Folks Router aggregates 11,990 Algorand trading pairs at a 0.1% fee

2026-08-19

defi · dex-aggregator · sdk · folks-finance · swap · discovery · web · updated

Folks Router aggregates 11,990 Algorand trading pairs at a 0.1% fee

Trading a long-tail token on Algorand has always carried a quiet gamble: pick Tinyman, Pact or Humble first and hope the pool you chose actually holds enough liquidity to fill the order without moving the price against you. Folks Router exists to remove that guess. The swap aggregator, built and operated by the lending protocol Folks Finance, scans all three decentralized exchanges — peer-to-peer marketplaces where users trade directly from their wallets with no centralized intermediary — compares prices, and assembles each trade from the combination of pools that returns the most output for the least [slippage](/glossary/slippage "The difference between the expected price of a trade and the actual executed price, often caused by low liquidity or rapid market movements. It can si"), the gap between a trade's expected price and the price at which it actually executes.

The router is not a newcomer. Folks Finance released it as an in-house product in August 2023, and it now serves two audiences at once: a consumer swap interface anyone can open, and routing infrastructure that other projects embed. The homepage displays 11,990 trading pairs across 424 assets and 202 liquidity pools drawn from the three partner DEXs — a pool count slightly below the 205 the team cited at launch. Inside Folks Finance's own app, the router powers swap-and-deposit, collateral swaps, repay-with-collateral and buy/sell gALGO flows, and the parent protocol reports roughly $47 million in [total value locked](/glossary/total-value-locked "A key metric measuring the overall health of the DeFi ecosystem. It represents the total fiat value of all ALGO and ASAs currently deposited or 'locke") per DeFiLlama — useful context for who operates the routing.

One swap, many routes

The unit of liquidity on a [DEX](/glossary/decentralized-exchange "A peer-to-peer marketplace built on Algorand where users can trade ASAs directly from their wallets without relying on a centralized intermediary (lik") is the pool: a shared reserve of two tokens whose relative supply sets the price. Folks Router's core idea is that a single swap need not be a single trade, and the pieces it can assemble into one order are:

Concept	Real-World Implication
Split routing	An order is divided across several pools so no single trade moves the price far; a live quote pulled during reporting split a 100-ALGO swap 50/50 across two Pact pools.
Multi-swap paths	A pair with thin direct liquidity executes through an intermediate asset; each half of that same quote ran as a two-hop path, through Vote Coin in one leg and MyCoin in the other.
Fixed-input and fixed-output swaps	You send or receive exactly the amount you specify; the live quote was a fixed-input swap, with any excess returned in the output asset.
[Composable](/glossary/composable "In software, a system is composable when its parts can be freely combined and reused in different applications. Here, it means marketplace listings ca") atomic group	The entire swap is one batch of transactions that all land or all fail together, so other operations can be appended to it.
Automatic pool discovery	New pools created on partner DEXs enter routing without a manual listing step.

The numbers from that live quote are worth reading closely. 100 ALGO, roughly $8 at today's prices, returned 7.926832 USDC at a price impact of 0.062%, and the network fee for the whole atomic group was 0.017 ALGO — a fraction of a cent. Quotes are promised in under a second, and Algorand's [single-block finality](/glossary/single-block-finality "A feature of some blockchains where transactions are confirmed and made irreversible in a single block, eliminating the need for multiple confirmation") settles trades in about three seconds with no forking, so a quoted price cannot be reorganized away before it lands. Users also set a slippage tolerance: if the execution price moves beyond the limit they consented to, the swap fails and no funds leave the wallet.

A 0.1% fee, a 50% cut, and the incentives in between

Folks Router's own take is deliberately small: a flat output fee of 0.1% (10 basis points — the router contract's [on-chain](/glossary/on-chain "Describes transactions that are recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain ledger, making them publicly visible and tamper-resistant.") state pins the minimum at exactly that) charged on what the swap returns, plus an ALGO transaction fee to execute the atomic group whose size depends on the number and type of swaps inside the route. The docs give the arithmetic: swap 100 ALGO for 10 USDC and the fee is 0.01 USDC; the ALGO cost is itemized in the quote before a user signs.

The fee is also the business model, and this is where the incentives deserve scrutiny. Any project that integrates the router attaches a referrer address to its quote calls and receives 50% of the fees its own users generate, and it can raise the fee above the 0.1% floor — set 1% and the split becomes 0.5% to the integrator, 0.5% to the Folks Router treasury. An integrator's revenue therefore grows with the fee it charges, so its interest is not automatically aligned with getting its users the best execution. Fees accrue to an intermediate escrow account rather than straight to the referrer, because Algorand requires an account to opt in to an asset before it can hold it; the SDK provides helpers to add new assets to that escrow and claim accumulated fees. The site's own footer is blunt about the relationship: 'This is an aggregator of third party software. Folks Finance declines any and all responsibility. Use at your own risk.'

V2, the FOLKS discount, and what the docs don't say

In late October 2025, the Folks Finance forum announced that V1 would be deprecated on 1 December 2025 in favor of V2, a reworked contract whose headline addition is fee discounts tied to holdings of FOLKS, the parent protocol's token launched in November 2025. The live V2 tiers endpoint returns the schedule:

Chart: Swap-fee discount by FOLKS balance (live V2 tiers)

The tiers run from a 10% discount at 15 FOLKS to 50% at 12,500 FOLKS, and they are verifiable on-chain: the V2 contract's global state carries the encoded schedule alongside a dedicated fee-collector account and a reference to Folks' lending-manager application — the contract-level wiring that lets a swap settle directly into a deposit or loan operation.

Two things deserve a skeptical reader's attention. First, the discount is a loyalty mechanism: it rewards holding FOLKS, which can steer a user toward Folks Router even when a competing router or a direct DEX trade would execute better — the incentive is token-sticky rather than purely about routing quality. Second, the router's docs publish application IDs but no audit report for the V2 contract, and FOLKS is barely nine months old — the two things an integrator would want documented before routing real volume. The docs themselves show the lag: the contracts page still lists the retired V1 [mainnet](/glossary/mainnet "The main public blockchain network where transactions are recorded and have real value, as opposed to a test network used for experimentation.") application ID while the SDK's own constants and the migration guide point to the live V2 contract.

What developers actually get

The developer surface is an open-source monorepo: the website, built with Astro, React and Tailwind, including the docs and a metrics dashboard, and the official JavaScript/TypeScript SDK, @folks-router/js-sdk, which the homepage markets as a one-line-of-code integration. The SDK wraps four calls — fetchDiscountTiers, fetchUserDiscount, fetchSwapQuote and prepareSwapTransactions — but its real value is verification: before returning unsigned transactions, it checks the sender, receiver and application ID of every transaction in the group and confirms the quoted amounts match the user's slippage tolerance, so a wallet signs exactly what the quote promised rather than something a tampered response substituted. The backend runs at api.folksrouter.io/v2; during reporting its healthcheck returned OK and a live quote request succeeded end to end.

Adoption so far is real but small. The npm package recorded 140 downloads in the past week and 472 in the past month; the GitHub repository carries 16 stars; and the only named third-party integration in the public record came from a 2023 forum thread in which community developer Scholtz reported the router 'already deployed in AWallet in all environments.' The metrics dashboard charts transaction volume, fees and wallet counts by hour, day and month, but those figures are served by the operator's own analytics backend and could not be independently verified — the homepage's pair and pool counters are likewise the operator's own, self-reported numbers. Forum history also records operational friction: an expired SSL certificate on the API in September 2024 and intermittent quote failures on larger trades in early 2024.

A modest, working niche

Three years on, Folks Router is a functioning part of Algorand's trading stack rather than a headline product: the fee is low, the atomic group genuinely composes with the parent lending protocol, and the economics deliberately reward the projects that build on top of it — which is exactly why users should understand who gets paid before they swap.

Source

Source: https://folksrouter.io/