AirSwap works with a combination of web protocols and smart contracts. There are two kinds of liquidity providers in the system, those that run their own HTTP servers to provide liquidity and those that manage onchain delegates that make trades on their behalf.

Each swap is between at least two parties, a signer and a sender. The signer is the party that creates and cryptographically signs an order, and sender is the party that sends the order to the Ethereum blockchain for settlement.

Make Liquidity

Makers run Servers or deploy Delegates and use the Indexer to signal their interest in trading.

Makers...

1. ​Run a Server at a public URL and use it as their locator value.

2. ​Stake AirSwap Tokens to signal their intent to trade on the Indexer.

3. Respond to get*Quote and get*Order requests.

See code examples of these protocols at work in the Run a Server section.

Take Liquidity

Takers use the Indexer to find Servers and Delegates to interact with.

Servers (HTTPS)

Servers implement the Quote and Order protocols.

Takers...

1. Call getIntents on the Server Indexer using protocol 0x0000 and receives locators (URLs).

2. Call get*Order on each HTTPS Server using JSON-RPC over HTTPS.

3. Call swap on the Swap Contract with the order that it wishes to execute.

Delegates (onchain)

Delegates implement the Quote and Last Look protocols.

Takers...

1. Call getIntents on the Delegate Indexer using protocol 0x0001 and receives contract addresses.

2. Call get*Quote on each Delegate Contract.

3. Call provideOrder on the selected Delegate Contract that performs the Swap.

See code examples of these protocols at work in the Run an Aggregator section.

Third-Parties

Authorizations are for parties that trade on behalf of others. These parties are authorized by an individual to send or sign orders for them. Parties can be wallets (people or programs) or smart contracts.

Affiliates are third-parties compensated for their part in bringing together the two parties of a trade and can be other traders or software applications that connect traders on the network.