Author: Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
1. Clearing Intents
There are currently dozens of active L1s, and the number of L2s has exploded with the advent of rollup services. Reducing the trade-offs of transferring cryptocurrencies across chains, unlocking value for all chains, improving user experience, and creating narrower spreads for users are much-needed features for the growth of users, applications, and protocols on these chains. Bridges are how users can transfer assets and liquidity across chains. This is critical for price stability on the chain and, more importantly, providing consumers with competitive spreads. Current crypto bridges face the trilemma of being fast, low-cost, and permissionless.
There are three types of cross-chain bridges:
● Hosted bridge: Using a CEX (centralized exchange) such as Coinbase or Binance for cross-chain bridging is instant and low-cost, but does not require permission.
● Permissionless bridges: Hyperlane, Portal, Hop, LayerZero are all fast, but not cheap. They can be permissionless, charged by liquidity providers (LPs), or rely on trusted miners to create standardized wrapped assets (not trusted assets).
● Intent bridges: Current solutions are permissionless, but are typically slower due to rebalancing, not significantly cheaper than permissioned bridges, and are also limited to large batches of tokens.
Intent bridges are expected to solve this trilemma, but face problems such as liquidity fragmentation, lack of standardization, and rebalancing costs.
Everclear’s Clearing layer is designed to solve all of these problems and significantly reduce the friction of cross-chain transfers, lowering costs for application builders and users, and simplifying the user experience for developers and users.
2. Intent Result
IntentBridge notes that 80% of cross-chain transaction volume “flows back to the network” within 24 hours, meaning that for every dollar that leaves a chain, 80 cents returns to the chain within 24 hours. There are always transactions coming in and out, but 80% of the transaction volume eventually returns to where it started.
The intention is that the protocol will make money by exchanging liquidity on each chain instead of bridging. For example, if a protocol like UniswapX has one user exchanging $100 from Arbitrum to Polygon, and another user exchanging $100 from Polygon to Arbitrum, then UniswapX will support the two users to transfer tokens to each other natively, which is much cheaper than the traditional bridge method.
The core problem that Everclear solves is that this perfect match is rare. Without it, the protocol must slowly transfer balances through traditional custody or permissionless bridges to “rebalance.” This is a slow, complex, and expensive process.
3. Benefits to all parties
The main stakeholders of IntentBridge are:
● Blockchain (permissionless), they want to integrate a bridging solution, which is usually a lengthy process.
● Protocols (auctions) with intent to order flow, but limited to their own order flow.
● Solvers execute certain on-chain intentions but have no efficient rebalancing method.
Everclear has standardized this process for everyone, and it’s a panacea. On each chain, Everclear deploys standardized contracts where users can generate “invoices” for their intent, and solvers can “balance” each other. If no one claims the invoice after a period of time, a Dutch auction is started for the invoice. For example, if a user intends to transfer 10 ETH from Arbitrum to Polygon, and no solver initially executes the request, the intent will be discounted to 9.99 ETH, and then lower and lower until a solver claims the invoice.
The standard benefits all stakeholders and creates a permissionless system that aggregates order flow from applications, providing market makers with more order flow to maximize profits, and can be supported on any chain with this standard set of smart contracts.
4. Partnership
Everclear is designed to benefit everyone. Existing stakeholders get a standardized system that virtually guarantees that intent will eventually be executed; competition for user order flow is more intense, which drives down prices. This also means that the more stakeholders there are, the more efficient this market becomes.
With this in mind, Everclear has partnered with countless stakeholders such as aori (rebalancer), StaFi Protocol (L2 liquidity staking and staking app), Tokka Labs (rebalancer), Renzo (liquidity re-staking), Anera (rebalancer), and many more.
5. Mainnet Release
Everclear is the first settlement layer to coordinate global settlement of cross-chain order flows, solving the liquidity fragmentation problem of modular blockchains. Everclear's mainnet was launched on September 18th. For more details and to get involved, please see their blog.