2026-06-11

Back After a Week

We skipped a week — the DevRel team was in Istanbul for the hackathon we threw during Istanbul Blockchain Week, and the side event at the end gathered more than 400 people. This week we're back, and the guests are Paul and David from Sodax. You may know them from Balanced or Hana Wallet; they're some of the OGs, and they walked us through what Sodax is and why a Stellar builder should care. The plan was to close with a new AI package from our side, but the Sodax half earned its time, so that one slid to next week.

Sodax: Cross-Network Liquidity as Developer Tooling

Sodax is a cross-network execution and liquidity system — an intent-based one — and the framing David led with is that it's essential developer tooling, not a destination app. If you're building on Stellar and you want to open your front door to users who hold assets on other networks, you normally have to build bridges, source liquidity, and maintain infrastructure. Sodax does that part so you don't: you stay on Stellar, build the way you want, and reach users elsewhere through a single developer SDK.

The liquidity piece is the part that's easy to underrate. It isn't only cross-network connectivity — Sodax has already sourced the liquidity, so the cross-network swaps and DeFi actions actually settle. As a developer you stop worrying about where the depth comes from.

From ICON to Sodax

Paul gave the origin story, and it's a good one. The Sodax brand is new — early 2025 — but the team isn't. Before Sodax they were ICON (the ICX token), a layer-1 from the ICO era with an interoperability vision that was years ahead of its time. Over time the lesson landed: to do intent-based, liquidity-powered interoperability you don't actually need to run your own blockchain. So they spun the L1 down, put their logic hub on Sonic (a fast, sub-second-finality EVM chain), and built the smart contracts out across Stellar, Solana, Sui, and more — deliberately spanning EVM and non-EVM networks to open routes other systems treat as impossible.

Balanced (once the number-one DEX on ICON) and Hana Wallet (formerly the ICON wallet, now a self-custodial multi-network wallet on mobile and desktop) both come from those same ICON roots and are now powered by Sodax under the hood. Both went through Stellar's SCF program — they pitched at Meridian in London two years ago and Hana again at Meridian Brazil last year.

The Spoke-Chain Model

In the Sodax model, Stellar is a spoke chain — which means everything in the Sodax docs applies to and for Stellar builders. The count keeps climbing, but they're on roughly 20 networks now, and they recently plugged in native Bitcoin, which they're rightly proud of. Some of the more exotic spokes are Near, Stacks (a Bitcoin L2), and Injective (Cosmos).

The asset model is worth understanding. When you swap into "BTC" on Stellar through Sodax, you get a soda variant — a trading- and liquidity-backed Sodax representation of Bitcoin that lives on Stellar but is plugged into real Bitcoin liquidity on the Bitcoin network. The solver sees native-asset liquidity across all 20 networks at once and reasons across all of it when a trade fires, so there's depth without anyone provisioning pools — and you can withdraw straight back out to a native Bitcoin wallet. If you've used something like Near Intents, the UX will feel familiar.

Three Lines to a Cross-Network Swap

Paul's honest line was that the demo is hard to make sound impressive because the SDK abstracts so much away. Integration is three steps:

1. Quote — ask for the price of the swap you want.
2. Swap — do it. One line.
3. Status — poll for not started, solved, or failed.

If a swap fails, the recovery system automatically returns funds — even if they'd already left the wallet. There's also a built-in wallet-connection component (wrap it around your frontend, stack the providers, done), which matters when you're juggling 20 networks, and Stellar trustlines are handled inside the SDK. npm install the SDK (or pnpm add it) and that's most of what you need to ship a real cross-network app.

Earn, and a Bit of Alpha

Beyond swaps, the SDK exposes a cross-network money market — your end users can deposit, borrow, and earn supply interest. David dropped a bit of alpha too: leveraged staking yield is coming, so things like native ETH or native Solana staking would become accessible to your users even if your app lives entirely on Stellar or some other unrelated network.

Built for Agents

This is the part that fit the room. Sodax shipped a best-in-class builder MCP server (builders.sodax.com) — plug it into Claude or your cursor agent and it levels your agent up into a "prime Sodax developer." You don't need a docs-indexer like Context7; the MCP is the docs. Even before you commit to building with Sodax, you can point the builder MCP at your existing Stellar repo and have it assess, in about ten minutes, where Sodax could open up cross-network opportunity for you. On top of that, they've embedded agent skills directly inside the SDK, so even if you never wire up the MCP, an agent crawling the package runs into the skills and uses the swap/lend/borrow modules correctly — in their words, "so that even Sonnet 4.6 doesn't make mistakes."

I can vouch for that last claim. The morning of the meeting I didn't even use the MCP — I pointed Sonnet 4.6 (not the strongest model) at docs.sodax.com with roughly "surprise me," and about thirty minutes and 20% of a Pro plan later I had a one-shot mainnet demo: assets, addresses, cross-chain swaps, bridge limits, every supported chain. The question stopped being can you vibe-code something on Sodax and became why not.

The Fee Model

Sodax takes a flat 0.1% on swaps — the same shape as a Uniswap-style backend fee. The interesting part for builders: any partner integrating the SDK can set their own partner fee on top. A wallet like Hana, or your own app, can add (say) 0.5% and keep it. You have full control over what you charge your users, which means an integrator can end up earning more per swap than Sodax itself.

Why Mainnet Only

A recurring audience question: does it support testnet? Short answer, no — and the reason is structural. The solver sources real liquidity from real markets, and there's no monetary value backing assets on testnet, so the solver simply has nothing to solve. Replicating it would mean standing up and maintaining dozens of testnet liquidity pools, bridges, and staking platforms in parallel. They're open to bringing parts of the stack to testnet and want to hear from developers about which parts would actually help — but for now Sodax is a mainnet product, which is also fine, because you're not deploying your own contracts. It's a plug you put into your app and it works.

Where to go next: docs.sodax.com for the SDK, builders.sodax.com for the MCP, and sodax.com/partners to see how the integration and fee split work. Their whole team hangs out in Discord and answers builder questions directly.

Next Week

I ran out of time to show the AI package we built, so set a reminder. Next week's is the one I've been most excited about: the tool the SDF DevRel team shipped that drops 42 skills and hooks into your setup, packs in information about every project ever built on Stellar for market research, and wraps the whole thing in an Agile workflow. It needs a full half-hour to do it justice. See you then.