We are building the multi-chain stack we wish we had.
Switchboard exists because the team behind it spent years writing per-bridge integrations for trading and game-state apps. Every corridor had its own validator set, its own message-format quirks, its own ops on-call. The honest answer was: pick one coordinator, run it on the fastest chain we trust, and treat every other chain as a destination.
Why Solana as the coordinator?
Solana gives us four properties we could not get together anywhere else: sub-second slot times, mature parallel execution, a healthy validator economy, and Anchor — a Rust framework that lets us audit the coordinator program in roughly the same way you would audit a Solidity contract. That combination is what makes the <400ms claim real. A coordinator on a 12-second L1 cannot get there mechanically.
What we deliberately did not build.
We did not build a validator network. We did not invent a new staking token. We did not ship a wallet. Every one of those decisions is an active choice — they would each add headcount, latency, or security surface area that does not pay back. Switchboard is a coordination layer plus the operational stack to run it. That is the whole product.
How we measure ourselves.
- p99 end-to-end latency per route, per chain — published per release.
- Coordinator slot lag — the gap between source confirmation and Solana commit.
- Verifier failure rate — what fraction of dispatches need a retry.
- Customer-reported incidents per million ops — the only number that ultimately matters.
Open-source as a contract.
The MIT license on the core repo is not marketing. It is a binding promise that if our managed service ever becomes a bad deal — for any reason — you can pull our docker-compose down, point it at your own Postgres, and keep running. That constraint is what keeps the managed offering honest.