Smart Move: Aurox To Launch Its Lending Protocol On The Polygon Network

Free crypto trading terminal Aurox is preparing to go live on the Polygon Network to make it easier, faster and cheaper to trade and lend crypto minus the unnecessary fees and arbitrage opportunities that only serve to enrich middlemen.

Polygon is a layer-2 interoperability and scaling solution that allows developers to create and deploy their own Ethereum-compatible blockchains while avoiding Ethereum’s notoriously high gas fees.

“With Polygon, it’s just a few cents to borrow funds plus whatever the trading fees are on top of that,” said Giorgi Khazaradze, CEO and co-founder of Aurox, which combines a centralized trading exchange with a decentralized lending and borrowing platform.

“This integration allows users to trade without paying insane fees,” Khazaradze told Decrypt.

The road to bridges

Launching with Polygon is also another step toward realizing Aurox’s longer-term vision to create a product for easily bridging assets across different chains.

“That product requires a lot of smart contract development, and the Polygon and Ethereum networks are where we’re planning to get started,” Khazaradze said.

By going live with Aurox’s decentralized lending protocol, which is powered by its URUS token, directly on the Polygon Network, users will be able to borrow cryptocurrency within the Aurox Terminal and trade simultaneously without being subject to exorbitant fees.

But lower smart contract fees are just part of it, Khazaradze said. The integration with Polygon will also enable traders to more seamlessly execute orders without having to move between platforms—which is usually where brokers insinuate themselves to take advantage of the interest rate.

The way things work today, decentralized lending protocols generally operate independently. Traders often have to transfer the assets they borrow to a centralized or decentralized exchange before they can do anything with them.

It’s not the best user experience, to say the least, Khazaradze said.

“If it takes too long for transactions to come through—and it can take a few minutes at least on Ethereum—a user’s trades might not even be transacted,” he said. “But on Polygon, transactions go through in seconds.”

That’s also good for lenders. Users who loan capital to Aurox Lend get favorable interest rate yields based on Aurox’s capacity to lend to its margin borrowers. The lender is always protected, because borrowed funds are fully collateralized. Lenders can withdraw at any time.

“As far as I’m aware, there isn’t another platform that does it this way,” Khazaradze said. “If a centralized exchange gets hacked, lenders could potentially lose millions of dollars.”

Along with the integration, Polygon will provide support for Aurox's developers as they build out their platform, alongside cross-marketing support. That’s a big coup for Aurox, which currently has more than 50,000 registered traders but is still in the early stages of marketing and generating brand awareness.

Khazaradze expects that striking a deal with an entity as big and influential as Polygon will be pretty good for business.

“Polygon is one of the top 20 coins right now—a lot of people use, trust and like Polygon,” he said. “This is the first big integration we have as a company, and doing it with Polygon gives us a lot of credibility.”

And street cred is a very necessary commodity in crypto trading.

“In this business people are anonymous and you do see schemes happening,” Khazaradze said. “For a company the size of Polygon to have faith in us is a huge deal because it proves we’re legit and it gives people a very good picture of where we stand both as a product and as a token creator.”