Maya Protocol
6.0/10 total
A THORChain-derived cross-chain DEX where every pool pairs an external asset against its native CACAO at equal value, letting you swap native Bitcoin for native Dash or Zcash with no wrapping and no account. Coverage is deliberately narrow: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Arbitrum, THORChain, Dash, Zcash and Radix, which is roughly ten tradeable assets. Live since 2023, so the independent operating record is short by construction rather than because of any known incident.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- No account, no email, no identity verification: you swap by sending a transaction with a memo
- Supports native Zcash and Dash routes, which almost no non-custodial venue does, and never wraps or bridges the asset
- Funds sit in node-operated threshold-signature vaults for minutes rather than in an operator's exchange account
- Fee mechanics are published as explicit formulas, so the cost is calculable in advance instead of hidden in a rate
- Open source, forked from THORChain, and swaps can be initiated by a plain chain transaction with no front end at all
Against
- Custody is not truly trustless: assets rest in TSS vaults controlled by the active node set during the swap, so a node-set compromise is a real loss vector, as THORChain's own 2021 hacks demonstrated for the same design
- Roughly ten assets across seven chains, so it is not a general trading venue
- The 3x gas outbound fee makes small swaps expensive in percentage terms, and the slip fee makes large ones expensive relative to pool depth
- Live only since 2023, so the track record is thin by construction; that is not an accusation, just its age
- Every leg is a permanent public transaction on both source and destination chains, and any hosted front end sees your IP; no onion service and no no-JavaScript path
Agent access 9/10
Public quote and inbound-address endpoints on the node and Midgard-style APIs, plus third-party SDKs. An agent needs only a funded wallet on the source chain and a correctly formatted memo, with no account or key.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
3x gas outbound fee plus slip-based liquidity fee
Two components per the protocol's own fee documentation. The outbound fee is three times the stored gas cost for the destination chain, of which one part pays the network and two parts subsidise the pool, so a Bitcoin payout with $1 of gas costs you $3. On top of that a slip-based liquidity fee of x squared times Y over (x+X) squared scales with your trade size relative to pool depth, and applies twice on asset-to-asset swaps since both legs route through CACAO. Small swaps are dominated by the outbound fee; large swaps by slip.
Specification
- Type
- On-chain DEX
- KYC policy
- No KYC
- Custody model
- onchain
- Account required
- no
- Assets
- ~10
- Chains
- 7
- Operating since
- 2023
- Jurisdiction
- none
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- yes
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.