Bungee Protocol — The Endgame
Bungee is for the people, by the people
We’ve been laser-focused on helping users. Building for users since Day 1.
In ’22, we chose to build a bridge aggregator over launching just another liquidity bridge, to ensure users get the fastest and cheapest routes at all times.
In ’23, we helped users stuck without gas assets via Refuel, helped users lost between the chains via SocketScan(to track your transactions), and simplified multichain for users.
We’ve seen enormous amounts of love flowing into this, so we are grateful to users and the Bungee Community.
As we headed into our 3rd year and saw the emerging 10,000+ chain future, one thing was clear: the current bridging experience was broken, and the new world needed something radically new.
We know that you have always bridged because you need to not because you wanted to!
And with more chains than ever and apps building anywhere today, bridging is almost like a punishment, a hurdle. Every time you want to try a new app, you need to onboard via bridges, pay gas, and wait for the in-progress screen, all of which are unnecessary steps that you need to go through to do the action you want to.
The end state in the new world is users being able to perform the actions they care about without thinking about the unnecessary steps in the middle, the end state needs a new end-game.
Introducing Bungee Protocol — The Endgame
Bungee Protocol is a global liquidity marketplace, enabling users to perform any action across chains. Bungee Protocol is designed to be a marketplace that optimizes for you, the end user, powered by Socket Protocol.
Users indicate the actions they want to take on-chain by signing on user requests. Actions could be anything: a simple swap, deposit into a specific DeFi protocol, or minting an NFT.
Users can simply dictate what they want to execute off-chain in a gasless fashion & outsource complex parts like on-chain execution, routing, and path-finding to off-chain actors.
The key insight here is that Bungee Protocol can operate at a global-level which unlocks completely game-changing possibilities. To understand what that looks like, let's look at the most simple and most popular action users perform onchain — a simple swap.
Chain-Abstracted Swaps
We all know how liquidity is fragmented across chains — acting at a global level allows Bungee Protocol to treat chains as liquidity avenues with off-chain agents splitting the trade between all the chains to optimize the swap.
This is very different than, say a DEX aggregator optimizing a swap across just DEXs on one chain. It's a token-centric worldview where the user only needs to think about the assets they need, and can optionally get the asset delivered to a chain of choice.
You can imagine the liquidity avenues need not be restricted to just chains but can extend off-chain as well. Imagine tapping into the deep liquid orderbook of a CEX to offer optimal pricing available with just a gasless signature.
Why Marketplace?
Bungee Protocol is designed as a Marketplace to optimize outcomes for the end user.
Off-chain actors compete to fulfill user requests: they compete on latency, efficiency, performance, and all other parameters users could care about. User requests are fulfilled by the off-chain agents according to preferences dictated by users in a non-custodial fashion. All users need to do is sign gasless user requests, and sit back and chill.
What off-chain agents? All of them!!!
To build the most efficient and reliable marketplace, we cannot rely on market-makers only as they operate with a set of tradeoffs that are extremely expensive to bootstrap and scale across networks.
From Day 1, Bungee Protocol will operate across the tradeoff spectrum and include various kinds of off-chain actors under its umbrella, to ensure efficiency, reliability, and ability to scale. Bungee users are spoilt to receive the best no matter what and we are not going to disappoint.
Bungee Protocol employs 3 different off-chain actors making it the biggest marketplace:
- Solvers: Offchain entities that are great at “path-finding” between various liquidity pools across networks and don't have active capital
- Provers: Offchain entities that create onchain verifiable proofs
- Fillers: Offchain entities that operate with inventory and have active capital across networks
As Bungee receives requests from end users, all 3 actors above with their strengths compete to fulfill the user request, optimizing execution for the end user.
Since different entities above operate on various tradeoffs, combining them into a single marketplace makes sure no matter what users get the best execution, be it small size or large, be it a stable asset or a meme coin that just launched, be it a popular generic chain or a newly launched app-specific rollup.
Scaling to 1000+ chains gracefully
To operate in this new paradigm of ever-increasing chains, marketplaces are the only viable solution going forward, not only are marketplaces more efficient but also more secure and scalable.
While it's obvious how the marketplace approach is optimal for efficiency, it also has an interesting side effect on the security and scalability of the protocol.
As chains increase, it increases the workload on “services” like bridges to expand as it dilutes liquidity and requires deployments that need maintenance without any estimations on potential usage, the marketplace approach flips this liability into opportunity. Every new chain becomes an opportunity to capture an off-chain agent as they can specialize in an un-crowded market to serve users.
On security, the marketplace sits as a lightweight layer between users and external agents/contracts giving users strong security, and protecting them against harmful side effects of ever-increasing surface area due to integrations, potential smart-contract bugs etc.
This is the ONLY wei to scale to 1000+ chains while maintaining top-grade efficiency and security!
Balls Deep Liquidity
We think every application and every user deserves access to deep liquidity on demand and that's what Bungee aims for. Today, we start this journey and in the following weeks will keep releasing new information. The end state is closer than ever and we are super excited to get there together.
We open a waitlist for users and developers to build on top of Bungee on Day 1, sign up here and look at the balls drop as you await the mainnet launch.
STAY TUNED.
