Introducing Trails: The universal intents platform for 1-click crypto transactions

Crypto adoption is held back by an industry-wide fragmentation problem. Liquidity is fragmented across hundreds of chains, tokens, and wallets. Not to mention the inconsistent gas requirements across ecosystems.

This fragmentation makes crypto difficult for new and experienced users alike. Even in today’s best crypto applications, onchain actions require too much time and effort, which churns users and hurts commerce. Swapping or bridging tokens only to discover there’s no gas (or native tokens) in your wallet on the destination chain is painful and time-consuming, causing many users to abandon the flow entirely.

The reality is that crypto fragmentation will continue to worsen as more chains and tokens launch. But crypto won’t scale until users can move value freely without thinking about chains, bridges, wallets, or gas requirements.

Trails fixes this.

Meet Trails: The universal intents platform for 1-click crypto transactions

Trails delivers universal transaction rails for crypto that make sending and spending digital assets as easy as 1-click. Trails enables anyone to pay, swap, fund, or earn in any token, on any EVM chain, using any wallet, and finally eliminates the need for complicated bridges or swaps.

Trails is the intent-powered transaction engine that turns fragmented balances into instant liquidity, unlocking the full spending power of crypto.

Intent-based

As an intent-based transaction orchestration protocol, Trails determines the optimal route from the user’s chosen token to the destination chain, token, and contract. When the user receives a sign request to their wallet, they’re signing a deposit into a user-owned intent address that is instantiated from a merklized bundle of transactions to be executed across multiple chains. And the intent address primitive is so powerful that it works beautifully with EOA wallets like MetaMask—or any other wallet—out-of-the-box without requiring the use of ERC7702.

Unified user liquidity + gasless experience

Trails works with both same-chain and cross-chain transaction flows and allows users to access their aggregate spending power across chains, tokens, and wallets. Plus, Trails offers a gasless experience where users can pay gas using any permit-compatible ERC20 token, such as USDC, for both same-chain and cross-chain transactions in a single user confirmation. For example, a user can pay gas with USDC even if they have zero native gas on the origin or destination chain.

Lightweight developer toolkit and API

Trails includes a full-featured plug-and-play widget that developers can drop directly into their app in minutes. For teams that want full control, Trails also offers the Trails Intents API, a Typescript SDK, Go SDK and React hooks, allowing teams to build the integration that best suits their needs or build their own custom UI.

Trails has open-sourced the protocol contracts and SDK, completed audits with leading security firms including Quantstamp and Consensys, and published documentation that explains the protocol in more detail. We also ran two audit competitions on Code4rena where hundreds of white hat hackers reviewed our core contracts for security gaps.

Trails architecture: Universal 1-click transaction rails

Trails architecture is designed to provide non-custodial and transparent transaction rails across bundled transactions that span one or more chains. Funds always remain in control and owned by the wallet that initiated the Trails intent transaction in the first place.

Build with confidence: Powered by Trails

Trails is designed to support nearly every high-impact use case in crypto. If you're building in crypto or want to accept it, Trails is here to help.

• Payments
• DeFi
• Stablecoins
• Fintech and TradFi
• Wallets
• Exchanges
• NFT minting
• Real-world assets (RWAs)
• Gaming and other applications

All benefit from the instant liquidity, cross-chain execution, and seamless onchain payment experience that Trails unlocks.

Trails is built with composable DeFi in mind and can source liquidity from multiple DEXs and bridges for optimal execution. It automatically chooses the best route across these liquidity sources without requiring the user to make any decisions. Trails can also route liquidity across chains, swap into the target asset, and interact with protocols like Aave or Morpho from any origin token or chain, all in 1-click.

It’s designed to give developers, chains, and users a unified and seamless crypto experience that works like one global network where value can move freely.

Trails offers built-in token indexing across all supported chains, providing real-time balances, history, and metadata in a single multi-chain query. This ensures users see a simple and aggregated view of all their assets almost instantly when making a transaction.

Access and pricing

Trails launches with no monthly platform fee and no added user fees. In the future, Trails will introduce a tiered fee for end-users that is competitive with adjacent products.

Trails will be released through an allowlist at launch. Developers, partners, integrators, and early users can request access during the initial rollout to begin integrating Trails before the full public release.

Additionally, developers can request a Trails API Key and integrate in minutes. It’s easy and fast to adopt, works with any existing wallet connector, and supports any wallet. This enables a non-custodial, 1-click cross-chain or cross-token experience for MetaMask and other EOA wallet users, WalletConnect, and embedded or smart wallet users.

How does it work?

Thanks to advancements in account abstraction technology, which our team has been researching and developing for more than 6 years, a Trails “intent address” is an account abstraction-powered smart contract that encodes a set of sub-transactions as a merkle hash. The intent can be executed trustlessly by any party to move the state forward.

In simple terms, Trails intents are a transaction rails primitive that can span multiple EVM chains and bundled actions. This makes complex multi-step operations fast and simple for users.

On top of the intent primitive, the Trails API offers a solver backend that can route, encode, and orchestrate the optimal path to complete the intended transaction. Trails is designed for handling failure cases too. In the event a transaction flow fails, the Trails contracts automatically revert funds back to the user.

Trails: Major integrations at launch

Trails launches with several major integrations, including Circle CCTP, Katana, Foresight, and more to be announced. These integrations demonstrate how Trails powers real-world transaction flows across the crypto landscape.

Circle

Circle CCTP is natively integrated into Trails as a low-slippage, high-volume bridge for USDC, powering fast transfers across chains. In parallel, Trails is a launch partner for Arc, the Economic OS for the internet — powering the programmable trust layer and transaction engine where capital, humans, and machines coordinate to drive real economic growth. Together, these integrations make USDC not just portable, but fully spendable across apps, chains, and wallets in 1-click.

Katana

Katana partners with Trails for instant cross-chain bridge, swap, and deposit flows into vaults, enabling users to fund yield opportunities on Katana from any chain, wallet, or token in a single step. Future integrations will extend this to vKAT staking and governance, removing the last layer of friction between liquidity, participation, and yield, and bringing all users closer to a unified DeFi experience.

Foresight

Foresight is a social-first prediction market that rewards users for sharing their convictions. It’s designed to turn user insights into real value. It allows individuals to launch or join markets on various events, including crypto, sports, and general events, and earn when their predictions are accurate.

What’s next for Trails?

Trails has an ambitious roadmap ahead, including support for more chains and tokens, more DeFi integrations, and unlocking new transaction flows that make moving value across crypto effortless. Trails will continue to serve as one unified interface for execution, even as coverage grows across ecosystems.

This is an important milestone for our team, and we’re incredibly excited to share Trails with the world.

Visit our website, explore the docs, and connect with us on X, TG, or email. Let’s build together!

→ Request your early access API key

→ Read the Trails documentation

→ Contact our team if you need support