Questions we get asked most

The Quillon Protocol is a public, open-source set of contracts that lets anyone pool assets and trade them straight on the chain. It cuts out the middle desk and the fees that come with one, so a swap stays cheap, quick and open to anybody with a wallet. Once published the contracts cannot be upgraded, and nobody can switch them off.

The protocol itself, and the web front end that most people use to reach it, were built by two separate teams working inside Quillon Works.

Read the First Steps pages of the handbook for a fuller account of who looks after the contracts, the front end and the treasury.

To open a pool, add liquidity, swap a token or vote on a proposal, head over to the Quillon app and connect a browser wallet. Remember that every action written to the chain costs a small fee, paid in the chain's own base coin. For a slower walk through each step, read our Setup Guides.

If you would rather build on top of the protocol yourself, our developer notes list the contract addresses, the events they emit and the router.

Quillon is an automated market maker. In plain terms it is a bundle of contracts that set out one standard way to open a pool, add liquidity to it, and trade against that pool whenever you like.

Every pool holds two assets. The contracts keep track of the pooled reserves and of the pricing rule agreed when the pool was opened, and both the reserves and the quoted price move the moment somebody trades. There is no central order book, nobody else holding your coins, and no private matching engine running behind the scenes.

Because the reserves rebalance after each trade, a Quillon pool can always quote a price for either side of a pair — unlike an older venue, where a trade only happens once two people happen to want opposite things at the very same moment.

For a deeper account of the maths, and of what a pricing rule can and cannot do, read the Core Ideas chapter of the handbook.