Crypto Gloss

Panora

Panora is Aptos’s primary DEX aggregator and swap router — aggregating liquidity from Liquidswap, Thalaswap, Cellana Finance, Aries Markets, and other Aptos AMMs/CLMMs to find the best execution price for any swap, abstracting away the fragmented multi-DEX Aptos liquidity landscape into a single interface.

Overview

Panora launched on Aptos mainnet in 2023 as the liquidity routing layer for the Aptos ecosystem — the functional equivalent of Jupiter on Solana or 1inch on Ethereum. As the Aptos DEX landscape fragmented across Liquidswap (baseline AMM), Thalaswap (multi-pool), Cellana (ve(3,3)), and various CLMM DExes, the need for a single router that finds optimal swap paths became clear. Panora fills this role: users interact with Panora’s interface or API, and Panora’s smart routing algorithm finds and executes the best price across all integrated sources, including multi-hop paths (e.g., TOKEN → APT → USDC when no direct TOKEN/USDC pool has depth).

Core Functionality: Smart Routing

The following sections cover this in detail.

Price Aggregation

For any token pair swap, Panora:

  1. Queries all integrated DEX pools for the current price and depth
  2. Calculates expected output at the requested swap size for each path
  3. Considers multi-hop paths (A→B→C) when direct paths are suboptimal
  4. Splits the order across multiple sources if optimal (split routing)
  5. Executes atomically in a single Move transaction

Split Routing

For larger swaps, Panora may split the order:

  • Part through Liquidswap pool (e.g., 40%)
  • Part through Thalaswap pool (e.g., 35%)
  • Part through Cellana pool (e.g., 25%)
  • This minimizes price impact vs sending entire order to one pool

Integrations

Panora aggregates liquidity from:

  • Liquidswap (Pontem) — xyk and CLMM pools
  • Thalaswap — weighted, stable, MetaStable pools
  • Cellana Finance — volatile and stable ve(3,3) pools
  • Aries Markets — margin account liquidity
  • Merkle Trade — perps (for leveraged routing)
  • Other active Aptos DEXs as deployed

Why Aggregators Matter

On Aptos, like Solana, individual DEXs have shallower liquidity pools than Ethereum L1:

  • A single $100K USDC→APT swap may get 0.5% worse price on Liquidswap alone vs optimal
  • Panora routing might find 60% through Liquidswap + 40% through Thalaswap for better average
  • For small swaps ($1K-$10K), single-hop direct DEX is often fine; for larger swaps, aggregation is critical
  • This is the Jupiter effect on Aptos — Panora captures most large-swap volume

Interface and SDK

  • Panora UI — web interface for direct user swaps
  • Panora SDK — Move/TypeScript SDK for protocol integration
    Protocols building on Aptos can integrate Panora routing to enable token swaps within their own flow
    Aries Markets uses Panora routing for margin trade execution (open leverage position → Panora finds best swap)
    Other DeFi protocols integrate Panora for user-facing swap features

Sources

Related Terms