Connecting Blockchains with Mayan Finance
This Twitter Space interview gives us a peek into the future of Web3. Read along as Mayan Finance discusses their revolutionary one-click cross-chain swap platform. You’ll also learn what’s on the horizon for Mayan, as well as future cross-chain applications in general.
For those in the audience that might not know, can you share a quick introduction of what you’re working on at Mayan?
Mayan Swap is a single-click, cross-chain swap that lets Meta Mask users swap tokens on Serum order book. We just launched our first version of the platform on MainnNet, so now users can go to mayan.finance and try it out for themselves. Currently, it supports swaps from Binance but it will eventually support swaps from all the EVM chains that will hold support.
So, there’s been a lot of talk about cross-chain building and multi-chain applications these days. What is the problem that your team is looking to solve with Mayan?
So, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy comparing blockchain networks to cities. For those that haven’t heard, it basically says that each blockchain network is like a city. All of those cities will remain isolated unless there is a road between them. In Web3, we call those roads bridges — like Wormhole.
The point is that each city has different attributes, portals, assets, etc. These features are what make users consider moving from one “city” to another. They might consider moving if they’re looking for a particular asset or product.
With that being said, let’s say you currently live in “Ethereum City” and you want to buy assets from “Solana City”. Currently, you have to grab your money, hit the road yourself, find the best “store” in Solana City, trade your asset, and travel the same route back to your home city.
This was the same story we had in Web2 before eCommerce platforms came available. Now, you can sit at home and trade your money with some assets and the eCommerce platform will bring those assets into your home.
Mayan fills the same role in the blockchain world as eCommerce platforms did in Web2. We don’t sell our own asset, but when people want assets from another chain they can use Mayan as a “road” to have that asset delivered.
So, let’s say your home chain is Ethereum and you want to buy some Solana tokens. Obviously, the best place to buy Solana tokens is on the Solana network. You’d have to find the best way to move your tokens over to Solana, find the best liquidity pool in Solana, and swap your tokens. If you want to keep them in your Ethereum wallet, you’ll have to bridge them back to your original wallet. Mayan does all of those things for you in a single click.
Your team at Mayan is solving this cross-chain problem in a very elegant way. Can you talk a little bit more about how you guys are solving this problem differently than other platforms in the space?
What we’re really focusing on is the user experience. Our user experience is really similar to native swaps like Uniswap which is the missing component in other platforms offering cross-chain swaps.
Other platforms offering cross-chain swaps usually still require phantom wallet — you need some Solana tokens to execute transactions on the Solana blockchain.
We think getting onboarded with a new wallet is a huge barrier. Especially when you consider what’s involved in creating a new wallet. You have to go through the download and installation. Users also have to create a new account, keep it a secret, and they have to fund their wallet with the tokens of that particular blockchain.
Since they need to fund their wallet, their funds have to make a roundtrip through a centralized exchange. There are many steps involved for a user who gets onboarded with a phantom wallet. Our system eliminates all these steps and allows users to do swaps with just their Meta Mask wallet.
How has your product evolved since your Serum-Wormhole Hack-a-thon submissions?
At the time of the hack-a-thon, we were focusing on cross-chain investment. We were trying to make cross-chain investment possible, but then we figured out that cross-chain investment is a more advanced transaction. A more advanced user will be investing, and usually the people that want to swap tokens don’t need that level of knowledge.
More people are doing cross-chain swaps than cross-chain investments. So, we figured we would focus on swaps and then evolve our platform to accommodate investment sometime in the future.
Now that you guys are on MainNet, what are you working on next?
We’ve already started working on Mayan Swap V2. In V2, we’re going to have smart relayers. If you go to Mayan Swap right now, you’ll notice that the “road” isn’t selected until you choose the types of tokens you’re swapping. This is because, currently, the road is selected on the client side.
After the transaction starts, wWormhole usually needs a threshold of confirmations before assigning the messages. The market can fluctuate during this time and the user may end up not getting the best offer. Smart relayers will enable Mayan Swap to determine the best road for the user immediately while bypassing confirmations, which will make users immune to market fluctuations during the time between transaction execution and confirmations.
When do you think V2 will come out?
V2 should be available in approximately two months. Then, we’ll open up the platform to others, so anyone can create a relayer for Mayan Swap. The relayers are going to get some of the profits from the swaps. Doing this incentivizes them to always choose the best roads and makes the whole system sustainable.
What are some other exciting cross-chain applications you’d like to see builders build?
If you look at our current defi protocols, you can make any of them cross-chain by using Wormhole’s message-passing but it lacks user experience. We’d like to see cross-chain defi protocols with a user experience similar to a native experience.
Solving the Cross-Chain Riddle
That’s a wrap on the Project Serum Twitter Space interview with Mayan Finance. What an insightful look into all the amazing things happening on Serum and in the digital economy as a whole. Thanks to brilliant people in the space like the Mayan Finance team, we’re seeing a new economy spawn right in front of our eyes.
For more on what the Mayan Finance team is doing with Serum, check out the full Twitter Space interview.
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