UniswapX RFQ Integration

The problem UniswapX solves

Traditional AMMs — Uniswap V2, V3, V4, Curve, Balancer — price your trade using a formula. The bigger your trade relative to pool liquidity, the worse the price. This is called price impact, and it's the dominant cost on large swaps.

Example: you want to swap $200K USDC for WETH on Base. The largest USDC/WETH V3 pool has ~$8M liquidity. Your $200K is 2.5% of the pool. The AMM formula says you eat ~30 bps in price impact. That's $600 gone to the pool — before fees, before slippage, before anything else.

UniswapX flips the model. Instead of trading against a pool, you broadcast your order to a network of professional fillers. They compete to give you the best price. The winner fills your order from their own inventory or hedges it. No price impact. No pool formula. Just a quoted price.

The RFQ flow, step by step

Here's what happens when you submit a swap through Orkid that's eligible for RFQ:

1. 01

   Order signing

   You sign an EIP-712 Permit2 message authorizing the swap. No on-chain transaction yet — just a signature. This costs zero gas. The signed order specifies input token, output token, minimum output, and deadline.

2. 02

   Quote request broadcast

   Orkid sends the signed order to the UniswapX RFQ network. The request hits the /v1/quote endpoint, which broadcasts to registered fillers. Each filler receives the order details and has ~200ms to respond with a price.

3. 03

   Filler competition

   Multiple fillers respond with their best price. Orkid's solver compares all RFQ quotes against the best AMM route it can find. Whichever is better wins. The competition is real — if filler A quotes 5 bps spread and filler B quotes 3 bps, filler B gets the order.

4. 04

   Fill execution

   The winning filler submits an on-chain transaction that executes the swap at the quoted price. The filler pays gas. You receive your output tokens at the agreed price — no slippage beyond what was quoted, no MEV exposure, no front-running.

Orkid's filler address

Orkid operates as a registered UniswapX filler on Base. The filler contract lives at:

This is the address that submits fill transactions to the UniswapX reactor. When you swap through Orkid and the order is filled via RFQ, this is the address executing on-chain. You can verify it on Basescan — look for interactions with the UniswapX SwapRouter02 reactor contract.

As a filler, Orkid maintains inventory in major Base tokens (USDC, WETH, cbETH, DAI, USDbC) and quotes prices based on real-time market conditions. The 9 bps Orkid fee is embedded in the quote — the price you see is the price you get.

The /v1/quote endpoint

The RFQ quote endpoint accepts signed orders and returns competing filler prices. Here's the request format:

POST /v1/quote
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "tokenIn":  "0x833589fCD6e6D0896C1dE0d0fA0Be8f3d53eB6E8",
  "tokenOut": "0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000006",
  "amountIn": "200000000000",
  "chainId":  8453,
  "recipient": "0x{user_address}",
  "deadline":  1735689600
}

The response includes the best quote across all fillers and the AMM fallback:

{
  "quoteId":     "0xabc123...",
  "filler":      "0x4808A1F195791Cc6E180cE92e1DD0A027851dFee",
  "amountOut":   "78432105500000000",
  "priceBps":    7,
  "source":      "rfq",
  "expiresAt":   1735689700
}

The priceBps field shows the effective spread in basis points. If source is "rfq", a filler won. If it's "amm", the AMM route was better and no filler could beat it. The expiresAt timestamp gives you the quote validity window — typically 10–15 seconds.

Adaptive slippage with RFQ

One of the advantages of RFQ is that slippage is largely eliminated — the filler quotes a fixed price and executes at that price. But Orkid still applies adaptive slippage logic as a safety net.

Here's why: the filler quotes a price, but between quote and on-chain execution, the filler's hedge could move. If the filler's hedge fails, the order might revert. Orkid's adaptive slippage sets a minimum output that's slightly below the quoted price — tight enough to not leave money on the table, loose enough to allow the filler to execute without reverting.

For RFQ orders, the adaptive algorithm typically uses the minimum buffer: 0.01 bps base, since there's only one hop (filler → user) and no pool staleness factor. The cap of 1.25 bps almost never triggers for RFQ. Compare this to a 4-hop AMM route with stale pool data, which might need 0.01 + 1.6 + 0.2 + 0.3 = 2.11 bps (capped at 1.25 bps).

When RFQ wins, when AMM wins

RFQ isn't always better. Here's the decision matrix:

The crossover is around $20K–$30K on Base. Below that, AMM routing is cheaper because pool liquidity is sufficient and RFQ fillers need a minimum spread to cover their hedging costs. Above that, price impact dominates and RFQ wins by a widening margin.

Orkid's solver runs both paths in parallel — RFQ and AMM — and picks the winner automatically. You don't need to choose. The quote you see already reflects the better option.