The War to Rebuild On-Chain Transactions: As the Foundation Shifts, Who's Tackling Real Challenges?
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The War to Rebuild On-Chain Transactions: As the Foundation Shifts, Who's Tackling Real Challenges?
If you're still wondering "which coin will go up," you might have already missed the deepest narrative of this cycle.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: 0xResearcher
From on-chain integration to on-chain rewrites, DeFi is tinkering with the infrastructure again.
During DeFi Summer in 2021, everyone was launching tokens, mining, and making minor innovations. In 2023, DeFi has started restructuring—this time not through module integration or gameplay innovation, but by layer-by-layer "reverse" competition from the ground up.
You’ll notice more and more projects aren’t just building on top of previous designs—they’re questioning:
“Was this wheel designed wrong in the first place?”
As a result, two distinct paths are emerging for on-chain trading:
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Either do everything yourself—build your own chain, write your own matching engine, handle wallet interactions end-to-end
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Or focus only on the lowest-level components, fully modularize everything, and let others assemble them into systems
Today, we’ll explore this ongoing battle over foundational restructuring—not listing projects, but examining the problems they’re solving and why we should care about this trend.
Problem 1: Why is on-chain trading still so broken?
On-chain trading was revolutionized by AMMs (like Uniswap), which dramatically lowered market-making barriers—but fragmented efficiency in the process.
If you want depth, you lose efficiency; if you want efficiency, matching must return to centralization.
In recent years, attempts to upgrade on-chain trading from AMM to “on-chain CEX” have either led to L2s (cheap gas but low adoption) or new chains (built but poorly integrated). Ultimately, the core issues aren't about TPS, but:
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Matching and clearing/settlement aren’t decoupled
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Liquidity is split across chains and DEXs
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Cross-chain trading experience is terrible, with cumbersome wallet interactions
So the current direction isn’t about building a better DEX—it’s about rebuilding the entire transaction system foundation from scratch.
Hyperliquid: An on-chain trading system shouldn’t be layered at all
Hyperliquid’s approach: No separation between L1/L2, no split between matching and settlement. Instead, build a natively high-performance chain with matching and trading logic baked directly into the chain itself.
The benefits:
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On-chain matching, verifiable transactions
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No reliance on Sequencers or external clearing nodes
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All assets and liquidity unified under one account system
In short:
“It’s not a DEX running on a chain—it’s a chain that is the exchange.”
This thinking resembles Solana, but instead of using a VM, it’s natively customized for trading. The trade-off is high coupling and poor scalability, but the user experience is genuinely seamless.
Orderly, meanwhile, is like a multi-chain version of Hyperliquid, taking a rural-surrounds-the-city approach—not relying on one dominant chain, but using modularity and multi-chain deployment to bring “native-exchange” level performance and liquidity to more chains and projects.
Ethena: Synthetic assets—building an on-chain dollar savings account without creating a stablecoin
Ethena doesn’t solve a trading problem—it tackles stablecoins and on-chain yield.
USDe isn’t fundamentally a stablecoin, but rather a delta-neutral portfolio combining spot ETH/BTC with perpetual hedge shorts:
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Value preservation via hedging
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Yield generated from funding rates and arbitrage opportunities
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Pricing controlled through incentive mechanisms that manage mint/redeem liquidity
The concept isn’t new, but Ethena packages it with strong operational design into:
“An on-chain dollar savings account” + “A stable yield entry point”
Critically, it doesn’t rely on centralized reserves or bonds. Instead, using on-chain asset combinations and perpetual contracts, it delivers a consumer-grade Cash & Carry strategy. And by enabling everyone to act as a DEX, it creates more yield and possibilities.
In short, Orderly is “a DIY toolkit allowing ordinary users access to stablecoin ecosystems and decentralized exchanges.”
Orderly: Not building products, but writing “standard parts” for on-chain trading
Orderly takes a third path: modularized trading infrastructure.
Unlike Hyperliquid, it doesn’t build an entire chain from scratch. Unlike Ethena, it doesn’t package financial strategies into finished products. Instead, it breaks down the on-chain trading system into composable “standard components,” offering project builders the freedom to assemble them as needed. Its core philosophy: create reusable, verifiable, and aggregatable trading modules serving the broader multi-chain DeFi ecosystem.
Key designs in Orderly include:
Centralized matching + on-chain settlement: off-chain performance, on-chain transparency and verifiability;
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Multi-chain liquidity aggregation: seamless integration across major chains like Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Solana, enabling unified accounts and cross-chain asset flows;
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Modular trading engine: core functions such as matching, clearing, risk control, and liquidity distribution can be independently deployed and freely combined;
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Cross-project shared order book: instead of every project maintaining separate liquidity pools, Orderly enables system-level order book sharing, breaking down liquidity silos at the foundational level.
Notably, Orderly is among the few high-performance trading systems capable of natively integrating Solana. While Solana is renowned for its extreme performance, its architecture is incompatible with EVM, making it difficult for most multi-chain DeFi projects to incorporate effectively. By unifying account structures and abstracting modules, Orderly replicates a “centralized-exchange-like” trading experience on Solana—filling a critical gap in high-performance chain support and introducing a new paradigm of shared liquidity and modular trading infrastructure to the entire Solana ecosystem.
In other words, Orderly transforms Solana’s performance into “part of a multi-chain system,” rather than treating it as “a special capability of an isolated chain.”
Orderly doesn’t build end-user products. Instead, it serves builders—perp projects, market-making vaults, stablecoin protocols—with standardized trading skeletons.
Just as Stripe provides payment infrastructure for Web2, Orderly aims to become the “standard component” for on-chain trading services, enabling developers to avoid reinventing the wheel while achieving professional exchange-grade performance and modularity.
Within the Solana ecosystem, Orderly has deeply integrated with Raydium, aggregating spot and perpetual trading liquidity for key assets including SOL, USDC, and USDT through a unified order book, delivering near-zero slippage and bringing “CEX-level smoothness” to the on-chain world.
This isn’t just technical integration—it’s a successful realization of modular trading system philosophy. Through deep integration with Raydium, the unified order book supports both spot and perpetual liquidity, drastically reducing user trading costs and slippage, while bringing unprecedented systemic liquidity aggregation to Solana. This model is becoming a blueprint for high-performance chains building multi-chain trading infrastructure, allowing builders on Solana to finally enjoy CEX-comparable trading experiences.
Then what is OmniVault? Just a side-door product
If you're building infrastructure, how can retail users participate? Orderly offers a backdoor: OmniVault.
In essence:
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Users deposit USDC
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Market makers like Kronos use these funds for trading
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Profits are returned to LP users
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All fund allocation and strategy execution are fully visible on-chain
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40% of Orderly’s trading fees go to Vault LPs, 60% to stakers
No mining, no token incentives—returns come from real trading profits distributed to liquidity participants.
This is completely different from early DeFi’s “subsidize-to-attract-liquidity” model. It’s closer to a traditional HFT strategy fund—only now available on-chain, with much lower barriers.
DeFi isn’t getting simpler—it’s becoming more like systems engineering.
Today’s DeFi is far removed from the 2020 era of “tweaking contracts and mining.”
You either go full-stack like Hyperliquid, pushing performance to the limit;
Or like Ethena, combine on-chain tools into “real financial use cases”;
Or like Orderly, build standard components so others can rapidly assemble products.
None of these approaches is inherently right or wrong—they’re each addressing DeFi’s structural engineering gaps.
The next breakout success may not involve launching its own chain or token, but will almost certainly leverage one of these foundational architectures.
If you’re still focused on “which token will pump,” you’ve likely missed the deepest narrative shift of this cycle.
This cycle’s protagonist isn’t a token—it’s the structure itself.
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