Wormhole Settlement is a next-generation suite of intents protocols enabling fast, multichain transfers for institutional-scale volume.
Wormhole is building toward a future where every asset, institution, and application is connected onchain. With the recent multichain deployments of tokenized funds of the world's largest asset managers like BlackRock and Apollo, this future has increasingly become a reality.
In September 2024, Wormhole announced the Era3 upgrade, which included the integration of Mayan Swift as Wormhole’s first intents-based protocol, as well as major upgrades for products like Portal and Connect. Today, Wormhole contributors are announcing Wormhole Settlement, a suite of intents-based protocols built in collaboration with Mayan to help these same institutions and applications move their digital assets cross-chain.
Wormhole Settlement empowers developers to integrate cross-chain functionality into their apps with ease, ensuring a seamless user experience without compromising speed, security, or liquidity.
Settlement will initially support Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, Avalanche, Unichain, Polygon, Solana, and Sui — with more chains on the horizon.
Swap, transfer, and build seamlessly across multiple blockchains with Wormhole Settlement — an evolution in intent-based asset transfers designed for developers, users, and institutions.
Why Wormhole Settlement?
The architecture of Settlement utilizes the three protocols described further below and provides three clear advantages to traditional intent-based mechanisms:
- Redundancy: Each intents protocol in the Settlement product suite, while built on Wormhole messaging, uses a novel architecture with unique tradeoffs in price discovery, scalability, and latency. These designs enable redundancy to handle highly asymmetric flows and sharp volume changes.
- Composability: Apps are able to bundle call data containing arbitrary protocol actions, which can be executed atomically alongside each transfer (e.g. swap + stake).
- Competitive Speed and Cost: Leveraging Solana as the central orchestration layer for price discovery and liquidity distribution, the protocols bundled into Wormhole Settlement aim to provide best possible execution.
How Settlement Works
Settlement comprises three interoperable protocols designed to meet diverse user needs while maintaining full composability for DeFi applications.
Together, these protocols unlock cross-chain functionality for users, institutions, and builders, reducing dependency on centralized exchanges, OTC desks, and slow legacy bridges.
1. Mayan Swift
Traditional intent-based protocols essentially function as cross-chain limit orders. If the order is profitable, solvers will compete to fulfill it, leading to MEV-like competition focused on speed. While functional, this methodology presents two clear inefficiencies and drawbacks.
First, they lack a competitive price discovery mechanism — limit order prices are typically determined through centralized off-chain systems. Second, in this MEV-like market structure, only a single solver can while the others lose out on transaction fees. This dynamic of deadweight loss results in solvers prioritizing high-margin orders, ultimately resulting in elevated fees for end-users without commensurate benefits.
Mayan Swift addresses these limitations by implementing competitive onchain English auctions, on Solana, as an embedded price discovery mechanism — fundamentally shifting solver competition from speed-based to price-based execution. Through this architecture, the solver offering the best possible price secures the right to fulfill the order within pre-specified deadline parameters.
Initiation: The user creates an order by signing a transaction that locks one of the primary assets (USDC or ETH) into the Mayan smart contract, specifying the desired outcome. (Note: If the input asset is not a primary asset, it is converted into a primary asset within the same transaction before the order is submitted.)
Each order includes properties such as destination chain, destination wallet address, output token address, minimum output amount, gas drop amount, deadline, and 32 bytes of random hex to prevent collisions. A Keccak-256 hash is then calculated to identify the order.
Auction: Solvers observe on-chain data or subscribe to the Mayan explorer websocket (solvers using the Mayan explorer verify the order’s integrity by checking the data against the on-chain hash). Once the new order is verified, an on-chain auction on Solana is initiated by passing the order ID and the bid amount, which cannot be lower than the minimum amount. Other solvers can increase the bid by submitting a higher amount before the auction ends.
Fulfillment: The auction ends three seconds after the initial bid. Once the auction ends, the winning solver can execute an instruction that passes their wallet address on the destination chain. This triggers a Wormhole message containing the order ID and the winner’s wallet address. Wormhole Guardians then sign this message, allowing the winning solver to fulfill the order on the destination chain by submitting proof of their win and the promised amount to the Mayan contract before the deadline. The Mayan contract deducts a protocol fee (currently 3 basis points) and a referral fee (if applicable), transferring the remaining amount to the user’s destination wallet. It also triggers a Wormhole message as proof of fulfillment.
Settlement: After the Wormhole Guardians sign the fulfillment message, the winning solver can submit this message on the source chain to unlock the user’s funds and transfer them to their own wallet.
Upon fulfillment, the solver has the option to delay triggering a Wormhole message immediately. Instead, they can batch the proofs and, once the batch reaches a certain threshold, issue a batched proof to unlock all orders simultaneously, saving on gas fees.
2. The Wormhole Liquidity Layer
The Wormhole Liquidity Layer is a cross-chain protocol that utilizes Solana as the central orchestration layer for cross-chain intents, enabling solvers to send messages to mint assets from a single hub (Solana) rather than distributing inventory across each supported chain. This hub-spoke model leverages interoperable token standards like Circle’s CCTP (and Wormhole’s NTT) — allowing the solver the ability to natively mint & burn assets between chains for intent fulfillment.
Traditional intent-based protocols require solvers to distribute their capital across each supported chain in the network. This fragmentation of liquidity leads to capital inefficiency and requires complex rebalancing to manage asymmetric flows between chains. As the number of chains increases, solvers face scalability challenges, which can result in market concentration reducing competition and potentially impacting price discovery in intent execution.
How it works: Users initiate a fast transfer either via a UI or directly on-chain. This then kicks off four steps:
Auction: Solvers monitor the Wormhole network for these transfer requests and initiate an auction on Solana by offering to fulfill the transfer up to maximum fee (set by the integrator). To start the auction, the solver must transfer the requested funds plus a small security deposit to the matching engine contract.
Competition: Once initiated, other solvers can participate by submitting lower bids in a simple English auction, aiming to provide users with the best rate. If a new solver submits a better offer, the previous solver's funds and security deposit are returned, with the new offer taking precedence atomically. This competition ensures users receive the best possible transfer rate.
Fulfillment: After the auction concludes, the winning solver must complete the transfer within a predefined grace period to earn their fee and reclaim their security deposit. Failure to do so may result in the security deposit being slashed, with the slashed amount compensating the user for delays. This mechanism incentivizes prompt execution. Upon successful completion, the fast transfer hub sends the USDC to the user's destination wallet, and the solver receives their security deposit and transfer fee.
Settlement: Once the original source chain transaction reaches finality, the winning solver can use the finalized Wormhole message to settle the auction with the matching engine and rebalance. This allows the solver to retrieve the original transfer amount into their wallet.
By combining Mayan Swift with the Liquidity Layer, Wormhole Settlement delivers a powerful cross-chain solution capable of catering to both retail users and institutional-grade use cases.
3. Mayan MCTP
The Mayan-Circle Transfer Protocol (MCTP) serves as a redundancy layer, wrapping Circle’s CCTP to enable any-to-any swaps with added composability.
While direct CCTP transfers typically require 15 minutes (due to Ethereum and L2 finality times), MCTP ensures that users can still transfer assets even if both Mayan Swift and the Liquidity Layer are temporarily unavailable.
Use Wormhole Settlement Today
Whether you're a developer enabling cross-chain functionality within your app, a fintech looking to unlock seamless cross-chain payments, or an institution rebalancing inventories, Wormhole Settlement provides the fastest, most scalable, and cost-effective solution.
Start integrating with Settlement via the docs here.
About Wormhole
Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform that powers multichain applications and bridges at scale. Wormhole provides developers access to liquidity and users on over 30 of the leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases that span DeFi, NFTs, governance, and more.
The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap Labs. To date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 40 billion dollars through over 1 billion cross-chain messages. To learn more about Wormhole, follow on Twitter, join the Discord, or read more on the blog.