Automated liquidity management is one of the most capital-efficient places to put onchain assets. However, depositing into it is still the hard part: a user holding USDT on BNB Chain who wants exposure to a strategy denominated in a different asset on a different network has to bridge, swap, approve, and accept whatever the numbers look like when they land. Every step is a place to lose the deposit.
Liquidity keeps fragmenting across new chains and new venues, and the strategies built on top of it keep getting more sophisticated: multi-position concentrated liquidity, automated rebalancing, vaults that manage exposure the way a desk would. The strategy side of DeFi has compounded, but the path into it has not: a depositor still has to show up already holding the right asset on the right chain.
Trustware is now integrated into the routing and settlement layer behind Steer Protocol's swap experience. Users arrive with whatever they already hold, and Trustware routes it to the asset the vault requires without ever taking custody. Swaps are the first surface, and the work now underway with Steer is one-click cross-chain deposits, where a depositor holding any supported asset on any supported chain enters a vault in a single action, and the conversion and the cross-chain leg resolve underneath.
Automating liquidity across 45+ chains
Steer Protocol builds curated liquidity infrastructure for DeFi. Its flagship product, Smart Pools, are automated concentrated liquidity managers that offer a balanced approach to multi-position liquidity, managing up to twenty positions inside a single strategy and using offchain data processing to keep gas costs down. Smart Pools run across 45+ chains and 60 DEXs including Quickswap, Camelot and Sushiswap, covering 1000+ tokens.
This design makes the coverage as wide as it is, yet it also increases deposit friction. A protocol running across different chains/assets, are protocols whose users arrive holding something other than what the pool needs.
How Steer and Trustware work together
Steer's swap experience runs on the Trustware SDK today. A user connects the wallet they already have, Trustware reads what is in it, and the Route Handler sources quotes concurrently across multiple providers before returning the optimal quote across supported providers available at that moment. Integration required no backend changes on Steer's side.
Trustware is fully non-custodial, and all transactions are end to end, so funds move peer-to-contract-to-peer. Trustware runs Squid, LI.FI, Relay and other providers concurrently and selects per quote. No single provider holds the best price on every corridor. Trustware never holds, escrows, or custodies user assets, and never generates or touches keys. For protocols whose value proposition rests on users retaining ownership of their positions, that matters.
A vault should be able to accept any asset a depositor already holds. That is what Trustware’s Settlement Configuration does, and it is what Trustware and Steer are wiring into the vaults now. The destination declares the asset, chain, and rail it requires, and Trustware settles into it, regardless of what the sender arrived with. The vault's requirement becomes just a property of the vault, rather than a burden on the depositor.
“We integrated Trustware to simplify how users move into Steer strategies while keeping the experience non-custodial. The live swap integration is a strong foundation, and we're excited to build toward a more seamless cross-chain vault deposit experience together.”
— Derek Barrera, Steer Protocol
Testing routing before scaling
Before expanding the integration, we benchmarked the Trustware Route Handler against direct LI.FI across 52 corridors, spanning seven networks and the assets Steer vaults support, each corridor pairing an asset and chain a depositor arrives with against the asset and chain the vault needs. The list was fixed before any quotes were requested. Each of the 156 paired observations is one request to Trustware and one to LI.FI, issued at the same moment with identical inputs, because cross-chain quotes move with gas prices, bridge inventory, and pool depth: two readings taken minutes apart are not comparable. This measured Trustware routing across the corridors Steer uses. No Steer transaction, API key, vault, or production route was involved.
Both arms returned a successful quote on all 156 attempts, with no errors, no timeouts, and no rate limiting on either side. The Route Handler selected four different upstream providers over the run, Squid on 101 observations, LI.FI on 30, Relay on 16, and Khalani on 9, which is what multi-provider selection looks like when it is live rather than nominal. Twenty of the 156 observations are excluded because the two arms were not quoting the same thing: nine returned a quoted amount with no distinct guaranteed minimum, and eleven came back from a LI.FI tool that applied a fixed 2.5% slippage floor against our requested 0.1% (Both rules were declared before analysis, and the eleven would have counted in Trustware's favor by +252 to +304 bps had they been left in).
These figures represent benchmark minimum-output quotes, not realized settlement. Both arms were quoted under their fee configuration at the time of collection: the Trustware benchmark key carried no application fee, and the direct LI.FI arm carried LI.FI's standard 25 bps fixed fee. Trustware application fees are set per integration. Corridor outcomes also moved between windows as both arms reselected providers, which makes this a distribution rather than a per-route guarantee.
The losses, the exclusions, and one corridor sizing error are published alongside the result. A routing benchmark that reports only its wins is not evidence of anything.
On the 136 observations supporting a like-for-like minimum comparison:
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| At or above parity with direct LI.FI | 113 of 136 (83%) |
| Median advantage | +11.95 bps |
| Mean advantage | +14.46 bps |
| Win / tie / loss | 91 / 22 / 23 |
The distribution matters more than the median. Corridors originating on Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain and Arbitrum saw median advantages between +25 and +33 bps, while the deep Ethereum and Base pairs came back closer to parity.
When the Route Handler selects LI.FI as its provider, the client receives LI.FI's number exactly. Twenty of those 30 observations were precise ties. Trustware takes no spread on top of the provider it selects.
What's next
The swap integration is the foundation; one-click cross-chain vault deposits are the goal, and they change what a Steer strategy can accept: any supported asset, chain, and wallet; settled into exactly what the vault requires, with full wallet attestation.
That is the same architecture underneath every Trustware integration. Deposit is the wedge, routing and settlement are the moat.
All 312 raw API responses were rehashed against their manifests after collection with zero mismatches.
Corridor matrix SHA-256: 5825efdc78809143aea43ae428f8535ff662237f5d5685df819dfa1e9d59ed46.
Trustware is the Universal Deposit Layer for onchain applications. Accept any asset. Settle anywhere. Without ever taking custody. Visit docs.trustware.io.