The fee displayed in a wallet before a trader confirms a swap is rarely the full cost of the transaction. Slippage — the gap between the price a trader expects and the one they actually receive — price impact, liquidity fragmented across dozens of venues, and inefficient execution can all quietly erode the amount a trader ultimately receives. On a small trade, the difference may be negligible. On a large one, it adds up quickly.

As onchain trading has matured, several teams have begun attacking these hidden costs from different layers of the stack. Here are five projects worth knowing about.

1. Orbs: More Ways to Execute a Trade

Most decentralized exchange trades are market orders — a swap executed immediately at whatever price the pool offers. Orbs expands the options. Its Layer 3 infrastructure sits on top of existing decentralized exchanges and powers two execution protocols: dLIMIT, which lets traders set limit orders, and dTWAP, which breaks a large order into smaller trades executed over time to soften its price impact. Both are familiar from traditional markets, where limit orders and time-weighted execution have long been standard tools for managing large orders — their arrival onchain brings that playbook to decentralized venues.

Orbs has also built Liquidity Hub, which lets DEXs tap liquidity sources beyond their own automated market maker (AMM) pools. If an external source offers a better price, the trade routes there; if not, it falls back to the standard swap. In either case, users never have to leave the exchange they are already on.

2. CoW Swap: Letting Solvers Compete

CoW Swap flips the conventional model. Rather than submitting a transaction that follows a fixed route, traders sign an intent — essentially a statement of what they want — and a network of solvers competes to fill the order at the best available price.

When two traders want opposite sides of the same pair, CoW Swap can match them directly, bypassing the automated market maker entirely. That direct matching is the “coincidence of wants” behind the protocol’s name. When no match exists, solvers draw on external liquidity instead. Because orders settle in batches rather than sitting exposed in the public mempool — the open queue where pending transactions are visible to anyone — the design also guards against common forms of MEV — value extracted by manipulating the order of transactions — such as sandwich attacks, where an observer spots a pending trade and places orders on either side of it to profit from the price movement it triggers.

3. 1inch: Searching a Fragmented Market

The same token can trade at different prices on different DEXs at the same moment, and manually checking every venue is not realistic. 1inch performs that legwork. Its aggregation infrastructure scans liquidity sources and, where doing so helps, splits a single trade across several routes to secure a better overall price. It is a task that only grows as the industry does: every new venue and pool is one more place a better price could be hiding.

4. 0x: Aggregation as a Building Block

Where many traders use 1inch directly, 0x mostly operates behind the scenes. Its Swap API gives wallets, trading platforms, and other applications access to aggregated DEX liquidity, allowing developers to offer solid routing and execution without building an aggregator from scratch. A large share of the swaps executed inside wallet apps runs on infrastructure of this kind. For many users, that means aggregated routing arrives by default — built into the wallet they already use rather than chosen as a separate tool.

5. Uniswap: The Foundation Underneath

Much of the above ultimately depends on liquidity sitting in automated market makers. Uniswap played a central role in bringing that model into the mainstream: anyone can provide liquidity, and anyone can trade, with no permission required. That same openness is one reason the landscape looks the way it does: with no gatekeepers, venues and pools have multiplied, scattering liquidity across the many independent markets the projects above now have to navigate.

Its concentrated liquidity design lets liquidity providers (LPs) focus their capital within price ranges, deepening liquidity where trading actually happens. Subsequent upgrades have continued to improve capital efficiency and market structure, showing that DeFi’s core layer is still evolving — a layer worth watching, since everything built on top of it, from routers to solvers, depends on the liquidity it holds.

The Bottom Line

These projects operate on different layers of the stack, from core liquidity to routing to execution logic, but they are chasing the same goal: making decentralized markets cheaper and easier to use. The layers are also increasingly interwoven — wallets that route through aggregators, exchanges tapping external liquidity, solvers drawing on the same underlying pools — so one development to watch is how the boundaries between execution, routing, and liquidity continue to blur as these layers interconnect.

For traders, the takeaway is simple. The fee shown on the confirmation screen is only part of the story. How a trade gets executed, and by what, can matter just as much.

This article originally appeared on Metaverse Post.