Multiswap: Redefining Onchain Capital Markets
Abstract
Multiswap is the first automated market maker (AMM) engineered to scale to traditional finance (TradFi) proportions, bridging DeFi’s potential with institutional-grade infrastructure. Unlike legacy AMMs that bleed value and fragment liquidity, Multiswap delivers a mathematically robust, capital-efficient trading ecosystem. With dynamic weights, unified liquidity, and an embedded launchpad, it rethinks the capital management value chain—merging exchange and portfolio into one. Powered by the CAV token, Multiswap lays the foundation for spot trading, lending, fixed income, and derivatives, poised to rival centralized limit order books (CLOBs) onchain and outpace NYSE-grade systems offchain.
Introduction
Decentralized finance (DeFi) commands a total value locked (TVL) of $100 billion, yet it remains a fraction of traditional finance (TradFi), where the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) processes $150-$200 billion in daily volume. Conventional automated market makers (AMMs), such as Uniswap and Curve, rely on constant product formulas that constrain DeFi’s growth. These systems incur value leakage through slippage and impermanent loss—costs obscured by fee-focused metrics—while liquidity fragmentation across multiple pools limits scalability. Short-term reward structures further destabilize protocols, exposing liquidity providers (LPs) to volatility and incentivizing transient participation.
CavalRe introduces Multiswap, an AMM engineered to transcend these limitations and align DeFi with TradFi’s scale. Designed from first principles, Multiswap ensures capital preservation through robust mathematics, consolidates liquidity into a single, boundless pool, and optimizes trades with dynamic weights. An integrated launchpad facilitates equitable token distribution, while a restructured value chain merges exchange and asset management—casting LP tokens as shares in a yield-bearing index fund. Extending beyond spot markets, its modular framework supports lending, fixed income, and derivatives, positioning Multiswap to compete with centralized limit order books (CLOBs) onchain and exceed NYSE-grade performance offchain.
This whitepaper delineates Multiswap’s technical architecture, ecosystem design, and the CAV token’s pivotal role in fostering adoption. Scheduled for launch on May 8, 2025, with a $25M fully diluted valuation, Multiswap establishes a foundation to integrate DeFi’s innovation with TradFi’s magnitude—targeting the next trillion in onchain capital markets.
Technical Foundations
Multiswap redefines decentralized trading, engineered from five foundational financial principles—discrete mathematics, balanced value, internal numeraire, discrete self-financing, and dynamic weights—to bridge DeFi’s potential with traditional finance (TradFi) scale. These principles converge into a single-pool architecture that supports unlimited assets, eradicates value leakage, and rivals NYSE-grade throughput. Transcending conventional AMMs, Multiswap’s governing equation and pioneering design deliver institutional-grade efficiency, targeting a $25M FDV at its May 8, 2025 launch. This section outlines the technical foundations of Multiswap, illustrates its mechanics through practical examples, and explains its potential role in advancing onchain capital markets.
Discrete Mathematics
Legacy AMMs like Uniswap anchor their mechanics in continuous mathematics, epitomized by the constant-product formula, . This model assumes a finite trade is split into infinitesimal steps, integrated from pre-trade to post-trade prices—an abstraction misaligned with real-world dynamics. The result? An effective mid-price execution where ~50% reflects the stale pre-trade price, leaking value as trades execute partially at outdated rates. Financial markets, however, operate discretely, with finite transactions driving tangible shifts in prices and reserves. Multiswap harnesses this reality, modeling trades as distinct events rather than integrated curves.
This paradigm shift unlocks a profound capability: a singular liquidity pool supporting unlimited assets without the inefficiencies of pairwise fragmentation. In a pool with assets, Multiswap automatically activates
trading pairs with zero fragmentation of liquidity.
The entire TVL of each asset is available to trade against the entire TVL of any other asset. Multiswap’s testnet exemplifies this prowess, deploying a single pool with 504 tokens modeling the S&P 500 unlocking 127,260 pairs—all with zero fragmentation of liquidity. Contrast this with traditional AMMs, where supporting 504 assets would demand thousands of separate pools, each diluting liquidity, amplifying slippage, and crippling scalability. Multiswap consolidates capital into a boundless hub, optimizing efficiency and forging a scalable backbone for institutional-grade trading—extensible to thousands of assets without compromising depth, poised to rival TradFi’s vast infrastructure with unmatched precision.
No Leverage
From the perspective of the pool, LP tokens represent equity and tokens in the pool are assets. Multiswap’s second pillar mandates that the value of LP tokens precisely equals the value of all assets within the pool
meaning there is no leverage in the system.
This principle enables a key advancement: LP tokens serve as shares in a yield-bearing index fund. Beyond trading fees, LPs gain proportional ownership of the asset portfolio, uniting exchange efficiency with portfolio growth.
Internal Numeraire
Multiswap has no dependencies on external prices, instead adopting an internal measure of value called "scale". Each token carries a scale , with its scaled price defined as
—the value per token in scale units—and the pool’s total scale follows from no leverage and is given by the sum of the asset scales
The post-trade scaled price adjusts to
Asset weights are independent of the chosen numeraire and are given by , and the price of token measured in terms of token emerges as the ratio
Discrete Self-Financing
Multiswap’s discrete self-financing principle ensures value inflows equal value outflows so that no value is created or destroyed during trades. For token , with quantity and scaled price from Principle 3, the value change from to is
which can be expressed in term of and by rewriting this as
Here,
is the change in value due to trading, i.e. trading flow, which depends on the post-trade price , and
is the change in value due to price movement which depends on the pre-trade position .
Discrete self-financing mandates
This fundamental governing equation ensures no value leakage. Unlike constant-product AMMs, where mid-price execution erodes capital, Multiswap’s post-trade secures full integrity.
Dynamic Weights
Consider the scaled value flow
Dynamic weights open an infinite design space for Multiswap with the only real constraint being changes in scale (and hence weights) must satisfy
In an attempt to reduce the design space, note that if we set
we find that
i.e. the pre-trade marginal price is equal to the post-trade marginal price, i.e. there is precisely zero price impact and we have
Inspired by this observation, we define a 1-parameter dynamical weight model
resulting in a new expression for scaled value flow
or
Special Case:
When
we have
which we saw above corresponds to zero price impact.
Special Case:
When
we have
which corresponds to constant weights with significant price impact.
Special Case:
When
we have
and
which means the post-trade price goes to zero, i.e. maximum price impact.
In summary, the parameter models desired price impact with precision:
- : yields dynamic weights with zero price impact,
- : locks constant weights with significant price impact, and
- : drives dynamic weights to extreme price impact, collapsing the post-trade price toward zero.
This simple yet powerful parameterization unlocks a vast design space. Inspired by volatility-dependent fee models such as those implemented by Kyber, LFJ's Liquidity Book and, more recently, Flowing Tulip, we envision tailored models where responds directly to market volatility. For example, setting
where denotes current volatility and is a reference volatility, allows Multiswap to automatically deliver minimal price impact during stable market conditions and increased impact—akin to traditional constant-product AMMs—during periods of high volatility. Thus, Multiswap not only generalizes existing volatility-adaptive AMM approaches but elegantly integrates them into a robust, mathematically rigorous framework suitable for institutional-grade finance.
Target Weights
Multiswap extends its dynamic weights mechanism by introducing the concept of target weights, enabling sophisticated and responsive asset allocation within the liquidity pool.
In this model, each asset in the Multiswap pool has a predefined target weight, clearly distinguishing between two asset states:
- Underweight Assets: Assets whose current weight is below their target.
- Overweight Assets: Assets whose current weight exceeds their target.
Zero-Price-Impact Trades
When an underweight asset is deposited, or an overweight asset is withdrawn, the asset moves toward its target weight. Multiswap ensures that such trades experience precisely zero price impact (i.e., ) until the target weight is reached.
If the deposit or withdrawal surpasses the target weight threshold, the trade transitions smoothly from zero price impact into the dynamic weight model described below.
Trades with Price Impact
Conversely, when an overweight asset is deposited or an underweight asset is withdrawn, the trades immediately experience price impact according to Multiswap’s dynamic weight model. Specifically, the price impact is governed by the parameter , calculated via a piecewise quadratic function
where is a predefined constant and represents the target reserve for asset . The reserve ratio is defined by
This quadratic formulation elegantly ensures minimal price impact for small deviations and increasingly significant price impacts as actual weights diverge substantially from their targets.
Computing Target Reserves
To practically implement target weights, Multiswap computes target reserves from target weights. The relationship between changes in reserve and weight is given explicitly as
ensuring that adjustments toward target weights are seamless, transparent, and computationally efficient.
Strategic Implications
This innovative target-weight model provides Multiswap unparalleled control over liquidity distribution, risk management, and asset allocation strategies, positioning it ideally for sophisticated DeFi applications including decentralized index funds, strategic asset allocation for institutional investors, and risk-managed liquidity provisioning.
Rethinking Impermanent Loss
Impermanent loss (IL) constitutes a central limitation in conventional automated market makers (AMMs), such as Uniswap, constraining their scalability and economic efficiency within decentralized finance (DeFi). IL quantifies the divergence in value between holding assets passively and providing liquidity to a pool as market prices shift. For a pool at time with reserves of asset X and of asset Y, the value of holding the assets outside the pool until would be
Following a trade that adjusts the pool reserves, the pool’s value at is
Impermanent loss is defined as
which can be written as
The numerator
typically yields a negative value under price divergence for constant-product AMMs, reflecting a reallocation of reserves that disadvantages liquidity providers (LPs) relative to holding.
This phenomenon can be reframed through the lens of value flow, offering a precise diagnostic of IL’s mechanics. Here
represents the value flow for , while
denotes the value flow for . In traditional AMMs, IL manifests as an imbalance in these flows when decreases below the initial pool price
the pool gains X (inflow) but surrenders a greater value of Y (outflow), dictated by the constant-product formula. This value leakage, obscured in fee-centric metrics, represents a significant expense and undermines LP capital efficiency and scalability.
Multiswap reengineers this paradigm by enforcing a discrete self-financing condition, ensuring that value inflows precisely equal value outflows for each trade. The post-trade price
satisfies
nullifying the IL numerator and resulting in
This formulation eradicates single-trade IL, aligning with Multiswap’s no-leverage principle and discrete mathematics foundation, which eschews the continuous approximations of legacy AMMs. By securing capital preservation, Multiswap establishes a robust framework for institutional-grade liquidity provision.
This approach extends to an LP token-based valuation, where