Synthetic swaps might sound like a niche feature, but they’re at the heart of KongSwap’s ambitious attempt to remove friction from cross-chain trading. Rather than relying on liquidity pairs to exist for every possible token combination, KongSwap has built a multi-hop routing engine that automatically pieces together the best path for each swap — even if that path includes two or three steps.
It’s a quietly bold idea that’s gaining traction. The process works behind the scenes, but the user experience stays clean and simple. You input the token you want to trade, and the system finds the best available return across the entire route, regardless of whether a direct pair exists.
If you want to trade a token from the Internet Computer ecosystem for something on Solana, KongSwap will route that request through stablecoins like $ckUSDT or base assets like $ICP if needed. It does the maths and executes the trade as a single, atomic transaction — which means fewer chances of frontrunning or manipulation, and more confidence in what users receive.
There are three levels of swap routing on offer:
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A basic 1-step swap if a direct route exists
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A 2-step option that might move through $ckUSDT or $ICP
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A 3-step route that could include both intermediate tokens
The router checks all paths and picks the one with the best output. For users, that means no toggling through options or guessing which way is cheaper. The fees are handled proportionally along each leg of the route — and the design ensures that fees don’t pile up unnecessarily.
Apart from better pricing and less hassle, there’s added protection baked in. The synthetic swaps engine executes routes atomically, so there’s no room for frontrunning. Slippage is calculated across the entire trade path, not just one leg, and fees are validated before the swap executes — which keeps things fair and capped.
While synthetic swaps are already live within the ICP ecosystem, KongSwap’s ambitions don’t stop there. The team is preparing for multichain mode, which will eventually allow users to swap any token from one chain — like ICP — into tokens on Solana, BNB Chain, Base, and even Bitcoin.
That’s a lot to promise, and execution will matter. Cross-chain functionality brings technical and security challenges, especially when moving assets between very different environments. So far, KongSwap has focused on building a routing layer that’s both flexible and modular — which should help as it scales across chains.
There’s a quiet confidence in the way KongSwap is framing synthetic swaps. The message isn’t about hype, it’s about function: it doesn’t matter if there’s no liquidity for your exact pair. The system will figure it out. And for users, the experience is meant to feel as native and seamless as a one-step swap on a local DEX.
It’s early days for this approach, but it reflects where many decentralised trading platforms are heading: abstracting complexity, giving users more flexibility, and doing it all with minimal manual input. The more chains get added to the KongSwap system, the more these synthetic swaps will be put to the test.
If they hold up under multichain conditions — and if the UI remains smooth — this could change the expectations around how token swaps work. Not with noise, but with quiet infrastructure that just does the job.
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