When Toby Gilbert speaks about blockchain, it is with the calm conviction of someone who has seen both its promise and its pitfalls. As CEO and co-founder of Coinweb, he has been working since 2018 to solve one of the most enduring challenges in decentralised finance: how to make blockchain systems talk to each other safely.
That ambition has now materialised in PACT Swap, a new decentralised exchange (DEX) built on Coinweb’s infrastructure. Designed from the ground up, it addresses the vulnerabilities that have plagued DeFi for years, from bridge hacks to collateral inefficiencies, and aims to reintroduce what Gilbert calls “trust, without compromise.”
Gilbert’s path to Web3 was anything but predictable. Before blockchain, he moved through music publishing and telecoms, even building satellite infrastructure in Central Africa. His first encounter with blockchain came, he recalls, “in Goa in late 2017. A friend was explaining it to me. I went down the rabbit hole, invested, and by May 2018, I was leading the project.”
Unlike many who entered the space chasing speculative returns, Gilbert took a more technical route. “Most people got in through gains,” he says. “I got in through the tech. I went deep into infrastructure and learned the hard way. I don’t recommend that path to anyone, but it taught me everything I needed to know.”
That grounding in architecture and interoperability shaped the development of Coinweb, and now PACT Swap, a cross-chain DEX that eliminates the need for traditional bridge mechanisms.
“Blockchains are incompatible,” Gilbert explains. “They’re like different operating systems. The way assets move between them today relies on validator sets, effectively third parties gluing chains together, and that’s where the hacks come from.”
Instead of relying on those intermediary validators, PACT Swap introduces a cross-chain reactive smart contract framework. In simple terms, it monitors the connected blockchains and executes trades based on their consensus, not an external authority. “We’ve replaced the validator sets entirely,” Gilbert says. “We rely on the consensus of the underlying chains. It’s faster, cheaper, and more secure.”
The difference is significant. Traditional cross-chain systems often lock up hundreds of millions in collateral for extended periods, driving up costs and creating security risks. PACT Swap uses collateralised smart contracts on a per-trade basis, reducing costs by as much as 95 per cent compared to other cross-chain DEXs and 45 per cent compared to single-chain exchanges like PancakeSwap.
To maintain integrity, PACT Swap also introduces a straightforward system of accountability.
“If a trader fails to fulfil their side of the transaction, their collateral is slashed,” Gilbert explains. “It’s simple market discipline. You don’t deliver, you lose twice the value of the trade. That’s how we bring accountability back into DeFi.”
This model is designed not just for crypto natives but for wider adoption. “We’ve kept it simple,” he says. “Professional market makers are already active, and we’ll soon open it to retail users via a Telegram bot. The interface is clean and intuitive, but the real focus is on B2B2C, enabling merchants, gateways, and traditional businesses to integrate PACT Swap directly into their payment systems.”
Coinweb’s partnership network is already taking shape. “We’re live in MVP,” Gilbert confirms. “We’ve integrated with Fortress, a major non-custodial gateway that’s processed over eleven billion dollars in trades, and we have nine more integrations lined up.”
Collectively, the first wave of merchants represents potential daily transaction volumes of ten million dollars, a figure set to grow as PACT Swap integrates with decentralised exchange aggregators.
While most DeFi platforms rely on transaction fees for revenue, PACT Swap’s model is different. Each trade posts collateral in Coinweb’s native token, from which a small percentage is redirected into a fee pool.
“As the value of the fee pool rises relative to the token, there’s a natural arbitrage opportunity,” Gilbert says. “It’s an elegant way to align incentives between traders, liquidity providers, and the ecosystem.”
Security, cost-efficiency, and interoperability are the core pillars of PACT Swap, but Gilbert believes the project’s long-term success will depend on trust.
“In DeFi, people need to try it and test it,” he says. “But by embedding PACT Swap behind trusted brands and gateways, users engage through channels they already recognise. Over time, that trust becomes organic.”
Even the name carries intention. “PACT stands for Penalty Adjudication,” Gilbert explains. “It reflects how the system enforces honesty, not through centralised control, but through code.”
For Coinweb, the launch of PACT Swap marks a milestone nearly eight years in the making. “It’s taken a lot of money, time, and energy,” Gilbert admits. “But what we’ve built is proprietary. It’s not a fork, it’s not a copy. It’s a new architecture.”
Looking ahead, he sees PACT Swap becoming a “cross-chain Uniswap” – a platform processing billions of dollars in daily volume. Yet for Gilbert, the motivation remains the same as when he started. “It’s about solving the hard problems,” he says. “Building something that lasts.”
