FAQ
Questions a serious buyer would actually ask.
Honest answers about the trust model, MEV protection, supported chains, and what is and isn't live yet. Still stuck? Ask the team.
- What is atomic composability, and why do cross-chain agents need it? +
- Atomic composability means an action that spans multiple rollups either completes everywhere or completes nowhere — no state where one leg has settled and another has not. Autonomous agents in 2026 route capital and execute strategies across many L2s simultaneously; a bridge hop that lands on one chain and reverts on another leaves them holding a broken position. Tesseract gives agents a single all-or-nothing primitive: submit a cross-chain intent as an atomic swap group and get a deterministic resolve-everywhere-or-refund-everywhere outcome.
- How is Tesseract different from a bridge? +
- A bridge moves an asset from chain A to chain B by locking the original and minting a wrapped copy. Tesseract never moves assets across chains — it coordinates simultaneous, atomic swaps already happening on each chain. There is no lock contract to drain, no wrapped IOU to depeg, and no validator quorum that can be socially engineered. That is the difference between a message-passing bridge and an atomic-composability layer.
- Can I use Tesseract as the execution layer for an agent or intent framework? +
- Yes — that is the primary design target. An agent (or an intent solver on its behalf) expresses the desired cross-chain outcome as an atomic swap group bound by a shared swap_group_id and a deadline. The Vyper contracts enforce that the whole group resolves or the whole group refunds, so the agent settles a deterministic outcome rather than orchestrating and unwinding independent bridge transactions. The Rust relayer submits the legs but has no authority to force a resolution the contracts do not already permit.
- What stops MEV bots from front-running my swap? +
- Swaps are submitted as a keccak commitment hiding the payload. The reveal can only happen after the commitment is included on-chain, and resolution requires a further 2-block delay. A searcher reading the mempool sees opaque bytes; by the time the payload is public, the block ordering is already settled.
- Which chains are supported? +
- At launch: Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base — both mainnets and their testnets (Sepolia, Amoy). Adding a new EVM rollup is a matter of deploying the seven Vyper contracts and pointing a relayer instance at the RPC.
- Do I need to run a relayer to use it? +
- No. End users only interact with the Vyper contracts on whichever rollups they care about. Relayers are infrastructure operators — they bond TESS in the RelayerRegistry, listen for events, and earn fees for coordinating cross-chain resolution. The Rust reference implementation is open source.
- What happens if a leg of a multi-chain swap fails? +
- Atomic swap groups either resolve everywhere within the deadline window (5–300 seconds, configurable per swap) or they don't resolve at all. Any participant can call the refund path after expiry and reclaim their funds on each chain. There is no "stuck mid-flight" failure mode.
- Is it audited? +
- The seven Vyper contracts pass 135 in-house tests covering compilation, tokenomics, access control, safety, and cross-chain integration scenarios. A third-party security audit is in progress before mainnet launch; current contracts are production-ready on testnet. Roll responsibly.
- Why Vyper instead of Solidity? +
- Vyper has overflow protection by default, no inheritance, no inline assembly, and a deliberately small surface area. For a protocol that holds buffered swap state across rollups, that small surface is a feature, not a constraint. Auditors love it; bug bounty hunters less so.
- How does Tesseract compare to Optimism Interop / the Superchain interop model? +
- Optimism Interop enables low-latency message passing between OP-Stack chains within the Superchain trust zone — powerful, but scoped to chains that share that zone and to a messaging model rather than atomic settlement. Tesseract is chain-agnostic across EVM rollups (OP-Stack and non-OP-Stack alike) and enforces atomicity of a whole multi-leg group at the contract layer, so a trade or intent that touches Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism resolves as one operation. The two are complementary: Interop is fast intra-Superchain messaging; Tesseract is cross-rollup atomic composability.
- Is Tesseract an intents protocol? +
- Tesseract is the atomic-execution layer that intents can settle on. An intent describes a desired outcome ("give 1,000 USDC on Arbitrum, receive WETH on Base"); Tesseract encodes that outcome as an atomic swap group and guarantees the group resolves or refunds as a unit. It is deliberately not a solver network or an off-chain auction — it is the on-chain primitive that makes an intent-style outcome enforceable across rollups without trusting a solver to be honest.
- How do TESS stakers benefit? +
- Stakers earn 5–15% APY based on lock duration, receive fee discounts of up to 50% on their own swaps, and vote on governance proposals through TesseractGovernor. Protocol fees flow through the on-chain FeeCollector to staker rewards — not into a foundation wallet.