On May 21, 2025, Cordial Systems CTO Conor Patrick and COO Sebastian Higgs led a technical deep dive introducing Crosschain, the open-source library enabling developers to add new blockchains to their infrastructure—often in a single day. If you missed the live session, here’s your recap, including insights, live demos, and how to get started.
Why Is Blockchain Integration Still So Painful?
Sebastian kicked things off with a core question: Why is it still so hard for companies to add blockchain support in a reasonable timeframe?
Conor’s answer: "Blockchains are still new. Infrastructure is fragmented and not standardised, and integrating with custodians or wallet providers often means waiting weeks—or months."
Key challenges include:
- Lack of standardization in transaction formats
- Limited abstraction layers for wallet infrastructure
- Reliance on slow-moving external stakeholders
Meet Crosschain: Open Source, Developer-First
Crosschain is Cordial Systems’ answer to these problems. It's an open-source Go library that acts as a standalone tool for interacting directly with well over 50 blockchains at the RPC level.
“Crosschain is the only component in our architecture that touches RPCs directly.” — Conor Patrick
What makes it powerful:
- Written 100% in Go and easily runnable as a static portable binary
- Supports testnet and mainnet for all integrated chains
- Fully standalone: not a custody solution but a foundation for one
- Used internally at Cordial and available for anyone to extend
👉 Explore the Crosschain library on GitHub
How Long Does It Take to Add a Chain?
Conor shared that adding a new chain can take as little as a day, especially when it's a variation of a chain family already supported. Completely new architectures (like Kaspa) can take a week or two.
“We added two new chains last night—Kaspa and Kava—both already live in the library.” — Conor Patrick
Developers can view recent pull requests to understand how fast new chains are added and what the process involves.
The Transaction Lifecycle, Simplified
Conor walked through the five core steps of the blockchain transaction lifecycle using Crosschain:
- Get Funds – Generate an address and receive assets
- Prepare – Fetch necessary transaction inputs
- Serialize + Sign – Done entirely offline to support secure environments
- Broadcast – Push the transaction to the network
- Finalize – Poll the RPC for confirmation
Live Demo: Kaspa and Kava
Conor showcased a live integration of Kaspa, a UTXO-based chain. He demonstrated:
- Creating and funding a wallet
- Combining user intent and on-chain inputs
- Serializing and signing the transaction offline
- Broadcasting to the Kaspa network
He followed this with a quick walkthrough of Kava, a Cosmos-based chain, showing the same repeatable workflow.
How Is Crosschain Different from Coinbase’s Rosetta?
Sebastian noted a common question: Is this like Rosetta?
While Rosetta offers detailed blockchain interfaces, it's designed specifically for Coinbase integrations and can’t be used as a standalone tool. Crosschain offers a better abstraction that developers can use independently to power wallets, custody flows, or other apps.
From Library to Full Custody: Cordial Treasury
While Crosschain is standalone, it also powers Cordial Treasury, Cordial’s zero-trust custody solution. Conor gave a brief demo showing how policies in Treasury integrate with Crosschain and other components to allow secure transfers under MPC governance.
Staking is also possible with crosschain and support is available today for EVM, Cosmos, Solana, with Sui and Aptos coming soon.
If you're interested in building with Cordial Treasury, reach out for sandbox access or a live demo.
Get Started
🎥 Missed the live demo? Watch the full webinar replay on YouTube
✅ Library: github.com/cordialsys/crosschain
📅 Schedule a Demo: meetings.hubspot.com/seb72
📚 Docs: docs.cordialsystems.com/guides/overview
📩 Sandbox Access: Email marketing@cordialsystems.com
