Understanding Routes

THE BASICS

The simple analogy

Imagine you're planning a road trip from Austin to Dallas. The direct route on I-35 looks obvious — but there's a traffic jam near Waco. Sometimes it's faster to take a detour through smaller cities: Austin → Waco → Hillsboro → Dallas. The path is longer, but you arrive sooner.

Crypto routing works the same way. The "direct highway" — swapping token A for token B in a single pool — isn't always the cheapest path. Sometimes going through intermediate tokens (the "smaller cities") gives you a better price, even though the route looks longer on paper.

DEFINITION

What is a route?

A route is a path from the token you're selling (token A) to the token you're buying (token B). The simplest route is a single hop: trade A directly for B in one liquidity pool.

But a route can also pass through intermediate tokens — known as hops. A two-hop route looks like A → X → B: you trade A for an intermediate token X, then trade X for B. Each hop is a separate swap in a separate pool, executed atomically in a single transaction.

The key insight: the route with the fewest hops isn't always the cheapest. A longer path through deeper, better-priced pools can deliver more of token B than the direct route.

CONNECTOR_TOKENS

Connector tokens

To build multi-hop routes, Orkid uses a set of connector tokens — high-liquidity tokens that serve as intermediate hops. These are tokens with deep pools across many venues, so routing through them is cheap and reliable.

Orkid uses 10 connector tokens on Base:

• WETH — Wrapped Ether, the base asset
• USDC — the dominant stablecoin on Base
• cbBTC — Coinbase's wrapped Bitcoin
• EURC — Euro-backed stablecoin
• DAI — decentralized stablecoin
• USDbC — Base-native USDC variant
• USDT — Tether stablecoin
• wstETH — wrapped staked ETH
• VIRTUAL — Virtual Protocol token
• AERO — Aerodrome governance token

When you swap an obscure token for another obscure token, Orkid routes through these connectors: obscure-A → USDC → obscure-B. The connectors act as the "highway system" that links the whole market together.

ORKID_ENGINE

How Orkid finds the best route

When you enter a swap, Orkid doesn't just check one pool. It scans all 5 liquidity venues it's integrated with:

• Tycho — PropellerHeads' real-time pool indexer
• Uniswap — the largest AMM on Base
• Bebop — RFQ-based liquidity
• Wintermute — institutional market maker
• Liquorice — solver-based execution

Orkid builds a graph of all available pools across these venues, then searches for the optimal path from your input token to your output token. The search is bounded by a few guardrails that keep it fast without sacrificing price:

Up to 3 hops means a route can pass through at most two intermediate tokens. Orkid evaluates up to 20 candidate paths and picks the one with the best expected output. Any pool whose data is older than 120 seconds is treated as stale and excluded — stale prices lead to bad routes and failed swaps.

SPLIT_ROUTING

Split routes

Sometimes the best execution isn't a single route at all — it's split routing. Instead of sending your entire trade through one path, Orkid can divide it across multiple pools simultaneously.

Imagine you're swapping a large amount of WETH for USDC. There are three WETH/USDC pools, each with different depth. Sending the full amount through any single pool causes price impact. But splitting the trade across all three — say 40% / 35% / 25% — means each pool moves less, and the combined output is higher than any single route could deliver.

Split routing is especially powerful for large trades where no single pool has enough depth. The solver calculates the optimal split fractions to minimize total price impact across all the pools used.

THE_FEE

The 9 bps fee

Orkid charges a flat 9 bps (0.09%) fee on every swap. The important detail is how it's applied: the fee is taken from the output, not the input.

When you swap WETH for USDC, you send your full WETH amount into the route. The route produces some amount of USDC. Orkid then deducts 9 bps of that USDC output as the fee, and you receive the remaining 99.91%.

Applying the fee to the output (not the input) means the fee is always denominated in the token you actually want — no hidden conversion, no double-charging. What you see in the quote is what you get in your wallet.