Field notes from the coordinator.
Latency math, security tradeoffs, post-incident retros, and honest comparisons with the rest of the cross-chain industry.
- opsproductionretro
Operating a two-service stack: what we learned in the first year
Switchboard ships as two services and a Solana program. After a year of running it for paying customers, here is what worked, what broke, and what we changed.
Read post → - finalityarchitecturebackground
A field guide to cross-chain finality models
Probabilistic, economic, deterministic, sequenced, light-client: the cross-chain industry uses 'finality' to mean five different things. Here is what they actually mean and how Switchboard picks between them.
Read post → - economicsgasarchitecture
Gas math: why batched coordinator commits beat per-message bridges
Most cross-chain stacks charge you per-message gas on the destination. Switchboard batches commits at the coordinator. Here is the math, including when the batching actually loses.
Read post → - architecturesolanadesign
The case for Solana as a coordinator (and when it isn't)
Why Switchboard puts its coordinator program on Solana, what that costs us, and the specific scenarios where the choice is wrong.
Read post → - tutorialorderbookperps
Building a real-time cross-chain orderbook with Switchboard
A practical walkthrough of a perp-style orderbook that quotes on three chains and settles atomically across all of them, using Switchboard for state coordination.
Read post → - comparisonwormholesecurity
Wormhole guardians vs the single-clock model
Wormhole's 19-guardian quorum and Switchboard's single Solana coordinator are two answers to the same question. Here is why we picked the second one — and where the first one is still the right call.
Read post → - comparisonlatencylayerzero
Switchboard vs LayerZero: a latency-first comparison
We benchmarked the OSS core against LayerZero on five corridors. Here is what we found, where LayerZero still wins, and the engineering decisions behind the gap.
Read post →