rewrite this title Orbs Made DeFi Liquid Last Year – This Year It’s Making It Work Like CeFi

2024 was a coming-of-age year for Orbs, the liquidity layer dedicated to making DeFi work better for everyone. From strategic investments and fruitful partnerships to new solutions designed to make onchain trading more capital efficient, it seemed like Orbs was everywhere last year.

Which is because it was: as the most widely integrated L3 solution for onchain trading, it’s woven its way into DEXs and L2s across the EVM landscape. Not content with crushing it in 2024, Orbs is intent on sealing its domination this year with the goal of making onchain trading as good as its centralized counterpart. We’ll get to that bold plan shortly, but first let’s examine the story so far.

How It Started 

Orbs began 2024 with a clear focus: collaborating with top-tier projects to accelerate the growth and maturity of DeFi ecosystems. This goal was embodied by strategic investments in prominent projects like Fenix Finance, the decentralized exchange operating on Blast, where Orbs helped Fenix enhance its trading products after leading a $300K seed round.

Orbs also led a $10 million strategic funding round for Harris and Trotter Digital Assets, a provider of accounting solutions to crypto-focused enterprises. The move demonstrated Orbs’ holistic approach to supporting not only DeFi protocols but the surrounding infrastructure necessary for sustainable growth. The real successes Orbs enjoyed in 2024 weren’t in the boardroom, however, but on the coalface where DeFi is done.

Progress on All Fronts

Many of the headline achievements Orbs took time to toast at the end of 2024 were in fact the result of months of less exciting but far more valuable work. Its collaboration with THENA, culminating in the BNB Chain protocol’s native token listing on Binance, being the perfect case in point. This milestone marked the culmination of Orbs’ efforts to integrate seamlessly with leading DeFi platforms, with THENA an early beneficiary of its core products.

For the uninitiated, dLIMIT and dTWAP are Orbs’ flagship releases that can be incorporated into virtually any DEX or liquidity protocol, instantly giving it CEX-like features. In the case of dLIMIT, this means the ability to set limit orders to buy or sell tokens at a desired price point. dTWAP, meanwhile, allows traders to average into a position – it’s basically an onchain DCA strategy.

Last year, these products were integrated far and wide, finding a home within such popular DEXs as SushiSwap, Lynex (Linea), and QuickSwap (Polygon zkEVM). Additionally, Orbs expanded its Liquidity Hub to Ethereum via Quickswap, reinforcing its position as a multi-chain solution. The move not only broadened Orbs’ impact but highlighted its ability to adapt and thrive in an increasingly interconnected blockchain world.

It’s All About the Liquidity 

While dTWAP and dLIMIT have been Orbs’ most popular products to date thanks to their versatility and ease of integration – they essentially give any DEX superpowers without the need to code everything from scratch – its long-term value-add lies in Liquidity Hub. It, together with complementary product Perpetual Hub, are the backbone of onchain liquidity routing, enabling new chains and protocols to spring up with an optimum trading environment in place from day one.

From Fantom to Linea and Ethereum to BNB Chain, Liquidity Hub saw a slew of integrations last year, making these L1 and L2 networks not only more liquid, but capable of meeting the demands of traders swapping with size. By producing liquidity from external sources, the service ensures better pricing as well as supporting zero gas swaps and MEV protection. Which brings us to the tail-end of 2024, when Orbs made a major upgrade to Liquidity Hub, providing a taster of what we can expect in 2025 as V2 is rolled out across the omnichain landscape.

Technological Innovation: Liquidity Hub V2

In late December, Orbs unveiled Liquidity Hub V2 with the goal of – that’s right – enhancing DEX liquidity. By enhancing capital efficiency and liquidity provisioning mechanisms, V2 sets a new standard for onchain swaps. While the technicals of how Liquidity Hub V2 works are best reserved for developers, the tl;dr is that it’s much more efficient than its predecessor, particularly when it comes to pricing. Traders save more with every swap, while quoted prices are also more accurate.

As 2025 grinds into gear, Orbs’ primary mission is clear: to bring CeFi-level execution standards to DeFi. This vision is rooted in the belief that DeFi can achieve the reliability and capital efficiency synonymous with centralized finance. Any asset, any chain, any DEX. Whenever, wherever: that’s the endgame for Orbs. Needless to say there is still much work to be done in making this a working reality, primarily in sealing the partnerships and integrations that will prove Orbs’ tech in prod.

As more DEXs and L2s add protocols such as dLIMIT and Liquidity Hub, the hallowed flywheel effect should kick in. On a chain where the leading DEXs can offer superior pricing due to Orbs’ liquidity layer, other DEXs will feel the FOMO. The beauty of this arrangement is that not only does it give end-users better pricing, but it saves DEXs from needing to invest in costly liquidity mining programs. With the liquidity taken care of they’re free to focus on core operations like improving UX and shipping new products and features.

If Orbs succeeds in its goal of making DeFi work like CeFi this year, the onchain economy will owe it a debt of gratitude. And yet, paradoxically, many of those trading on Orbs technology won’t even be aware of it due to its seamless integration into third-party DEXs. Which is exactly how it’s meant to be. The number of L1s and L2s is only going to proliferate in the years to come. While this can’t be stemmed, the onchain trading experience can at least be improved through smarter liquidity routing and the addition of CEX-style features like limit orders. Enter Orbs.