SettleX
Cross-chain clearing & settlement layer for crypto
Created on 2nd October 2025
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SettleX
Cross-chain clearing & settlement layer for crypto
The problem SettleX solves
SettleX solves liquidity fragmentation, improves capital efficiency, and eliminates high cross-chain bridging costs.
Today, crypto bridging is stuck in an outdated model. Every month, over $24 billion is bridged across chains, yet every bridging solution still moves the gross amount, publicly and inefficiently. This kills capital efficiency, fragments liquidity, drives up costs, and exposes trading strategies and counterparties. Institutions such as intent networks, solvers, market makers, and liquidity providers cannot scale in this environment.
SettleX changes this.
It nets obligations across chains and settles only the net delta, reducing bridging and rebalancing costs by up to 90%.
SettleX simplifies cross-chain operations, improves capital efficiency, and provides confidential and compliant settlement infrastructure for any fungible token, making multi-chain liquidity management safer, and far more cost-effective for institutional users.
Challenges I ran into
The most time-consuming and challenging part was researching and building the netting algorithm that efficiently offsets cross-chain obligations while ensuring accuracy and security. Designing this logic to handle multiple chains, tokens, and directions required extensive testing and iteration.
Another major challenge we faced was handling gas estimation and execution consistency in cross-chain calls during settlement. When sending hundreds of transactions across multiple chains (for example, Base → Hub → Arbitrum), different RPCs and relayers handled gas limits differently, often causing “out of gas” or stuck message errors during batch settlement.
We solved this by implementing dynamic gas estimation and chain-specific overrides in our Foundry scripts, allowing each settlement call to adapt to the destination chain’s runtime behavior. We also added revert tracking and logging to trace failed cross-chain executions, which made debugging and validation significantly easier.
These improvements made our netting engine stable and reliable, enabling seamless settlement across multiple chains and tokens, and making the system highly scalable.
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What is your product’s unique value proposition?
SettleX introduces a new paradigm for cross-chain liquidity management by netting obligations instead of bridging gross amounts.
While existing solutions focus on faster or cheaper transfers, SettleX acts as a clearing and settlement layer beneath them, aggregating cross-chain flows, netting positions, and settling only the net delta.
This reduces bridging and rebalancing volume by up to 90%, dramatically improving capital efficiency.
Our alpha build demonstrates this by netting opposite flows between Base and other chains and settling only the net difference. In one example, real cross-chain netting between Base Sepolia and Avalanche Fuji, two opposite transfers (10,000 USDT and 9,500 USDT) require bridging only 500 USDT.
This validates our core value proposition of confidential, compliant, and capital-efficient cross-chain settlement for intent networks, solvers, market makers, and liquidity providers.
Who is your target customer?
Our target customers are intent and solver networks, market makers, liquidity providers, and the crypto arms of traditional financial institutions that move large token volumes across chains.
These users face high bridging and rebalancing costs, liquidity fragmentation, and operational inefficiencies when managing multi-chain positions.
We’ve validated this audience through conversations and early pilot discussions with ecosystem partners such as Axelar, Union, Polymer, Concero, QuickNode and Forta, and through feedback from intent network builders and institutional liquidity desks who confirmed the demand for a unified settlement layer that reduces costs and preserves confidentiality.
Who are your closest competitors and how are you different?
Our closest competitor is Everclear (https://everclear.org/), which focuses on capital-efficient transfers.
Everclear is a clearing layer that focuses on rebalancing but is heavily dependent on solver networks to complete settlement. SettleX is somewhat similar in concept but is built with stronger infrastructure and achieves greater savings in liquidity and bridging fees by leveraging bridges, solver networks, liquidity pools and better netting algorithm together.
Unlike Everclear, they are not focused on compliance, while SettleX is built with compliance and security at its core, ensuring that no sanctioned or illegal address can bridge or settle using our protocol.
This makes SettleX a complementary settlement layer, not a competing bridge, offering confidentiality, compliance, and capital efficiency for institutions, intent networks, and liquidity providers.
What is your distribution strategy and why?
Our distribution strategy is partnership- and ecosystem-driven rather than focused on direct user acquisition.
We are integrating with bridges, intent networks, solver networks, and liquidity providers that already move large volumes across chains. By embedding SettleX as the settlement backend for these partners, we gain immediate reach to their institutional and DeFi user bases.
In parallel, we have formed strategic partnerships with QuickNode, Axelar, Polymer, Union, Concero, Avail, and Forta, and are planning co-marketing initiatives with them. We are also in discussions with multiple institutional customers to onboard them as early adopters.
This B2B2C model fits our infrastructure-level product, enabling scalable adoption without retail marketing or paid acquisition.
Traction and market validation so far:
- Runner-up in the QuickNode Accelerator, winning over $400K in non-dilutive infrastructure credits.
- Partnerships with Axelar, Union, Polymer, QuickNode, Avail, Concero, Fairblock, and Forta.
- Winner of the Axelar Infinity Quest, earning 75K AXL along with potential grant and fundraising support from the foundation.
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