Skip to content

Core Concepts

An Aspens Market Stack is a crosschain orderbook: one matching engine, trading contracts on every connected chain, and a single book where the base and quote tokens can live on different blockchains. This page covers what that gets you.

One book, many chains

A market pairs a base token on one chain with a quote token on another:

base_chain::base_token :: quote_chain::quote_token

You trade them in a single orderbook, and the tokens never leave their native chains — no wrapping, no bridging, no synthetic representation. The engine matches bids and asks within a market regardless of where each side's assets live.

  • Limit orders rest in the book; market orders take the best available and reject any unfilled remainder.
  • Direct execution matches any compatible counterparty; discretionary matches only a named set of orders (used by dealrooms).

You keep custody

Aspens never takes custody of your funds. You deposit into the trading contract on your own chain, and your assets stay there — on their native chain — until a trade settles you out of them. Place and cancel orders freely; withdraw your free balance whenever you want.

Trade at exchange speed, on-chain

Order entry is instant and free: you sign an order once and it's matched the moment it crosses the book — no on-chain transaction, no block wait, and no gas to place or cancel. Settlement to the chain is handled for you in the background, so you get centralized-exchange responsiveness while keeping self-custody and on-chain finality. You pay gas only to move funds in or out.

No bridge, no bridge risk

Both sides of every trade settle natively on the chains the assets live on. There is no bridge to exploit and no wrapped token to redeem — the single largest source of crosschain risk simply isn't part of the design. Every settled trade is reflected on-chain and recorded in the stack's trade journal.

Fees

  • Trading fee — basis points configured per stack, applied at settlement.
  • No trading gas — the stack covers the gas to settle your trades on-chain; you pay gas only for your own deposits and withdrawals.

Risks

  • Smart contract risk — the trading contracts (MidribV3 on EVM, the Midrib program on Solana) are immutable post-deploy. Audits and source live in the contracts repository.
  • No bridge risk — tokens never leave their native chain; both sides of every settlement happen natively.
  • Operator risk — each stack is independently operated. Verify the stack you're trading against (see Disclosure).