Cross-Chain Innovation: Gasp and Ava Protocol Discuss the Future of Decentralized Exchanges

The continued growth of DeFi and rollups has increased the need for secure, cost-efficient transactions across multiple blockchains. This was the focus of a recent AMA on Ava Protocol’s Discord featuring Gasp, the first Ethereum-native cross-rollup protocol and DEX, where they discussed their technologies and shared commitment to decentralized infrastructure.

This collaboration has deep roots. When Ava Protocol was known as OAK Network and Gasp operated as Mangata, both teams were already working on combining decentralized automation with cross-chain liquidity. Today, as they build on EigenLayer's restaking model for Ethereum, this vision is steadily becoming a reality.

Gasp’s gas-free, MEV-protected cross-chain swaps and Ava Protocol's trustless automation solutions are major strides toward delivering the frictionless web3 experiences that everyday users want.

Tackling Liquidity Fragmentation and Security

Gasp co-founder and CEO Peter Kris explained how Gasp aims to solve liquidity fragmentation across blockchains while maintaining security through EigenLayer. Gasp is designed as a master rollup or multi-rollup that simultaneously sequences transactions for the connected chains.

“Gasp is an application-specific rollup,” Peter explained. “So developers can’t develop smart contracts for themselves, but they can create trading bots. They can create integrations for other applications.”

Unlike traditional bridges, Gasp's architecture keeps assets under user control through an “escape hatch” mechanism. “Imagine you take your ETH and you bridge it to Optimism,” Peter said. “It's not bridged in a sense of how other bridges are working, like Wormhole. That bridged token to Optimism is protected by escape hatches. An escape hatch is a mechanism of all the rollups, and it means that if the rollup would go down completely for whatever reason, you as a user can always withdraw your liquidity from that rollup.”

Peter emphasized the security advantages of this approach: “We really double down on security, and this particular functionality of escape hatches ensures that the custody of the tokens is 100 percent in the hands of a user.”

Ava Protocol's focus on secure autonomous super-transactions aligns naturally with Gasp's vision. Both protocols aim to provide seamless interactions without compromising decentralization or user control, with EigenLayer’s security model at the core.

“We are tapping into EigenLayer restaking in a similar way to how Ava Protocol is doing,” Peter observed. “The best thing about EigenLayer,” he added, “is that it gives you the power to tap into Ethereum security. And pretty recently, they have enabled restaking of various ERC-20 tokens. So it's not necessarily Ethereum, it can be even stablecoins like USDT, it can be other project tokens like Uniswap or Aave or anything. So this gives you the power to bootstrap economic security for your protocol.”

MEV Protection and Gas-Free Trading

Ava Protocol can safeguard users' automation tasks from Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) attacks, preventing front-running and tampering with transaction orders. This ensures that scheduled or automated tasks, such as stop-loss orders or yield compounding, are executed securely and without interference. Gasp similarly addresses the issue of MEV attacks by encrypting transaction details until finalization. As Peter explained:

“On Gasp there is no one that can reorder transactions, that can affect the ordering. And the transactions are encrypted. So it has an encrypted mempool where the validator, or let's say the sequencer, they don't see the purpose of the transaction. So they cannot tell what that transaction or that order is going to do. They will learn it only after it is included and finalized, right? So in this way MEV is minimized in its full spectrum.”

This architecture prevents actors from exploiting their position to extract value at the expense of users. By encrypting transactions in the mempool and preventing reordering, GASP eliminates the two main vectors for MEV attacks: the power to reorder transactions and the power to reject them. But it's important to note that this protection is limited to transactions within Gasp.

In addition to MEV protection, Peter noted that Gasp provides gas-free trading for its users, delivering a more user-friendly experience. “On Gasp, you are paying only the fixed AMM, 0.3%,” he noted. “There is no gas.”

A Shared Commitment

The connection between Ava Protocol and Gasp goes back to their early collaboration as Oak Network and Mangata, when they worked together on automated compounding processes for DEX users.

As Peter noted, Oak Network previously helped Mangata provide auto-compounding liquidity pool rewards for their users. He elaborated:

“You’re providing liquidity into an AMM pool and you get certain rewards. But then those rewards are just staying on your account and they are not active, they are passive. They are not producing any work. So you can take those assets and you can put it into the liquidity protocol again, automatically, and you can set it up as a scheduled event into the future.”

This approach helped shape their focus on user-centric innovation, which remains central to both projects today. As Gasp prepares for its mainnet launch and further integrations, the potential for collaboration to address web3 automation challenges remains strong.

“We've touched on the topics of limit orders or the automation of auto-compounding. That is certainly a direction that would need to be addressed in the future,” Peter said. “We’re tapping into the same Ethereum security network, and once there are maybe some interoperability protocols… something like Hyperlane or maybe some other player, we could definitely leverage some automation network for triggering certain future scheduled events on Gasp.”

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With Ava Protocol and Gasp developing on parallel paths, the future of decentralized exchanges is shaping up to be more secure, user-friendly, and interconnected than ever before.
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