The term solver is thrown around rather freely in our industry. We have not yet arrived at a single definition of what a solver actually is, but we seem to have developed a shared understanding – solvers are these magical entities that sit behind the scenes and figure out how to fill an order, typically a swap or a bridge or a cross-chain swap intent, and if the prophecy unfolds, ‘any intent’ in the future.

That description gives us a sense of what to expect from solvers, but doesn’t do any justice to the work that solver teams do to make seamless execution possible. In Solver Deep Dives, we’ll spend time with the solver teams competing for order flow through LI.FI Intents, and learn more about the inner workings of a solver.

The intent behind this series is to understand what being a solver actually looks like in practice. We may not yet have an agreed definition of the term, but by looking closely at the teams, infrastructure, systems, and decisions behind these solvers, we can start to build a much clearer picture of what playing the role of a solver in the onchain economy really entails.

This is the first edition of Solver Deep Dives. 

Let’s dive in!

What You Must Know 

• Radius, like many other solvers in the industry, did not start as a solver business. They started in the block building and transaction order niche, building to overcome the harmful MEV problem and later moved upstream to transaction execution to solve that problem.

• The initial version of Radius’ solver was bootstrapped with $1,000 with a few assets on a couple of blockchains, the team learned their lessons in how to run a solver from deploying real capital in production and combining their overall block building knowledge with practical knowledge to run the solver efficiently.

• Radius’ edge as a solver comes from the fact that they operate not with just the goal of maximizing profit but with a more long term approach that keeps risk management at the core of their operations.

• Today Radius’ main focus is on serving quotes for blue chip assets on the most popular chains. Their big bet for the future is on real-world assets, which they believe will be a big market that will require solver-based execution due to the fragmentation across issuers, chains, settlement types, and other factors.

Meet Radius

Radius was formed in late 2021 by four co-founders,  AJ Jihoon Park, Jayden Junryong Kim, Jongbeen Han, Tariz Jeong, before officially incorporating in 2022. The team’s lens into crypto and blockchain technology comes from zk systems and incentive design perspectives, and at the time, they believed harmful MEV was one of the clearest examples of how crypto had failed to build a fair incentive system. The focus of Radius, therefore, was rooted in making blockchains true financial infrastructure by removing what he believed to be the biggest obstacle, harmful MEV. 

Over the next four years, the company went deep into gaining knowledge and building infrastructure for block production and secure transaction ordering, in an attempt to overcome the MEV problem in crypto. It developed cryptographic sequencing technologies and built MEV-resistant exchanges, shared sequencing infrastructure, Lighthouse, and Secure Block Building. The work brought Radius into close contact with block builders and MEV searchers, which later helped shape their solver business and strategies, and helped the company raise $7 million from investors including Pantera Capital.

Through their close work on blockbuilding with block builders and MEV searchers, the team quickly realized that while block production and transaction ordering are key to solving the MEV problem in crypto, there were even more challenges that lay in the supply chain even before these parts. They realized that by the time a transaction reached a block, many of the decisions determining its economic outcome had already been made. Someone had priced the order, selected the liquidity, decided where the capital should sit, and accepted the risk that the execution might fail. And thus, a transaction could be ordered securely and still represent an inefficient movement of capital. The problem became more visible as crypto spread across chains. Liquidity that had once been fragmented between pools was now fragmented between independent blockchains, each with its own gas market, finality assumptions, bridges, and settlement conditions. Producing blocks more securely could address one part of the system. It could not decide how capital should move through the system in the first place.

This was the turning point in the Radius story. 

The company’s focus began moving upstream, from the ordering of transactions to executing the order flow that created them – and this is when Radius decided to build a solver. Radius could have remained an infrastructure provider looking at execution from the outside. Instead, it chose to put its own capital to work and the team began running arbitrage strategies and operating a solver.

"While most Solver teams started from the execution layer, we’ve built experience across the entire transaction lifecycle—from block production to execution. We believe that broader perspective is what sets us apart.

We don’t see operating Solvers as an end in itself—we see it as a way to better understand how capital moves onchain."

That experience of getting their hands dirty in different parts of how a block is built and how transactions eventually settle onchain helped the Radius team see how the sausage is made – and in a way shaped their overall methodology to how they approached any product or business opportunity in crypto, as it became the team’s instinct to not just look at transactions or any system in isolation, but look at the entire transaction lifecycle and all the parts of the blockchain ecosystem it touches as a whole. “Those are problems you can’t fully understand from designing systems on a whiteboard. You only develop that intuition by operating with real capital over time,” Radius explained.

This multi-dimensional thinking and approach is also evident in how the team runs their solver today, with profit maximization being one of the core tenets of the business but not the end goal, instead they take a multi-faceted approach to capital allocation, risk management, and profitability overall - which has served the team really well in the past few years in scaling their solver business from an initial allocation of $1,000 in the early days, to a much larger arm of the business today, but this approach allowed them to start small, tinker and experiment with real data and optimize the business based on actual evidence and experience of how onchain markets work, an approach that is extremely key to running a profitable solver business in crypto because months or even years of profits can be wiped out in seconds with just a few bad trades - hence risk management is key to the solver business.

Today, the company’s work stretches across several layers of onchain finance. Radius operates solvers and arbitrageurs to learn directly from order flow. Radius is now a team spanning protocol researchers, infrastructure engineering, and onchain execution with the solver infrastructure. It is also building cross-chain just-in-time liquidity infrastructure intended to make arbitrage capital more productive. And beyond crypto-native markets, it is researching and preparing pilot programs in New York related to bringing institutional repo markets onchain. All of these products, viewed through the history of Radius, are all attempts to answer the same question – how can capital move more safely and efficiently onchain?

"Although these initiatives may look different on the surface, they’re all driven by the same goal: building the execution infrastructure that enables capital to move as efficiently as possible onchain, ultimately making institutional onchain finance possible."

Building A Solver That Survives 

When Radius decided to operate a solver, it deliberately started small with approximately $1,000 and it supported only two chains and a handful of major assets. The first version of the solver was designed for the team to figure out how to run a solver in production, and what they needed to build and acquire in terms of practical knowledge in order to later scale into a profitable business. The team treated every early failure as a piece of evidence. “Whenever we encountered a losing trade, we stopped and analyzed exactly what had gone wrong.” In that sense, the first $1,000 was less a trading bankroll than tuition.

This is when the team learned one of the most important lessons of running a solver in crypto. It’s that executing a particular order profitably is only the first step, and infact one that you have most control over because you can see most of the parameters of the trade at the time of execution. The more difficult part is how completing that trade changes the balance sheet of the solver, and what they needed to do in order to rebalance across the portfolio to account for this trade – and what that would cost and how could they model to factor all of those variables into their strategy.

And this distinction defined the way the team thought about running a solver entirely. The main question for the team from there on wasn’t about if a trade was profitable, it was more about how that order would change their overall portfolio and what they would need to do to rebalance and the associated costs and time all of that will take. 

"A solver cannot simply ask, ‘Is this order profitable at the current price?’ It has to determine—within milliseconds—whether the trade will still be profitable after execution, settlement, and any required rebalancing."

Overall, the Radius team sees the solver business operate successfully largely on two things, execution quality and risk management, and hence takes an approach that deploys capital efficiently while keeping the risk under control. 

"A good solver is reliable. It consistently fulfills its commitments, regardless of market conditions, and remains resilient even on difficult days. A great solver goes one step further by generating sustainable returns on top of that reliability.

The challenge is finding the right balance between safety and profitability. Being overly conservative may limit returns, while aggressively pursuing profits can introduce excessive risk. The ability to maintain that balance consistently over time is what separates great solvers from the rest.

Ultimately, the solvers that survive are the ones that can preserve this balance — earning users’ trust by delivering both reliability and sustainable performance."

That philosophy also determines where Radius chooses to compete. Today, it is strongest on Ethereum and focuses primarily on stablecoins and liquid blue-chip assets such as WETH and WBTC. These markets offer the deep liquidity, reliable price discovery, established volume, and predictable rebalancing paths needed to refine the system without introducing every possible source of risk at once.

Before supporting a new chain or asset, Radius asks three questions:

Q1. Is there enough demand to justify positioning capital there? 

Q2. Does the opportunity offer an attractive return after its risks are counted? 

Q3. And, once an order is filled, can the resulting inventory be rebalanced reliably?

The third question can overrule the first two. A market may have strong demand and attractive headline margins, but if capital cannot be repositioned efficiently afterward, Radius is prepared to leave the opportunity alone.

This selective approach to scaling its scope of operations is part of what Radius considers its edge.

Architecturally, Radius’ solver system consists of three closely interlinked systems:

The first is the decision layer, which evaluates incoming intent flow, pricing, and risk in real time. It determines whether Radius should fill an order, under what conditions, and how the execution should proceed.

The second layer tracks inventory and exposure across chains. Its job is to look beyond the immediate economics of the order and calculate what the fill will do to the wider capital position. 

The third handles execution and settlement, ensuring that the assets are delivered and the corresponding funds can be recovered safely across the chains involved.

Human operators establish the parameters and monitor the system. The individual execution decisions happen autonomously – and the entire system is based on the principle to make decisions quickly while keeping every exposure within controllable limits.

"At its best, none of that machinery is visible to the person whose order it fills. That’s the nature of Solver infrastructure: the better it works, the less visible it becomes."

Radius does not define its edge by how often it wins an order, but by how carefully it chooses which orders are worth winning. “The real competitive advantage of a Solver isn’t maximizing the number of orders it fills. It’s making the right decisions about which orders to accept and which to decline, given limited capital.”

Real World Assets – The Market Radius is Building Towards

"Over the long term, however, we see Real-World Assets (RWAs) as one of the most important areas for expansion."

Radius believes the next major market for solver-based execution will be real-world assets, meaning onchain markets for tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, and other digital assets.

Early DeFi was built around the idea that every asset could have its own pool of liquidity. That model works best when the number of important assets is relatively small, trading is continuous, and liquidity can concentrate around a handful of venues. Radius believes RWAs will challenge each of those assumptions and this is where solver-based execution will truly stand out.

Treasuries, equities, private credit, commodities, funds, and instruments such as repo are not a single asset class with uniform market structure. They can be issued by different entities (like Ondo or xStocks or another issuer), subject to different regulations, trade during different hours, and settle through different processes. As these assets move onchain, they are also likely to be issued across multiple blockchains and distributed through different networks (like LI.FI).

It is unrealistic to expect every tokenized asset to maintain deep liquidity on every chain where a potential investor may want to access it. This is the fragmentation problem Radius has spent years building toward and thus believes they will have a major role to play in the real-world asset market as it expands onchain.

Instead of forcing an RWA issuer to build and maintain a separate pool of liquidity on every network, solvers can connect the venues where liquidity already exists. Instead of requiring an investor to understand where an asset trades or how it settles, the execution layer can deliver the requested outcome behind the scenes.

"Unlike major crypto assets, RWAs are likely to have fragmented liquidity, diverse settlement models, different trading hours, and varying regulatory requirements. In that environment, relying on dedicated liquidity pools for every individual asset may not be scalable.

We believe this is exactly where Solvers become increasingly valuable. As markets become more fragmented, the ability to connect liquidity across multiple venues and provide the most efficient execution path will become even more important.

In the long run, we believe the competitive advantage won’t come from owning liquidity—it will come from connecting and executing across fragmented liquidity more efficiently than anyone else."

The overarching bet Radius is making is towards more and more global markets getting tokenized and institutions coming onchain. 

The risk-management system Radius is building for crypto assets becomes more important in this environment, not less. Institutional execution cannot be judged only by whether a solver found an attractive price. It also has to account for settlement certainty, counterparty requirements, compliance constraints, trading hours, and what happens when one part of a multi-step transaction does not complete as expected.

Radius expects permissionless execution and KYB/KYC-verified execution to coexist. Crypto-native order flow may continue to be served through open markets, while regulated institutions and asset issuers require verified counterparties and more controlled execution environments. Solvers that want to operate across both markets will need to adapt their execution and risk systems without compromising reliability.

This is one reason Radius’s work on institutional repo markets matters to the broader company story. The team is researching and preparing pilot programs in New York related to bringing repo onchain. Repo is, at its core, a market for the efficient movement of cash and collateral. Bringing it onchain would require more than tokenizing the underlying assets; it would require infrastructure capable of coordinating liquidity, execution, risk, and settlement under institutional constraints.

"As institutional capital and regulated participants move on-chain, the demand for execution between verified counterparties will naturally grow. This will also unlock new types of order flow that were previously difficult to bring on-chain.

However, we do not think it will replace all forms of execution. Instead, we expect a future where permissionless execution and KYB/KYC-verified execution coexist, each serving different use cases and market needs.

For Solvers, the ability to support both environments and adapt to different requirements will become increasingly important. The winners will likely be those that can provide flexibility while maintaining reliable execution across both permissionless and regulated markets."

Operating a solver today gives Radius direct experience with the execution problems that more complex institutional markets may face tomorrow. Every order filled through LI.FI Intents adds to its understanding of pricing, inventory placement, capital turnover, rebalancing, and cross-chain settlement. Order flow is not only revenue; it is information about where demand is forming and how capital moves between networks.

Stablecoins and blue-chip assets are therefore the proving ground. RWAs and institutional capital are the market Radius is building toward.

If Radius is right, solvers will become the core execution layer for institutional onchain finance. 

Closing Thoughts

"LI.FI has built broad connectivity across multiple chains, bridges, and DEXs, which allows it to aggregate diverse and meaningful transaction flows.

From a Solver’s perspective, the biggest advantage is having a consistent source of orders with real execution opportunities. This reliable access to quality order flow is what makes LI.FI Intents particularly valuable."

At LI.FI, we’re building LI.FI Intents to serve the full spectrum of onchain markets, those that exist today, and those still taking shape for the future. 

Today, that means executing everything from same-chain swaps and bridges to more complex cross-chain transactions. But, the marketplace is being built with an eye on the future to serve use cases like access to real-world assets, 1:1 stablecoin payments, and access to compliant KYB’d liquidity, and other forms of orders that will emerge as more assets and institutions move onchain.

Enabling these use cases requires sophisticated execution infrastructure behind the scenes. That is why we work with solver teams like Radius, whose execution, liquidity, and risk-management systems make these increasingly complex use cases possible.

If you are building solver infrastructure capable of serving these use cases, you can get onboarded to LI.FI Intents and compete for order flow.

And if you are building an app, wallet, neobank, or trading platform that wants to give users access to these markets, contact us.