Welcome to the Atomic Age
For the last few years, I’ve held the belief that decentralized and onchain finance’s future lay in its abstraction: the ability for consumers to interact with blockchain-native assets and rails without any of the unique difficulties or complexities that come with using the technology today. Finance should be complicated in the way that finance is complicated, not because it’s on blockchains. Transactions across blockchains are a notable area of friction.
Now, to the industry’s credit, the friction of moving funds between networks has substantially decreased over the last few years; we’ve transitioned from 2020 DeFi summer multi-hour bridging congestion craziness to today’s 2-3s bridging that’s expensive, has thin liquidity, and often faces downtimes but, hey! This has been a massive leap for onchain user experience (UX).
Anyway, all of this is to say that I believe the Azura Technologies team has made a major onchain UX breakthrough. Specifically, a major breakthrough for how the world will move money across blockchains. Or, as we know it: bridging.
We call this breakthrough “Atomic Execution.” Atomic Execution allows Azura Trading Platform users to trade across supported networks with a single, gas-abstracted, USD trading balance in less than 200 milliseconds end to end. Instant crosschain trading. Today’s bridges–used by wallets, mobile apps, and terminals–are 10-15x slower than Azura.
Azura is now the fastest onchain trading platform in history.
Some of you may know that I’ve been playing my hand at the “terminal game” for a while (I love what I do, sue me). I started a project called “Thunder” while in college which was the very first trading terminal (though, admittedly, it did garner some infamy). I ran it with a divisive, provocative-to-get-clicks, pseudonymous Twitter persona (and had a blast), but ultimately we didn’t go the distance and made a lot of mistakes. Photon then released a few months later, ate our lunch, and made over $500,000,000.00 (gorillion) dollars.
Whatever, live and learn.
The Place Beyond the Pines, 2012
I mention this because I remember that, while working on Thunder in late 2023, I interviewed some Telegram bot traders on a Discord call and asked them:
Q: “What would you need to see in a web terminal to switch over?”
And, I’ll never forget their response (because I chuckle about it even to this day), they said:
A: “There’s nothing you can do. Telegram bots are the perfect product and they offer everything I could ever want. Web apps will never work.”
This, of course, was short-sighted. Telegram bots were merely a stepping stone to the now multi-billion-dollar onchain trading terminal and mobile trading app verticals that have since been established. They were a necessary onchain UX iteration, but a stepping stone nonetheless. Little more than a historical, but lucrative, footnote.
I view the current state of trading terminals like how we now look back on Telegram bots.
Today’s leading onchain terminals require 20+ unique, siloed, and manually-managed token balances for trading across networks. This must - and will - change.
I recently found myself having déjà vu after releasing the new version of Azura earlier this year. We spoke to many, many traders over the last few months and, often, the conversations amounted to little more than: “Copy the leading terminal(s) and keep your fees at zero. These are perfect products. There’s nothing you can do besides copying them and having zero fees. No one will ever use a new terminal.”
Of course, similar to the Telegram bot story I mentioned above, I emphatically refused this perspective. It sounded all too familiar. Plus, if this perspective was wrong in 2023, it’s probably wrong today. While history doesn’t repeat itself, it sure does rhyme.
A quote Henry Ford apparently never said.
The first thing I asked myself after these conversations was: what are the value props of a trading terminal from absolute, barebones first principles? To this question, I believe there’s three:
Terminals serve data for due diligence.
Terminals aggregate liquidity venues.
Terminals are very, very fast.
Using this framework, I then asked: okay, where is there room for step function improvements? Where lie the most pressing issues? I landed on number 3, the issue of speed (cliche, yes, I know, but hear me out).
I believe that “speed” should be measured from the point of ideation to execution. When a user says to themself: “I want to trade XYZ coin”, how do we reduce the time it takes to act on that decision? How do we allow users to effortlessly rotate crosschain instantaneously?
Why does crosschain trading on terminals still remain a manual, messy, and slow process? Why should we expect users to juggle gas balances across every network to hit runners? Why is it that the products that do solve the complexity of crosschain trading come with inhibitive tradeoffs like 2-3s of added latency, are stripped of pro tooling, and have ~2x higher trading fees?
This is because, given current bridging technology, the industry has settled on two solutions:
Retail mobile apps: Create a trading application that offers a USD trading balance stored on a single network. If a trading balance is stored on a single network, buying tokens on other networks requires a bridge transaction to take place, then leading to crosschain trades being delayed by 2-3s, costing ~2x additional fees, having poor fills, and often encountering downtimes. These added latencies and worse fills don’t work.
Pro trading terminals: Create a trading application that lets users store gas coins across networks and require them to manually manage their balances, which may allow for faster execution if users have gas pre-funded on every network, but ultimately fragments balances and takes time to coordinate topping-up wallets, manage network-siloed portfolios, etc. This complexity doesn’t work.
So we asked ourselves: What if we could have the best of both worlds… without compromise?
We spent the last several months designing Atomic Execution from scratch: a first-of-its-kind, sub-second, crosschain trading system. One USD balance, no gas, no bridging, no fragmentation, instant fills, and–still–zero trading fees.
“We work on v1 trading terminals”
We modeled Atomic Execution after “Instant Settlement” from traditional banks and brokerages. Where the actual, true, settlement of funds may take hours or days but, to the end users, the funds are debited–and credited–instantly between the sender and receiver. This is accomplished using a “loan network”. Like them, Azura takes on the temporary risk of loaning users funds on the receiving network even if their balance on the sending network has not yet truly settled.
Further, today’s bridges, browser wallets, trading terminals, and mobile trading apps cannot necessarily accomplish, or even mimic, this same behavior given their architectural decisions. It is not as simple as chalking this up to our risk tolerance and willingness to “give loans” to our users. We’ve done a complete rewrite of the traditional stack that now enables this loan network to offer the same competitive, sub-second latencies you’d get by trading with gas coins on the networks directly.
I could keep ranting about how important or big of a deal this is, or why you should care about it, or why it’s better than any prior attempts at improving crosschain UX, but being the capitalist I am: I’ll let the market decide.
