The decentralized exchange (DEX) security model is outdated, as recent events this past month have made abundantly clear. Multiple high-profile exploits ripped through the systems, leaving cross-chain bridges, validator-dependent networks, and synthetic asset systems in tatters.
What were the promises of ‘decentralization’ collapsed under the weight of its own weaknesses, with each attack reinforcing the same reality check: that most DEXs still rely on centralized chokepoints under the guise of trustless components.
The market is continuously patching holes in a system that isn’t fit for purpose; one that’s prone to failure, and the result is always the same: user funds lost, protocol apologies, and nothing changes. Retrofitting new layers of security time and again into designs doesn’t change their foundations, nor does it truly protect them against modern attack vectors.
The cycle of weakness, denial, and preventable disasters needs to end, and that’s precisely what Pact Swap does: securing the weakest points in a cross-chain DEX by removing them altogether.
Bridges, validator networks, and synthetic assets move value between chains, and while excellent technological solutions, they are responsible for almost every catastrophic exploit in the last two years.
Pact Swap operates without any of them. Coinweb’s PACT framework powers it and uses reactive smart contracts to observe and enforce swap conditions directly on each originating chain. No external consensus layer, no relay network, no wrapped assets, and certainly no custody points exist between the user and settlement.
Two chains execute their respective legs, Coinweb’s reactive contracts validate each event based on the native consensus of each Layer 1 (L1), and if both sides complete correctly, the transaction finalizes.
If anything breaks, misbehaves, or fails to settle during that process, the protocol automatically releases collateral to the affected user. This mechanism is deterministic, fully on-chain, and incapable of producing the same failures that have repeatedly destroyed users' funds elsewhere (in recent and distant history).
This is what structural trustlessness genuinely looks like: an architectural design that physically removes components attackers can virtually exploit.
The modern attack surface shows little resemblance to the environment in which early automated market makers (AMMs) and bridging protocols were conceived. In 2020, exploits were primarily economic, targeting price manipulation, oracle drift, and other flaws. Today, the space is far more hostile.
Liquidity moves across multiple executables, settlement can span incompatible virtual machines, and the rise of autonomous agents, MEV bots, and off-chain script networks rapidly interacts with dozens of chains simultaneously.
Outdated DEX designs are still in use, with retrofits to secure their functionality and safety in this hyper-connected world, using tools from a bygone era. Attacks now chain vulnerabilities across multiple ecosystems, exploit the delays that bridges create, compromise validator sets, and trigger inconsistencies between asset representations.
This is why the security model that Pact Swap brings to the space really matters. It relinquishes the infrastructure of the past and outdated components, discarding them all in exchange for a design built for the modern environment.
Pact Swap removes the fragile layers that attackers depend on, removing the ability to impersonate synthetic assets because there are none, and preventing relay key compromise because there is no relay key to compromise.
What Pact Swap’s security model demonstrates is that the industry no longer needs to choose between safety and trustlessness. The platform’s design pushes DEX infrastructure to the point where security is defined by the absence of attack surfaces, not the strength of the current retrofit.
In a year marked by the most significant failures and exploits driven by the latest technological advances in the industry, Pact Swap offers the first model aligned with today’s threat realities. In the face of rising exploits and DEX hacks, Pact Swap’s model lays the foundations for future DEXs.