Relay.link's cross-chain DEX
Swap between 70+ blockchains with relay.link
TLDR:
Relay.link’s a cross-chain DEX that has a single unifying interface supporting 70+ different blockchains, many of which are not even compatible with one another!
Relay makes cross-chain swaps appear miraculously simple by hiding the complexity. Below you’ll see how to swap ETH on Ethereum to BTC on Bitcoin.
However, it does not offer paths between many supported chains like SOL→BTC, yet it’s easy to get around this with an intermediary swap eg. SOL→ETH→BTC.
Relay’s quite simply the best cross-chain DEX I’ve come across at hiding away the complexity between token swaps in the multi-chain world we live in.
Following from last week where I looked at li.fi’s Jumper exchange, this week I decided to look at another cross-chain DEX that I’ve come across more recently and like as much as Jumper, namely Relay.link.
While jumper is predominantly focused on EVM chains, what’s interesting about Relay is that it brings a similar simple interface to a huge number of chains, including many non-evm compatible chains like Bitcoin and Tron.
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Relay.link
Relay.link’s a cross-chain DEX (decentralised exchange) much like jumper.exchange that we looked at last week. It uses the same super simple interface as many other exchanges including the likes of Uniswap and Jumper itself to bridge and swap between thousands of tokens.
However, where Relay really stands out is that it’s the first DEX I’ve seen that has a single unifying interface supporting 70+ disparate chains in one single place, especially considering many of the chains are not compatible with one another!
You can see Relay’s simplicity in its interface for swapping between ETH on Ethereum and BTC on Bitcoin shown above. While the interface looks simple, the operations going on in the background are anything but simple, even Thorchain that does this operation natively doesn’t look as clean.
Below we’ll run through how to do this specific ETH to BTC swap with Relay.
Open & Connect
Start by opening up Relay.link and select the “Connect Wallet” button at the bottom.
In this case we are swapping from the Ethereum mainnet to Bitcoin mainnet. So we first we need to connect an Ethereum compatible wallet, and once you’ve done this it will appear on the top right as such.
Since the receiving wallet doesn’t need to sign a transaction, Relay allows you to either connect your wallet or simply paste in the receiving address.
In this case I decided to connect to a Bitcoin wallet on Phantom to show you what it would look like as Relay very nicely shows that each wallet is connected and displays the icon of the wallet provider too.
Select Chain & Token
In this post we’re swapping between ETH on Ethereum and BTC on Bitcoin.
However, one of the most impressive aspects of Relay is just how versatile it is with the variety of different chains and tokens it supports. By selecting the token it’ll bring up this dialog box where you can search through supported chains and tokens:
This is where you can see the vast number of chains that are supported. From the more obvious chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. To many less obvious chains including well known L1s like Tron, Sei, and HyperEVM. Plus even lesser known L2s like Corn for Bitcoin, and Degen for Ethereum.
Now when you’ve found the chain you’re looking for you’ll generally want to use the search bar or paste the address of the specific token you want, as I’ve done here with USDC on Degen.
Through this simple interface you can effortlessly find thousands of tokens across 70+ blockchains. It’s simple and powerful.
But let’s get back to swapping ETH on Ethereum for BTC on Bitcoin.
Swap
Having selected the tokens you want, connecting the wallet(s) you’ll use, and selecting the amounts to swap, you then just hit the “Swap” button at the bottom. In this case I’m going for around $10 of ETH to BTC.
You’ll be asked to sign the transaction from the sending wallet, and once you’ve signed it Relay will do its thing.
While the transaction is in flight you’ll see the following pop up.
And if you hit “Track Progress” you’ll see the transaction going through in their transaction interface.
Finally, on completion the transaction will come back with a “Success” message at the top!
As a quck note, you may spot this transaction took 27 minutes to complete. That’s just because it was a Bitcoin transaction and they can take a long time, Relay works just as well with other blockchains and the transactions are much faster.
Considerations
Although the above swap was very simple and successful, Relay’s not without its issues. The most important consideration to be aware of is that while 70+ chains are supported by Relay, not all of them have direct paths between them.
As you can see in this image below for example, there’s no direct path between SOL on Solana and BTC on Bitcoin.
Nonetheless, you can still use Relay to acheive this swap, but you need just need to do an extra swap to get there.
In this specific example you can acheive the same result by first doing a swap between SOL on Solana to ETH on Ethereum.
And now with this ETH on Ethereum you can do the same swap we did earlier in this post between ETH and BTC, effectively doing SOL → ETH → BTC.
I’m sure relay are aware of this issue and will eventually find a way to support direct paths between all chains. For now it requires an extra step but you can still get to the same end result.
Buy Crypto
It’s also worth noting that Relay has an integration with Moonpay so you can buy crypto directly through them. This can be accessed by pressing the “buy” button at the top.
It’s pretty cool to have this integrated here, but in my testing it didn’t seem to support a lot of the different currencies and chains so I wouldn’t necessarily suggest using it and instead recommend going over to your favourite exchange instead.
Multi-Chain Future
Crypto’s future is multi-chain, there are already hundreds of chains out there and quite honestly as time goes by there’ll just be more and more chains available.
Relay is catering for that future, creating an incredibly simple user-interface that allows you to do some pretty complex transactions between entirely different chains.
However, in trying to over-simplify the interface you also don’t quite know all the operations that are going on in the background to service your request. This can be a bit concerning if you’re moving a lot of money and just don’t know what’s happening.
Yet there’ll always exist this trade-off, simpler interfaces require hiding information that’s not entirely necessary for the user, and Relay does this masterfully making the trading experience between chains super simple to navigate.
Now next time you want to swap between entirely different tokens on entirely different chains you know you can rely on Relay.
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