What is Mayan Finance?

Mayan Finance, which won the Wormhole Award at the Convergence Hackathon back in February 2022, is a cross-chain swap infrastructure that makes Solana protocols accessible to EVM-based chains. Mayan’s goal is to make cross-chain swaps as convenient as native swaps. To achieve this, they allow users to conduct single-click cross-chain swaps.

Mayan built their own bridge, called “Swap Bridge”, on Wormhole’s generic message-passing layer. Currently, Mayan uses the Serum order book to fulfill swap orders and has plans to add more Solana protocols in the near future. [Source]

How is Mayan using the power of Wormhole?

Each message on Wormhole’s core layer has a unique sequence to allow for identifying and tracking individual messages. First, Mayan’s “Swap Bridge” calls the Portal (Token) Bridge to trigger the token transfer and get the message’s sequence. Then, they put the sequence information into their Swap data structure, along with any other information needed to return the tokens to their owner (what markets are involved, slippage, deadline, fees, etc). For this to happen, Mayan uses Wormhole’s generic messaging function to create a second message that contains the above-mentioned information plus a reference to the first message (token transfer). After these two messages are signed by Wormhole Guardians, Mayan relayers will commit the transactions to the Solana network, executing the swap and bridging the output tokens back to the origin chain. This way, Mayan leverages Wormhole’s composability to execute a cross-chain token transfer while sending the necessary token swap information to Serum’s order book. [Source]

On September 7th, there was a space titled "Resilience of Solana" focusing on bridges. This space is on the Meteora page and is hosted by @0xMert_ (CEO Heliuslabs) and hellochow (building MeteoraAG and jupiterexchange) was held. A day earlier, the Meteora account published the bold points of this space in the form of a very readable thread. One of the reviewed bridges in this space was Mayan Finance.

One of the types of bridges are cross-chain bridges, and Mayan Finance is one of these types of bridges. These types of bridges are defined by the Meteora account as follows: "The third major area is cross-chain value transfers/trades where you want to exchange a specific asset on one chain for a specific asset on another chain. For example, if you want to exchange ETH on Ethereum for SOL on Solana."

One of the hosts was asked: "What are the biggest problems to tackle for bridging on Solana?" After this question, the Meteora account tweeted a quote from Mayan Finance, which made me check the status of the bridges to and from Solana and finally answer my curiosity, whether the lack of lp actions and incentive programs, Did it lead to the same result that Mayan Finance mentioned or not?