Swift Protocol: Revolutionizing DeFi Trading

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The DeFi trading experience is a balancing act.

Market makers juggle cost and efficiency, while traders deal with delays, slippage, and the ever-present reality of MEV extraction. Onchain execution can be slow, liquidity is often scattered across different venues, and gas fees — even on Solana — still exist.

These are just a few of the problems that Drift — the largest derivatives platform on Solana — set out to solve with Swift Protocol. Its new trading standard is designed to maximize execution speed, minimize slippage, and make trading truly gasless across perpetuals and spot markets.

Consolidating Execution Sources

Most onchain trades today are scattered across AMMs, order books, and private market makers, leading to suboptimal execution. Swift Protocol consolidates these sources into a single execution layer. Instead of waiting for confirmations, Swift broadcasts orders to market makers, who compete to fill them in milliseconds, ensuring better prices and deeper liquidity.

For Swift Protocol to work, it needs liquidity providers to be active participants. Traditionally, market makers on Solana manage order book quotes, a process that can be inefficient. JIT (Just-In-Time) market making improves this by only submitting fills when needed, reducing unnecessary gas costs. Swift further enhances this by introducing a WebSocket-based system that simplifies market maker integration, allowing them to react to orders instantly and efficiently.

Gasless Trading

Swift also removes gas fees for traders and does not impose additional costs on market makers, according to Chris Heaney, co-founder of Drift and lead on Swift Protocol. He mentioned, “JIT makers already pay gas to submit their fills. They don’t have to pay any additional gas fees vis-a-vis what they’re currently paying.” This minimizes unnecessary gas expenses and ensures capital efficiency, appealing to market makers.

Tackling MEV Challenges

Swift’s model addresses one of the biggest challenges in onchain trading: MEV, or maximal extractable value. MEV happens when transactions are reordered, inserted, or censored within a block to create profit opportunities for arbitrage bots or validators at traders’ expense. Swift Protocol mitigates this risk by using a Dutch auction system, ensuring market makers compete for the best price instead of instantly filling orders at the worst possible price a trader is willing to accept.

Staking-Based Order Prioritization

Concerns were raised about the possible preferential treatment of traders based on token staking for execution prioritization. However, Heaney clarified that there will be no staking-based prioritization at launch, ensuring fairness for all market makers. Proposed designs aim to give a ‘first look’ to staked market makers without disadvantaging others in filling orders.

Conclusion

By collapsing execution times, removing gas fees for traders, and structuring orders to minimize MEV, Swift offers a new take on how high-performance trading can work in DeFi. If the protocol delivers on its promises, it could set the standard for fast, efficient, and fair decentralized trading.

The Swift Protocol is now live for perpetuals trading, with spot markets coming soon.