Decentralized finance (DeFi) puts complex financial instruments into the hands of users, enabling them to build “money Legos” by mixing and matching an array of different DeFi products.
The problem is, that creates complicated workflows as users move funds between bridges, liquidity pools and other DeFi products to get to their desired end goal.
That’s where Aperture Finance’s Intents come in. “Intents are a move away from the transactional approach to Web3 and DeFi,” Aperture’s growth lead McDavid Stoddard told Decrypt. In that transactional model, the transaction is “typically too complicated for them to fully understand what’s happening,” he said.
Intents, he explained, enable the average DeFi user to gain access to “the types of execution and pricing that previously were only accessible to large prop shops, who are operating with institutional money and an in-house developer team.”
With Aperture’s Intents, built atop Uniswap V3, the user declares an end goal and the transaction is only executed if it matches the user’s desired outcome. A user can, for example, sign a message that they want their liquidity position to rebalance once it hits 3,000 USDC per ETH, rebalance to a 50:50 ratio at a range of 2,800 to 3,200 USDC, and specify the acceptable range of price impact from swaps and gas fees.
A decentralized network of solvers then works out possible transaction flows and posts them to the Aperture smart contract, where they’re simulated and ranked based on the simulations. Aperture has launched with one centralized solver, with third-party solvers including one from PropellerHeads joining the network in Q2.
As well as building out its network of third-party solvers, Aperture’s future roadmap includes a Large Language Model (LLM) that will enable the user to express their intent in natural language and have it mirrored back to them in a readable Domain-Specific Language (DSL), which can then be delivered to solvers as the user’s “declaration of truth.”
Stoddard likens the user experience to ordering a pizza. “You tell the operator, ‘I want whatever your biggest pizza is, with all the meat.’ The operator will mirror back to you, ‘Okay, you want our extra large meat lovers’ pizza?’ And then the user says, ‘That’s what I wanted.’” Aperture’s UX will enable the user to couch their DeFi Intents in similar terms, he explained. “The user will say, ‘I want you to rebalance me to the most profitable position,’ and then the DSL should mirror back to them; the DSL itself will be readable enough that the user will know if the translation is correct.”
Ultimately, Intents could be the key to unlocking DeFi to everyone from mainstream consumers to TradFi institutions—and giving existing DeFi users access to more complex financial instruments, at prices that compare to what the most sophisticated MEV players and market makers get, Stoddard explained.
“It’s about making the learning curve less steep for outside users,” he said, adding that it gives the existing DeFi user base “more optionality, more expressibility in the types of strategies or approaches to on-chain activities that they’re running.”