Why Universal?

Universal is a wrapped asset protocol designed to enable trading for any token, on any chain.

The Universal Thesis: 1. Too many assets are not available onchain at all. 2. For those that are, liquidity will continue to fragment across multiple L1s and L2s. 3. End users shouldn't have to care about any of that. What problems does Universal solve? TLDR; we believe users should be able to access any asset they want, on any chain they want. Chains have a cold start problem: they don't have tokens/assets on day one. Imagine you launch a new L2 and want your users to be able to access a wide variety of assets so they can fully see the benefits of your chain- generally speaking, on day one you have a very limited set of assets natively issued to your chain, and the majority of assets users are used to trading don't have liquidity yet. Your users have bridged over, but there's nothing to do yet! Universal makes it possible to have some of crypto's most popular assets available on your chain on day one. Issuers have a different cold start problem: they can't afford to manage liquidity on every L1/L2. Imagine you launched a token and every week your holders are requesting liquidity on a new L1/L2- ensuring that liquidity is available is costly, and often comes at the price of pulling liquidity from another venue. If your community provides liquidity on a new chain, it's often too thin for new users to get good execution, an all around bad experience. Universal makes it possible for your end users to purchase tokens on whatever chain they want, without the need for a passive AMM pool on that chain. Users have the biggest problem: they just want to trade any asset they want, wherever they want. Users shouldn't have to do this complex calculus considering liquidity depth, bridging, setting up a new wallet, or whether they have enough gas on every chain. The majority of crypto's highest volume assets are not even available onchain in spot markets (think: DOGE, XRP, etc.). Users shouldn't have to make UX tradeoffs because they are trading onchain, the trading experience should actually be better onchain. Our Solution: Universal is a wrapped asset protocol utilizing the same architecture underpinning many of crypto's most popular assets (wBTC, USDT, USDC). Underlying assets are secured in custody with a qualified custodian. Universal's uAssets can be minted in a near instant to the chain of the user's choice when the canonical asset has been verified to be held in reserves with the custodian. When a user makes a request for a uAsset on their chain of choice, they sign an intent that can be fulfilled by a Merchant, an actor permissioned to mint uAssets. When a user wishes to transfer their uAsset, they can sign an intent enabling Merchants to burn the uAsset on the source chain and mint it to the destination chain. Unlike traditional lock and mint bridges, Universal doesn't require value to be continually held on the source chain, instead the token is burnt on the source chain and minted to the destination chain. This means capital is not locked up and liquidity doesn't need to exist in both places for the transfer to work, improving capital efficiency and price execution for end users. Universal enables cross-chain transfers, and the wrapping and unwrapping process means it can bring assets that otherwise are not available on smart contract chain to smart contract chains (think DOGE, which is not an ERC-20 token, available on any EVM chain).