Everclear, the first Clearing Layer, has launched its mainnet beta. Built as an Arbitrum Orbit rollup leveraging Hyperlane and Eigenlayer AVS, Everclear coordinates the global settlement of liquidity between chains, reducing rebalancing costs for solvers, intent-based bridges, and other actors in the ecosystem. Everclear lays the foundation for more scalable and seamless crosschain interactions by enabling Chain Abstraction. To dive deep into why the Clearing Layer is needed and its full benefits, read here.

Everclear: Clearing the way for scalable Chain Abstraction

Chain Abstraction is the endgame for user experience in modular blockchains.

In a truly abstracted ecosystem, users no longer need to think about which chain they’re using—whether they’re transferring funds or interacting with decentralized applications (dApps). The focus shifts to what they want to achieve, with intents at the core of these interactions.

In this new paradigm, solvers assume a crucial role. They anticipate liquidity needs across chains and manage complex tasks like handling multiple protocols and chains and executing high-level instructions (e.g., “find the best ETH yield”). This shift is driving the rise of solver networks and orchestration tools—within the Chain Abstraction stack—that enable everything to happen on-chain while abstracting the complexities of on-chain processes.

When the Clearing Layer was announced in June, it was clear that scaling Chain Abstraction had a key bottleneck: the inability to scale solving operations. 

The dirty secret of crosschain intents is that solving, and by extension Chain Abstraction, is currently centralized and unscalable. There are only a small number of crosschain solvers today (often bridge teams themselves or large market makers), and it is unprofitable for them to support anything but the largest chains and assets. Chain Abstraction is missing a key ingredient: If we want an abstracted experience for every asset, every chain, and every application, we need to scale solving by making it economical for everyone.

After working with ecosystem partners, it became clear this problem runs deeper. This challenge affects not just solvers but also market makers and centralized exchanges (CEXs), all struggling with costly and inefficient liquidity management across chains.

A decentralized, streamlined approach to liquidity rebalancing is critical for the scalability and efficiency of this intent-based economy.

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Liquidity is fragmented.
While it cannot be unified, it can be coordinated.

Everclear changes the game by introducing a decentralized Clearing Layer that optimizes liquidity settlement across chains, automating the rebalancing process. Solvers, market makers, and exchanges no longer need to manage liquidity flows manually—Everclear’s system nets flows between chains, finds optimal pathways to settle them, and drastically reduces costs and complexity.

This means that with thousands of new chains and assets in the future, Everclear can provide the foundational infrastructure needed to manage liquidity efficiently.

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The core idea of the Clearing Layer is that openness and composability win.

While individual entities may focus on optimizing their own rebalancing operations—CEXs, for instance, often have teams of 30+ people manually transacting across bridges—an open, decentralized system pushes operational efficiency to its peak.

As more participants join the Clearing Layer, the collective benefits grow exponentially. Each entity gains more than it would from isolated optimization, as the shared infrastructure reduces costs, increases liquidity flow, and enhances overall network efficiency.

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Everclear’s Mainnet Beta is live!

Starting today, anyone can plug into the Clearing Layer, request a rebalancing intent, and track its execution in real-time.

Here’s how intents are processed:

1. Registering an intent: Users (intent protocols, solvers, CEXs, or market makers) register their intent by making funds available for use in the Gateway on the domain chain (where they hold their balance) and calling `newIntent` on the Spoke contract.
   
   
2. Invoice generation: The Gateway generates an “invoice”— i.e., a settlement obligation backed by locked funds. This invoice specifies the destination chains (multiple can be selected), and the system automatically chooses the most optimal settlement route for the intent
   
   Future upgrades will allow users to define more parameters, such as their preferences for latency vs. cost and the maximum time they are willing to wait for settlement, providing more flexibility and control over the process.
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3. Transporting intents: Intents are transported from the Spoke to the Everclear rollup periodically when the queue has more than 10 items or the oldest item in the queue is over 60 minutes old. Hyperlane is used as the transport protocol, secured by Eigenlayer AVS.
   
   
4. Invoice management: The Everclear rollup maintains a registry of all invoices and manages the logic to compute and clear them at the most efficient rate for all ecosystem participants.
   
   
5. Settlement attempts and Dutch auction: Every 30 minutes (the current epoch length), the system first attempts to net the invoice against one with an opposite flow.
   
   If no match is found after 30 minutes, a Dutch auction kicks in, applying an increasing discount until arbitrageurs find it profitable to purchase the invoice. The discount increases by 8 basis points (bps) per hour for major chains. These parameters will be fine-tuned as more data is collected from mainnet.
   
   
6. Final settlement: Once two invoices are matched (either through the Dutch auction or directly), the settlement queue is processed on the Hub and transported back to the Spoke contract. The tokens are then unlocked and made available to the intended user.

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Herculean Developmental Efforts

Everclear's success is built on the tremendous contributions of our core development teams. Both Proxima Labs and Wonderland played a huge role in making the development of Everclear possible. Their expertise in building the Clearing Layer's foundational infrastructure was crucial in bringing Mainnet Beta to life. Their relentless dedication ensured Everclear could deliver a seamless, scalable chain-abstracted experience. Thank you to all the organizations in the Everclear Collective for their commitment and technical prowess in making this vision a reality.

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Forever Clear

How can the system make sure that all invoices are cleared? This is primarily achieved through two key mechanisms:

1. Dutch Auction Mechanism: This system creates increasing incentives for arbitrageurs to step in and clear invoices. As the auction progresses, the price declines until arbitrageurs can profitably purchase the invoice, ensuring liquidity doesn’t get stuck. Predictable pricing curves reduce uncertainty, encouraging participation.

2. Market of Arbitrageurs: To bootstrap the system, Everclear has partnered with major market makers to ensure there is always a liquid pool of arbitrageurs ready to clear invoices, maintaining healthy liquidity flow across chains. Anera, Tokka, Dialectic, and Aori are already operative in the system.

The Dutch auction system will be accessible to everyone. Launching with a robust & liquid pool of arbitrageurs will foster competition and help maintain the stability of prices during auctions.

But the next challenge is: where to allocate liquidity most efficiently?

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Enter vbNEXT: A new token primitive.

The vbNEXT model, proposed and ratified by the DAO, introduces a vote-bonded mechanism designed to direct liquidity to where it’s needed most. This system creates a dynamic flywheel that incentivizes healthy liquidity flows and avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional locking mechanisms like veTokens.

The core function of vbNEXT is twofold:

• Stake NEXT to earn protocol fees: Token holders can stake NEXT tokens to earn fees generated by the protocol, creating consistent demand for the token.

• Liquidity allocation: vbNEXT enables the protocol to guide liquidity towards underutilized chains or pathways, preventing liquidity from getting stuck in chains with lower demand.
  

vbNEXT aligns the interests of token holders, solvers, and chains, giving all participants a say in how liquidity is allocated and clearing is managed. By staking NEXT, token holders gain voting power to direct token incentives and earn a portion of the revenues generated by Everclear.

The vbNEXT system uses gauges to incentivize productive clearing behavior—rewarding solvers, market makers, and arbitrageurs for moving liquidity into underutilized pathways. Liquidity actors can then make rational decisions to allocate resources to chains where revenues are lower but are compensated with risk adjusted returns from incentives.

This approach ensures that liquidity is directed to where it’s needed most, even in low-demand scenarios, while still generating value for the protocol. 

Importantly, vbNEXT also offers chains and asset issuers a powerful tool to drive liquidity without relying on costly, opaque manual processes. Chains can purchase and lock NEXT tokens or incentivize existing vbNEXT lockers to direct gauges toward their chain—much like the popular veToken model.

vbNEXT’s Long-Term Value

One of the key innovations of vbNEXT is its deflationary mechanism. Unlike veTokens, the surplus revenue generated from system volume is used to reduce the overall supply of NEXT, offsetting inflation from emissions. In periods of low usage, inflationary incentives drive better capital allocation and liquidity flow, while in times of high usage, the system can become deflationary, reducing overall NEXT supply.

This act of balancing ensures that the system remains economically sustainable, rewarding productive contributions while optimizing liquidity allocation across the entire ecosystem.

You can join the discussion on the new tokenomics in the Everclear Forum here.

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The transition from Connext Amarok

With Everclear live, the liquidity-based Connext Amarok system will be phased out. Passive liquidity providers can withdraw their funds using this link, as Amarok will no longer utilize their liquidity. Routers can transition to one of our bridging partners, who will leverage Everclear's infrastructure.

For integrators currently using the Connext SDK and API, please contact the core team on Discord—if you haven’t been contacted already. The Connext SDK will be replaced by the new Everclear API, offering seamless interaction with the Everclear protocol moving forward.

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Ecosystem partners and backers

Everclear is excited to be working with some of the largest projects in Web3 to scale Chain Abstraction.

The Clearing Layer is being integrated by day-1 partners such as Anera Labs, Tokka Labs, Aori, Dialectic, Router, Symbiosis, Synapse, Kontos, and more. Additionally, Everclear will continue working closely with a broad range of aggregators, bridges, liquid staking and restaking protocols, Chain Abstraction protocols, chains, RaaS, infrastructure protocols, wallets, and projects from the solver ecosystem to deliver a fully chain-abstracted experience across Web3.

The project is supported by Polychain, 1kx Network, Pantera, Ethereal Ventures, Scalar Capital, Fenbushi, Coinbase Ventures, OKX Ventures, a_capital, ConsenSys, Hashed, and many more.

Use cases for protocols

Token issuers and protocols can leverage Everclear to optimize the movement of ETH and other assets back across chains in a highly cost-efficient manner. The system provides a seamless way for protocols to manage liquidity between chains with minimal overhead, making it especially valuable for institutional players where slightly lower latency is acceptable.

Building on the success of Renzo, which brought over $1 billion in TVL, the Restake from Anywhere module is expanding to platforms like Autolayer, Chorus One, MAHA, Mellow, Puffer, StaFi, and Ankr. This model can also be applied to stablecoins, yield vaults, and more, allowing token issuers to tap into Everclear’s efficiency for a wide range of DeFi applications.

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Trust assumptions and security

Core values of the project include radical transparency and integrity. As such, there is a long-standing tradition of outlining the trust and centralization assumptions for every launch or upgrade (see Connext V1—from 2021, V1.5, and Amarok announcements).

Everclear is built as an Arbitrum Orbit rollup, leveraging EigenDA through a partnership with Gelato RaaS.

Single Spoke Chains

Everclear spokes rely on the security of the single chains and rollups connected.

Everclear Rollup

Built on the Arbitrum Orbit stack, Everclear’s rollup is secured by fraud proofs, ensuring transaction integrity on the hub.

 Arbitrum Nitro has a built-in "forced update" feature. If there’s downtime, users can use this feature to exit transactions on L1, ensuring there's no way to censor users.

Hyperlane AVS

Everclear leverages Eigenlayer’s AVS to secure crosschain messaging. While slashing isn’t currently supported, limiting economic accountability, Everclear relies on Hyperlane’s validator set ISM to maintain security in the meantime.

Once Eigenlayer’s AVS is fully operational, economic security will scale elastically with Everclear's demand. The system will ensure sufficient economic security to bridge invoices from the spokes to the hub safely.

The process remains secure as long as the AVS stake exceeds the value of invoices moved during an update.

External Data Availability (DA)

Initially, Everclear will utilize Gelato’s Data Availability Committee (DAC) to minimize risks and ensure efficient data handling. Post-launch, the system will transition to EigenDA for a more decentralized and scalable data availability solution.

Contracts

Everclear’s smart contracts are designed to be upgradable with a timelock, allowing for iterative improvements without disruptive migrations. These contracts will undergo a second audit, with full verification on Etherscan expected upon its completion.

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How can you get involved?

With Everclear now live, there are several ways to engage with the network:

• Solvers: Integrate and execute intents seamlessly into your workflow.
• Arbitrageurs: Capitalize on opportunities by filling existing intents in the system.
• Intent-Based bridges: Incorporate efficient rebalancing directly into your operations.‍
• Protocols and DAOs: Transfer funds securely and cost-effectively using the Clearing Layer.

If you are building something cool in Web3, we want to speak to you. You can learn more at:

• Our website: everclear.org
• Our X: x.com/EverclearOrg
• Our Discord: discord.gg/everclear‍
• Our docs: docs.everclear.org