Cross-chain Intent Settlement Layer Everclear Analysis: Resolving the Problem of Blockchain Liquidity Fragmentation

In the current blockchain ecosystem, there are numerous active L1 public chains, and with the development of rollup technology, L2 networks are also experiencing explosive growth. To promote the development of users, applications, and protocols on these networks, there is an urgent need for a solution that can reduce cross-chain transfer costs, unlock the value of each chain, optimize user experience, and provide more favorable price spreads.

Cross-chain bridges are currently the main way for users to achieve cross-chain asset and liquidity transfers, which is crucial for maintaining on-chain price stability and providing users with competitive price spreads. However, existing crypto cross-chain bridges face the dilemma of balancing speed, cost, and decentralization.

The existing cross-chain bridges are mainly divided into three categories:

1. Custody Bridge: Cross-chain operations are conducted through certain centralized trading platforms, offering immediacy and low-cost advantages, but lacking decentralized characteristics.

2. Permissionless Bridges: Such as Hyperlane, Portal, Hop, etc., although they are fast, they come at a high cost. These types of bridges can be decentralized, relying on liquidity providers to charge fees, or depend on trusted miners to create standardized wrapped assets.

3. Intent Bridge: Although the current solution is decentralized, it is usually slower due to the rebalancing mechanism, and its costs are not lower than those of permissioned bridges, and it is only suitable for large token transfers.

The Intent Bridge is expected to address the aforementioned three dilemmas, but still faces challenges such as fragmented liquidity, lack of standardization, and rebalancing costs. Everclear's Clearing layer aims to comprehensively solve these issues, significantly reducing the friction of cross-chain transfers, lowering costs for application developers and users, and simplifying the development and user experience.

The design of the intention bridge is based on an important observation: about 80% of cross-chain transaction volume "flows back to the original network" within 24 hours. This means that whenever 1 dollar leaves a chain, 0.8 dollars will return to that chain within a day. Although there are always transactions flowing back and forth between different chains, most of the funds ultimately return to the starting point.

The intent protocol profits by exchanging liquidity across chains rather than directly bridging. For example, if a user on a certain DEX platform transfers $100 from Arbitrum to Polygon, while another user transfers $100 from Polygon to Arbitrum, then the platform can support both users to swap tokens directly locally, which is more cost-effective than traditional bridging methods.

However, such a perfect match is not common. When a perfect match cannot be achieved, the protocol needs to slowly transfer balances through traditional custody or permissionless bridges for "rebalancing". This process is often time-consuming, complex, and costly.

Everclear provides standardized solutions for all participants. On each chain, Everclear deploys standardized contracts, allowing users to generate their intended "invoices," while market makers can "balance" with each other. If an invoice goes unclaimed for a period of time, the system will initiate a Dutch auction. For example, if a user wants to transfer 10 ETH from Arbitrum to Polygon and no one executes the request initially, the intended price will gradually decrease until a market maker is willing to take the order.

This standardized system benefits all participants, creating a decentralized ecosystem that can aggregate application order flows, providing market makers with more orders to maximize profits, and supporting any chain that adopts this standard smart contract.

Everclear has established partnerships with several collaborators, including aori (rebalancer), StaFi Protocol (L2 liquidity staking and staking applications), Tokka Labs (rebalancer), Renzo (liquidity re-staking), and Anera (rebalancer), among others.

As the first settlement layer to coordinate cross-chain order flow global settlement, Everclear aims to address the liquidity fragmentation issues of modular blockchains. The project's mainnet officially launched on September 18, marking an important milestone in the field of cross-chain interoperability.