Uniswap Labs, the company behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap, has rolled out an opt-in beta of a new protocol on Ethereum, which aims to improve on-chain swapping with a range of new features.

The new protocol, called UniswapX, outsources the complexity of order routing to an open network of fillers that compete to fill swaps at the best prices, the Uniswap team explained in a Monday blog post.

The competitive ecosystem of fillers will bring about gas-free swapping, better prices and protection against Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots that front-run users’ transactions. Orders will be also protected from the more extractive forms of MEV like sandwich attacks, and fillers will be incentivized to use private transaction relays when routing orders to on-chain liquidity pools. 

UniswapX will bring about gas-free swaps through its ecosystem of fillers, who will pay gas on behalf of these users to complete transactions. This means that swappers won’t need to use a native token to trade or pay for failed transactions. 

Before the end of the year, the protocol plans to launch a cross-chain version that combines bridging and swapping between chains instantaneously.

“Swappers can also choose which assets they receive on the destination chain, instead of a bridge-specific token,” explained Uniswap founder Hayden Adams.

While some market participants hailed the new protocol as one that changes the game for decentralized exchanges, others pointed out that gasless swaps had already been enabled by other permissionless trading protocols like CoW swap.