Yak Swap: what makes it an ideal Swap aggregator for users and protocols

Yield Yak
3 min readMar 15, 2023

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Yak Swap was the first DEX aggregator to launch on the Avalanche network back in early 2021. Since then, it has accrued over $2B in trading volume, facilitated over 200,000 individual swaps, and saved users over $66M. Yak Swap acts as a liquidity endpoint, and most notably comes with unique features that other DEX aggregators don’t have. And it charges zero fee and can be integrated into any other protocol in minutes. Let’s dive in.

What is Yak Swap?

Integrating Yak Swap takes only minutes and you can benefit from it’s 100% uptime and on-chain price aggregation

Yak Swap simply executes your swap at the best price with one-click, while querying all on-chain liquidity sources and taking into account gas costs, slippage, and swap fees. It also executes multi-hop routes, meaning if there is a cost-saving by routing your swap through an interim asset or market, it will do so automatically for you.

Yak Swap has also consistently been the first and fastest DEX aggregator on Avalanche to integrate new and non-traditional swap sources like GMX, Woo Finance, and concentrated liquidity AMMs.

Minting complex assets like GLP, sAVAX, and yyAVAX

Yak Swap has built-in integrations with complex assets, which will check whether it is better to purchase the asset through a traditional swap venue, or directly mint the asset instead. This goes for liquid staking tokens like Benqi’s sAVAX and Yield Yak’s yyAVAX, where Yak Swap will always get you the best price when purchasing said asset and minting them when it is cheaper.

With GMX’s GLP, Yak Swap will uniquely take into account minting fees and slippage, and route your trade through the cheapest and most efficient asset to purchase GLP. No other aggregator does this, creating savings for the user and helping GMX reach target weighting for their GLP product. For more info on Yak Swap’s GLP Router, a dedicated blog article covers the Yak <> GMX partnership.

Other Benefits — 100% uptime, no maintenance cost, anyone can use it and add to it

Because Yak Swap is fully on-chain and works via contract calls, it has 100% uptime and there is no proprietary API or server required to use it (so no external points of failure). Any trader can query the best price no matter who or where they are (no blacklisting) and protocols can even deploy their own Yak Swap router and enjoy on-chain price aggregation.

This approach also means no maintenance costs, making it sustainable to upkeep without having to charge high fees or take a cut on the price offering. Integrating Yak Swap is extremely simple and takes only a few minutes. And if you want something custom, simply fork Yak Swap and add whatever you’d like extra yourself. It’s an open tool to benefit builders and the Avalanche community.

An overview of how Yak Swap smart contracts work and how to integrate them is in our Github repo. It’s so simple! And if you do need assistance, you can reach out to the Yield Yak team for assistance on any of our Community channels.

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