How to think of and use LI.FI?

This crypto industry is a complex one with a lack of standards, short innovation cycles, fierce competition and a lot of data fragmentation. LI.FI solves for this.

As an application developer, you want to provide the best prices to your customers, and you want to have those best prices available on many chains.

This leads you to do two things: a) You need multiple DEX aggregators to actually get the best price (like 1inch, 0x, Paraswap) b) You need cross-chain bridges to allow moving assets from one chain to the other The reasons to aggregate multiple providers of DEX aggregators and bridges are: a) You want to get the best price, and all those solutions constantly update their algorithms to be more competitive b) You want to have full coverage, but not everyone is available everywhere (on each chain) c) You want to have redundancy since if one solution is down, you need a fallback solution to not disrupt your user experience

Aggregating multiple solutions is difficult. It leads you to have to build and maintain multiple things internally:

• Get asset availability and token prices

• Match canonical assets (e.g. USDC, USDC.e, USDC.a, WUSDC, ...)

• Generate transactions

• Track transaction's status, which becomes even harder across chains (remember, each bridging transaction is two transactions, one on source- and one on destination chain)

• Monitoring and maintaining API integrations and the relationships with those partners

• Data homogenization (e.g. error codes)

• Data analytics becomes complex due to the lack of standards, you need to build your own

• Customer support tooling that reflects everything above (see our multi-liquidity source scanner: https://scan.li.fi - which we are offering white-labeled)

• Multi-Chain Dev Ops tooling and debugging

• Fail Safety and redundancy mechanisms

• Smart Order Routing

• So much more... - the devil is in the detail

Often developers and product managers think about LI.FI as a "liquidity source" whereby LI.FI positions itself as a whole trading stack.

LI.FI is not meant to be implemented alongside other liquidity sources. Instead, it typically encompasses existing liquidity sources and should, therefore, replace existing implementations to reap the maximum amount of benefits.