Tesseract: Avalanche's Liquidity Marketplace
Discover how Tesseract connects Avalanche L1s through fast, seamless swaps—built on the latest ICM upgrade powering a unified DeFi experience.
In January, Avalanche released Etna, their largest upgrade since mainnet launch. Transforming subnets into L1s. Anyone can now launch a L1 combined with Avalanche consensus for near-instant finality. Deploying your own blockchain is now easier than ever.
The key architecture is Avalanche ICM - Interchain messaging. Before, subnets operated with validators that secure the primary network. Now, L1s only need to validate their own chain. Since L1s are independent with custom rulesets and governance, ICM is the communication between Avalanche L1s. Making sure that L1s can seamlessly exchange messages and assets.
Tesseract is the first to leverage this new upgrade. A trustless, non-custodial trading platform designed to connect liquidity between the C-Chain and Avalanche's growing network of L1s. Supporting the ecosystem and providing a one-stop location for L1s on Avax. Tesseract contributors previously built Yield Yak, a well-known DeFi tool that has been on Avalanche for as long as I have.
Let’s dive into Tesseract’s utility, and ask them some questions.
Lightning fast network
Tesseract taps into Avalanche’s deep liquidity, and solves fragmentation by routing swaps across the network. Tesseract checks for the best price for your swap, taking into account slippage and gas-fees while leveraging multi-hop routes on both the C-Chain and on Avalanche L1s. These swaps benefit the entire ecosystem as liquidity is flowing through the network.
The Tesseract UI is simple and efficient. You can find connected L1s with their tokens, and bridge seamlessly between chains. Looking at the UI gives a great overview of the new Avalanche L1 network.
Complete round trips to and from the C-Chain in less than 10 seconds. ICTT - Interchain token transfer is the protocol built on top of ICM that handles the transfer between chains. It’s good to see these details displayed while reviewing a swap on Tesseract.
Tesseract is open source on GitHub. With midnight-commit and snow-farmer as contributors, I interviewed them alongside their communications lead, Ravageur, to get more insight into the platform's inspiration and future.
Yield Yak is a good tool on Avax. Will it be involved with Tesseract?
Tesseract is a separate project, though under the hood it uses some Yield Yak elements such as Yak Swap for some of its C-Chain routing.
Does cross-chain liquidity include other L1s? If so, how does that work?
Yes, the power of Tesseract is that it looks at the “full picture” of liquidity on the C-Chain and L1s to find the most beneficial route for a user making a swap. It also connects L1s to the Avalanche Liquidity Hub (the C-Chain) so that L1s don’t have to deploy their own DEX or manage their own liquidity themselves. How it works is that L1s who have deployed a Tesseract ‘Cell’ (which is a set of smart contracts) are immediately tapped into Tesseract’s liquidity network.
What was the biggest challenge in designing Tesseract?
The biggest challenge has been in designing the front-end UX to make sure it feels like a unified experience when you have tokens that exist on multiple chains. But I think we’ve found an elegant solution to handle this that includes no need to switch RPCs when moving between chains, and some innovative UX solutions that we’re quite proud of.
Are there any more features in the works?
Yes! In addition to integrating more L1s, we’re looking to implement more features that cater to traders. Our goal is to create the best swapping experience on Avalanche.
What is your favorite thing about ICM?
The flexibility. Tesseract can do some truly impressive feats of having routes move across multiple L1s and the C-Chain in matter of seconds. This is facilitated by the ICM infrastructure which allows developers to build custom solutions that just aren’t possible on other networks.
Why Tesseract Matters
Tesseract is one of the first real examples of what Avalanche’s L1 transformation and ICM can unlock. Swapping across chains without switching RPCs, connecting to shared liquidity without managing your own DEX, and building custom networks that still feel integrated. As more Avalanche L1s come online, tools like Tesseract help make the experience feel cohesive.
If you’ve used Tesseract, we’d love to hear what stood out. If you haven’t yet, now’s a good time to explore what the next phase of Avalanche feels like.
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