MaiaDAO: Crosschain Liquidity Expansion - What You Need to Know
Intents & OFTs on Meta Bridge, Omnichain Boosted Strategies, & More
Maia has grown far beyond its original role as a standalone DEX and a $bHermes aggregator. They now position themselves as an omnichain liquidity router that is built around Hermes Protocol.
In today’s edition, we’ll unpack Meta Bridge, Maia’s newly launched crosschain hub combining the power of intents and OFTs, and the Maia Boosted Strategies, which enhance liquidity rewards and create new value accrual channels for staked $MAIA holders.
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What is MaiaDAO
MaiaDAO acts as both an infrastructure layer and a capital coordination hub that routes liquidity between chains, directs emissions across integrated protocols, and captures value for $MAIA stakers through $bHermes accumulation and strategic deployment.
This structure makes Maia more of an infrastructure stack that powers intent-based bridging, vault strategies, and gauge-driven incentives across various supported chains.
Meta Bridge - Powered by Intents & OFTs
Maia’s omnichain Meta Bridge introduces 2 core components that results in efficient, slippage-free trades:
Intents – Simply put, users express what they want (“send 10,000 $USDC from Arbitrum to Base”), not how to get there. An off-chain solver network finds the optimal path and submits a single transaction to Hermes for settlement.
Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFTs) – Instead of burning and minting wrapped IOUs as with traditional bridges, OFTs rely on LayerZero’s cross-chain messaging to maintain a single canonical supply. Because the token itself is native on every supported chain, transfers settle 1:1 with no slippage since it doesn’t require liquidity pools or price discovery.
At launch, Meta Bridge supports over 160 OFTs already integrated with Hermes and supports “hops” which are multi-leg transfers that keep the user in the same transaction context. A Base → Arbitrum → Optimism hop is condensed into one move to the end-user, even though liquidity is resolved in two discrete steps under the hood.
Maia Boosted Strategies
Maia controls a % of $bHermes tokens which are locked emissions that power the Hermes flywheel. The DAO lends its boost to specific vaults flagged with a purple checkmark in the Strategies UI.
Once delegated, these strategies earn materially higher APRs because they stake with Maia’s boosted weight. Instead of taxing LPs directly, Maia takes 10 % of the incremental $HERMES rewards as a performance fee. Those fees route to the treasury, where they are automatically converted into $bHermes and deposited into the same $bHermes contract that underpins $MAIA’s ve-style staking.
Every distribution cycle looks like this:
Treasury claims boosted rewards.
Rewards are harvested, swapped for $bHermes, and locked.
The $bHermes backing each $vMAIA token increases.
A larger boost is available for the next epoch, thus higher APRs.
The loop is self-reinforcing: more boost → higher strategy APRs → larger fees → more $bHermes backing per $vMAIA. Unlike pure revenue share models that leak value back to holders as inflation, Boosted Strategies redirect cash flow into productive, yield-bearing voting power that expands future earning capacity. Protocols that integrate with Hermes can tap Maia’s boost without buying $HERMES themselves, while $MAIA stakers capture an expanding share of emissions.
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Disclosure
Alea Research is engaged in a commercial relationship with MaiaDAO as part of an educational initiative, and this newsletter was commissioned as part of that engagement. This content is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. You should do your own research and only invest what you can afford to lose. Alea Research is a research platform and not an investment or financial advisor.
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