We all know the feeling—
You need to transfer an asset across chains. So you head to your favorite chain, execute the transaction, and then have a micro panic attack while you wait what feels like an eternity to realize the successful completion of the transfer. You refresh the page a few times, curse yourself for not sending a test transaction *just to be 200% sure everything is in working order*, and text a friend about how screwed you might be.
Then, FINALLY, the transfer comes through. And a major sigh of relief is exhaled.
To address this poor UX, RockawayX’s liquidity and engineering divisions and Wormhole ecosystem contributors have spent months co-developing the “Liquidity Layer” and fundamental architecture powering a revolutionary solution: “Wormhole Settlement.”
Listen to our Spaces event with the Wormhole team:
This suite of intents protocols is now live, meaning Wormhole just got faster—a lot faster.
Your days of transferring anxiety are now over! Let’s explore more details.
Seamless Transferring That Brings A Smile To Your Face
Wormhole Settlement will facilitate near-instant transfers, representing a major technical lift from both development teams and a significant improvement upon the asset transfer experience of old, where transfers could take up to 15 minutes to complete.
Wormhole Settlement is now live. You can give it a whirl here - https://wormhole.com/products/settlement
For the technically curious out there, let’s dive into the details of how this new intent-based swap product came to be.
A Victory 1 Year In The Making
Our collaboration with Wormhole began a year ago when they sought an experienced liquidity provider to act as the main “solver” for the Settlement protocol. At RockawayX, we have run a yield investing division for over three years, and we are consistently one of the most active liquidity providers across DeFi.
Today, we have a dedicated solver unit.
Solvers come in varying forms, but they’re essentially anything that facilitates some form of market operation on-chain; it’s akin to being an on-chain market maker—solvers provide liquidity or a service to help transactions work smoothly. Our team acts as a key solver for protocols like DeBridge and Mayan Swap.
For the Wormhole protocol, our solver software evaluates transfer requests and we approve to service them by interacting with the Wormhole bidding engine. When we enter an auction to handle a transaction, we lock up capital to service the request.
Performing this function requires a unique combination of skill sets - financial acumen and quant engineering to understand and interact with the bidding mechanism, and the infrastructure to execute on it efficiently and at scale.
As a precursor to serving Wormhole as a scaled solver, RockawayX became a Wormhole Guardian. In practice, if there is a request for a settlement that the protocol has processed—by emitting a message on the blockchain—the Guardians see the request. If enough signatures confirm the request, it is directed to the solvers, and a 'bidding auction' kicks off.
Because we don’t need to pay for third-party RPCs (we route transactions to our top-performing RockawayX Infra RPC), our operation also runs cheaper than competitors and our solver is able to land transactions with very high frequency.
If your team is interested in becoming a solver, reach out to us! Our RPC setup will take that hassle off your mind.
Become a solver or get solver help - https://rockawayx.com/
Under The Hood
The Liquidity Layer is built atop Wormhole’s core cross-chain messaging protocol.
It is the next generation of the current token transfer protocol on Portal and significantly improves the user experience:
- Users are presented with transferred funds within 30 seconds on any target chain.
- The user’s transaction is completely de-risked once a solver picks up the order and executes it.
Wormhole source chains have a token router contract deployed, which users can interact with to use Wormhole services. These contracts will be extended to support a Settlement request.
Once a user makes a Settlement request, active Guardians will read the request and produce a signed Verified Action Approvals (VAA)—a signature by the required quorum renders the VAA valid for processing by solvers.
Solvers may, at their discretion, kick off or improve the current best bid in an auction meant to provide the user with fast service at the best possible market price. The solvers underbid each other and offer to execute the transfer at the lowest possible fee. The auction lasts only a few seconds so that the user receives quick fulfillment.
To execute their bids, solvers interact with the Liquidity layer (matching engine contract) on Solana to win the auction. This infrastructure built by YYY is interesting for two reasons.
First, solvers only have to interact with one auction contract on Solana regardless of the target chain. This simplifies the solver code substantially and allows for focused optimizations targeting Solana exclusively. Second, when the solver bids in the auction, the solver makes available, and locks up, its liquidity for the duration of the auction. This means that the user is guaranteed service (except for exceptional conditions discussed below) whenever any of the active solvers initiates an auction. Thereafter, the price can only improve.
Whoever wins the auction must execute the transfer, then wait for the slow transfer by the standard Wormhole portal system and settle the auction, re-couping their capital. The system thus works by providing automated, very short-term (max tens of minutes) loans to users of the Settlement product.
When the auction is executed, the Circle CCTP protocol uses its burn and mint mechanics to materialize USDC funds on the target chain.
Further Exploring The RockawayX Solver Contribution
There are multiple solvers active within the Settlement ecosystem. Here’s a more granular look at how they work. The solver has four key components: the executor, the liquidator, the risk engine, and a threshold signer.
The Executor
The executor is a state machine that tracks active and completed auctions, looking for opportunities to participate in auctions, execute auctions, or settle won auctions. The state machines use a WAL-style consistency mechanism where there’s a separate ingest queue for messages and a cursor that ensures read-once semantics - even if the state machine experiences downtime, it will be able to recover a consistent state from the linear message log relevant to auctions. Messages of interest arrive either from Solana (changes in auctions) or via a Guardian spy process (furnishes VAAs including those requesting settlements).
The Liquidator
The liquidator component specializes in completing auctions that have been left dangling. This is the one special case we referred to above in the article. Picture the following scenario: a solver wins an auction, then crashes. The auction would never be executed and the user’s funds would be left hanging in the system. This would reflect badly on Wormhole, so there is a permissionless mechanism built in to complete such auctions.
If a winning solver does not execute a won auction within a fixed (very small - a few seconds) time period, any solver can instantly execute the auction and thereby capture the fees of the winning solver. Doing so does not require any risk-taking on the side of the solver that executes an auction won by another solver past the grace period. Thus liquidating auctions past the grace period is a risk-free way to make money, incentivizing all solvers to watch each other and ensure transactions are completed. RockawayX runs a liquidator that ensures auctions are executed as soon as possible.
Risk Engine
The solver must make quick decisions on whether to provide service or not. Our solver has several service level thresholds that account for funds at risk across various aggregations and levels, ensuring a well-known amount of capital at risk.
RockawayX Threshold Signer
As we implemented the solver component, we realized that the available MPC signer solutions weren’t ideal for our use case, which demanded the highest security standard and a fast threshold signer, to participate in rapid auctions. Security and speed are generally at odds. So, we developed Plutus, a threshold signer based on the FROST two-round signature scheme producing Schnorr signatures. If you’re interested in the full technical details, please get in touch with our team. The result of our efforts was a policy-based MPC solution that carefully restricts which transactions can be signed, and where signers are securely spread across locations, while performing great on latency.
What’s Next?
At the moment, the Settlement solver supports any chains with the CCTP bridge enabled by Circle. Additional chain integrations are coming soon! The native Settlement protocol depends on Circle integration and thus only supports USDC as a medium of exchange. However, the FT protocol is integrated out of the box via the AnySwap layer into DEXes so that a user can ask to transfer, for example, ETH from Ethereum into AVAX on Avalanche.
Another roadmap item that will significantly increase the utility of the Wormhole protocol is the Swap & Execute feature, which will be able to move tokens and execute a contract call on a target chain (transparently using and funding the native gas token on the target chain).
Warming Up For More Intent-Based Innovations
Our collaboration with Wormhole has set a new benchmark for speed, efficiency, and reliability in cross-chain transfers. By leveraging our expertise in liquidity provisioning and solver infrastructure, we’ve helped develop a system that makes cross-chain transfers as seamless as they should be.
But this is just the beginning. As we continue refining our solver technology, we’re excited to bring similar innovations to other intent-based protocols.
If you’re building an intent-based dApp and need a dedicated solver to optimize execution and liquidity, let’s connect.
