Everclear is the first settlement layer to coordinate global settlement of cross-chain order flows, and its mainnet was launched on September 18.

Written by 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 Bridges: Using a CEX (centralized exchange) like Coinbase or Binance for cross-chain bridging is instant and low-cost, but does not have permissionless features.

  • 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 generally slower due to rebalancing, not significantly cheaper than permissioned bridges, and are also limited to large batches of tokens.

Intent bridges hold the promise of resolving 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 noticed that 80% of cross-chain transaction volume “flows back to the network” within 24 hours, meaning that for every dollar that leaves a chain across all chains, 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 intent is that protocols make money by exchanging liquidity on each chain rather than bridging. For example, if a protocol like UniswapX has one user swapping $100 from Arbitrum to Polygon, and another user swapping $100 from Polygon to Arbitrum, UniswapX will allow the two users to natively transfer tokens to each other, which is much cheaper than traditional bridging methods.

The core problem that Everclear solves is that this perfect match is rare. Without it, protocols must slowly transfer balances through traditional custodians 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 bridging solutions, which is usually a long process.

  • Protocols (auctions) with intent order flow, but limited to their own order flow.

  • Market makers (Solvers) execute certain on-chain intents 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 numerous stakeholders such as aori (rebalancer), StaFi Protocol (L2 liquidity staking and staking app), Tokka Labs (rebalancer), Renzo (liquidity restaking), Anera (rebalancer), and many more.

5. Mainnet Release

Everclear is the first settlement layer to coordinate global settlement of cross-chain order flow, solving the liquidity fragmentation problem of modular blockchains. Everclear’s mainnet was launched on September 18th. To learn more and get involved, read their blog.