The Frax ecosystem
Frax is no longer a single product. It is a set of pieces — a chain, an AMM, a lending market, a bridge — designed to work together, with the stablecoins and governance token running through all of them. This page is the map: what each piece is and how it connects to the rest.
Fraxtal: the layer-2 network
Fraxtal is Frax's own layer-2 blockchain, built on the Optimism OP Stack and fully EVM-compatible, so developers can deploy the same kind of contracts they would on Ethereum. It is the centre of gravity for where the project is heading. The stated ambition is "fractal scaling" — deploying additional layer-3 networks on top of the L2 to add capacity in a modular way.
Two things make Fraxtal distinctive. First, its gas token is a Frax asset rather than ETH, which is meant to give users more predictable fees and tie network usage back to the ecosystem. (Which exact token serves as gas has shifted during the North Star transition, so treat the current gas token as a live detail to confirm in the docs.) Second, it runs Flox, a blockspace incentive program that rewards users and developers for spending gas and interacting with contracts — turning ordinary network activity into rewards.
Fraxswap: the native AMM
Fraxswap is the protocol's automated market maker, based on a Uniswap V2 design. Its standout feature is a built-in TWAMM — a time-weighted average market maker. A TWAMM takes a large order and breaks it into many tiny trades executed continuously over time, which reduces the price impact of moving size. It is the difference between dropping a boulder in a pond and pouring in a stream of sand.
BAMM: borrowing on top of the AMM
BAMM, the Borrow Automated Market Maker, is a borrowing and lending module built on top of Fraxswap. It lets users create leveraged positions or rent out liquidity from an existing Fraxswap pair, and it is designed to work without relying on external oracles — the AMM itself provides the pricing.
Fraxlend: the lending market
Fraxlend is the permissionless lending market, organized as isolated pairs so risk stays contained. It is where the borrower and lender flows happen, and it is covered in depth in the borrower guide and the depositor guide.
Fraxferry: moving between chains
Fraxferry is an optimistic transfer protocol for moving Frax-based tokens across chains. "Optimistic" means transfers are assumed valid unless challenged within a window, which is a common design trade-off: it keeps things efficient but introduces a delay on the safe side. As always, cross-chain movement carries its own risk — see the risks page.
New to the names in this map? The glossary defines each one in a sentence, and the overview puts them in context.