Wormhole Ecosystem hosted RockawayX team members Tomas Livora, Adam Bilko, and Tomas Eminger on X Spaces to chat about Wormhole Settlement, a revolutionary intents-based protocol co-developed with RockawayX.
Listen to the full event —https://x.com/i/spaces/1vOGwXwrrPPJB
Here is a summary of the main talking points with timestamps:
(8:45) What is solving, and what does it actually mean for RockawayX to be a solver?
The solving division is within our credit fund. As you know, bridges have a chicken-and-egg problem: On one hand, you need volume to attract solvers. On the other hand, you need solvers to attract volume.
The idea to become a solver initially came from conversations related to providing liquidity to bridges, which is very difficult to do because of counterparty risk. We decided that, instead of offering liquidity, we would develop a solver and provide solver services.
Since we started, we’ve found increasing demand for the solution. So far, we’re mostly focused on solving on Solana but plan to expand beyond that.
(10:25) Was Wormhole Settlement your first big entry into solving?
We worked with the Mayan team beforehand and have really enjoyed working with them. Wormhole Settlement was an additional build on top of our cooperation with Mayan — they provide the swaps for USDC transfers through Settlement.
Settlement is an interesting construct, it’s like having a solver for solvers. Solvers can really easily rebalance through Settlement and it makes our life easier because we don’t have to have liquidity across several chains and you can have liquidity just on Solana. It improves capital efficiency; I don’t think people realize just how important this is.
As a solver for Wormhole Settlement, we’re basically going to be a solver for other solvers.
(13:20) You mentioned that you don’t have to do rebalancing, how painful is rebalancing for you without Settlement?
It’s very painful, not only from a capital efficiency perspective but also to do it properly. You need to maintain liquidity on all the supported chains, there are usually some maximum order sizes that you need to support for any given protocol — that’s the minimum amount of liquidity that you need to have on the chain. And that would only potentially support one large user transaction, so you need to usually have much more liquidity than that number.
At the same time, you fight to maintain capital efficiency.
We’ve been manually rebalancing for a while. We’ve tried many different solutions. We had a Telegram bot that was rebalancing for us and we were entering orders into, then a Slack bot that was more optimized. Now, we are almost ready to automatically rebalance; we are already executing rebalancing based on its suggestions but automation isn’t enabled yet. That’s our next step.
Then we can sleep more quietly. Now, every day someone from our team is on call and is responsible for problems that may happen and rebalancing. Whenever there are higher volumes between chains, you run out of funds in the middle of the night and need to rebalance manually.
(16:15) When you spun up a solver for the liquidity layer, was it harder than when you do solving for something like Swift?
It’s much simpler. With the Wormhole Liquidity Layer, you only have to keep USDC on Solana, and your solver software only has to interact with Solana — everything else is optional.
(18:00) Fully open solving vs. whitelisted solving
Whitelisted solving makes a lot of sense. We see more and more bridges going with whitelisted institutional solvers because small solvers don’t really care that much about finality risks on the source chains. They just take whatever orders and push the margins really low.
But the ultimate goal for any bridge is to be able to process big transactions. If you aren’t able to keep the big institutional solvers profitable or set up proper risk management, then they’ll just leave to find other opportunities.
It’s healthy to have whitelisted solvers compete with each other.
(22:20) RockawayX is a solver, but you’re also a guardian. So every time a transaction is passing through the Wormhole network, you’re one of the guardians that say yes or no to whether a message is accurate. Overall, how has your experience been working with Wormhole?
From the solvers side, Wormhole changed this protocol every time we needed a small adjustment. For example, we developed our own threshold signer to keep our funds safe. So we have a separate wallet where we keep USDC and also a separate wallet for signing all other transactions that don’t involve a need for USDC. This setup with two wallets wasn’t supported on day 1 when we saw the Wormhole protocol for the first time, and the team incorporated our feedback into the protocol so now we can use our two-wallet system.
As a guardian, it’s interesting to operate all the ~30 chains that are supported with Wormhole and observe the movements on those chains. Sometimes it’s a pain to deal with all the upgrades of all the chains, but we’re happy to do it. It’s our duty to help.
(26:55) When Wormhole and RockawayX started working together on Settlement, what did that conversation look like? It’s been a very long work in progress.
Yeah, one year! The conversation started about us being a guardian, and we brought up that we could also function as a solver and help with this interesting new solution. From there, we saw a win-win for both teams. We could offer expertise in solving, staking, and also serve as a guardian.
(29:30) Open conversation: The intents space matters because UX is what people prioritize above all else
Main takeaways from this portion of the conversation:
- Chain abstraction is becoming a bigger priority for builders. Incorporating it into the Settlement product offering will be a really big unlock. It should be going live soon.
- With Wormhole Settlement and the Liquidity Layer, this will work in size
- CEXs want to do more things on-chain as well because they can generate yield in more interesting ways. They don’t want to have to educate their users on the traditionally poor UX of the multi-step process required to interact with dApps (e.g., swapping, bridging, etc.)
Learn More
Wormhole Settlement is more than just an upgrade to cross-chain infrastructure — it’s a powerful new primitive that simplifies rebalancing, increases capital efficiency, and brings institutional-grade solving to the forefront.
With RockawayX playing a key role as both solver and guardian, the collaboration is a prime example of how aligned incentives and technical innovation can drive meaningful progress in Web3.
Learn more about Wormhole Settlement
