Mayan

Mayan is a cross-chain swap and bridge protocol built on Solana that uses competitive on-chain auctions to route tokens between blockchains at optimized prices. Launched in February 2022, the protocol has processed over $18 billion in volume across more than 8 million swaps, and its routing infrastructure is embedded in major wallets including Phantom, MetaMask, OKX Wallet, and Trust Wallet.

Core mechanism

Rather than relying on shared liquidity pools with fixed pricing, Mayan uses an intent-based architecture. Users sign a message expressing their desired outcome — for example, sending ETH on Ethereum and receiving SOL on Solana — and a network of competing solvers called drivers bid to fill that order on-chain. The driver offering the best execution wins and completes the transfer. The auction runs on Solana, which acts as the coordination layer for order matching regardless of which source and destination chains are involved.

This model addresses a structural problem with traditional cross-chain bridges: low liquidity in specific pools causes significant price impact, especially on larger trades. By routing through a competitive auction rather than a static pool, Mayan's architecture theoretically delivers market-rate pricing at the moment of execution.

Transfer methods

Mayan offers three routing mechanisms, each suited to different transfer types.

Swift is the protocol's primary intent-based path. Solvers compete in an on-chain auction and the winning bidder fulfills the swap within seconds. Swift v2, introduced with the Mayan 2.0 upgrade in March 2026, uses a two-contract design that separates execution logic between source and destination chains, enabling sub-second settlement for many routes. Community benchmarks report effective swap costs around 0.03% when using Mayan directly, compared with roughly 0.85% when cross-chain swaps are routed through integrated wallet interfaces.

MCTP (Mayan-Circle Transfer Protocol) routes transfers through Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP). Tokens are converted to USDC on the source chain, bridged via CCTP, and auctioned on Solana to convert back into the requested output token. Protocol fees are zero for USDC-to-USDC transfers and 3 basis points otherwise. MCTP is suited to large stablecoin transfers where native USDC liquidity minimizes slippage. A faster variant, Fast MCTP, uses Circle's CCTPv2 to further reduce latency.

Wormhole Swap uses Wormhole's Token Bridge with Solana as an intermediary chain. It is optimized for BTC, SOL, and ETH transfers where low slippage is the priority over execution speed.

Mayan 2.0

In March 2026, Mayan launched Mayan 2.0, centered on the Swift v2 architecture. The upgrade's two-contract design — separating source-chain and destination-chain execution logic — allows smoother transaction finality and adds structured payload staging and validation layers that reduce execution errors. Mayan 2.0 is described as up to five times faster than the previous version, with substantially lower costs. The upgrade also introduced referrer fee collection directly from source-chain assets, improving the economics for wallets and aggregators that integrate Mayan's SDK.

Supported chains and integrations

Mayan supports Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Sui, Monad, HyperEVM, and additional networks. The protocol provides an SDK and embeddable widget for developers integrating cross-chain functionality into wallets and dApps. Phantom, MetaMask, OKX Wallet, and Trust Wallet all route cross-chain swaps through Mayan's infrastructure, giving the protocol reach into user bases that may not interact with Solana directly.

Traction

As of March 2026, Mayan has processed over $18 billion in cumulative volume, more than 8 million swaps, and served more than 3 million unique wallets.

Security

Mayan describes its smart contracts as trustless, permissionless, and regularly audited. No specific audit reports or auditing firm names are listed in publicly accessible documentation. The intent-based design reduces custody risk: solvers fill orders without holding user funds beyond the brief duration of a transaction.

Solana ecosystem fit

Mayan is architected with Solana at its core. The auction layer runs on Solana mainnet, and Solana serves as the coordination hub for cross-chain order matching even when neither the source nor destination chain is Solana. The protocol routes external chain volume through Solana and positions the network as settlement infrastructure for multi-chain DeFi activity. Its integration into non-Solana-native wallets like MetaMask and Trust Wallet brings Solana-settled liquidity to users who might not otherwise interact directly with the network.