An Aperture Introduction to Intents

The following is the first installment in a three part series of articles about Aperture’s journey into the realm of Intents. In this post we will introduce the intents narrative and which problems it aims to solve in the current DeFi landscape with a focus on Aperture’s unique perspective as a leading LP innovation layer. This post will be beneficial for newcomers to the Intents space as well as seasoned VCs who’re familiar with the existing intents thought leadership from Anoma, Binance Research, Paradigm, and Delphi Digital.

We’ll start with a simple vision:

Imagine a future Aperture UX where one can declare a complex end state they would like to achieve from a transaction (and have this end state obtained through a competitive bidding process):

• Hedge 50% of my $ETH delta exposure across my portfolio through any means necessary so long as my cost is locked in at 2% APR per $ETH for 30 days
• Claim all eligible airdrops on my behalf, including gas cost associated with claiming, in exchange for a 1% or less finder’s fee
• Rebalance all my LPs across all chains and DEXes (Uniswap, Maverick, and Sushiswap) to concentrate 60% of my capital on the highest APR DEX-pool combination, 30% on the 2nd highest, and 10% on the 3rd highest

Under our current transactional paradigm each of these declarations could inspire its own protocol complete with funding and a ravid community. However, this takes far too long and the end result leaves users constrained by a limiting front-end and smart contract. There’s a better way. But first we must evolve beyond the “transactional approach”.

Intents > Transactions

Under the current DeFi paradigm, a limiting but familiar “transactional approach” is used to achieve desired end states. The approach involves users interacting with a dApp’s interface, triggering actions and hoping for desired outcomes. In many ways this mirrors the US healthcare system, where patients navigate an unknowable number of options to achieve specific health goals without any guarantees of outcome or guarantees of final cost.

A quick example — let’s consider an individual with neck pain who has certain goals motivating their journey into the healthcare system:

• reduce overall pain by 40–100%
• spend under $500 (out of pocket)
• and find relief within 3 months

Similar to navigating on-chain solutions, they might start by searching for treatments, which limits them to the options they are already aware of. The individual might find a surgeon who claims a surgical procedure will reduce their pain and their secretary claims it will cost less than $500. But as most individuals know, there is no guarantee for pain reduction and there is definitely plenty of ambiguity on final pricing.

In contrast, an ‘intents approach’ would transform this process. The patient would begin their journey by simply declaring their needs in natural language:

“Reduce my neck pain by at least 40% within 3 months for under $500, prioritizing pain relief, cost, then timing. The provider must have a 99% trust score. Use any methods necessary.”

A healthcare intents platform would allow providers (solvers) to compete on offering the best service package. These providers can innovate and compete with each other by finding and offering novel pain reduction treatments and competitive pricing arrangements.

In the end the patient receives the optimal solution which turns out to be a two-month regimen of daily sauna and bi-weekly physical therapy, achieving 90% pain relief for $200 out of pocket, from a provider with a 100% trust score (this is NMA: not medical advice).

Of course in the IRL healthcare realm this analogy has limitations due to healthcare’s inherent unpredictability. Costs and treatment timing can be estimated, but the individual response to a procedure is uncertain. However, this need not be the case in our on-chain realm: advanced simulations, the promise of Zk proofs, and other advancements makes this uncertainty limitation solvable for DeFi users.

So what specific components are required to pull of this “intents approach”? Or in other words — beyond just saying Intents on your pitch deck what features and solutions are required to make an intents solution a reality and not just a narrative?

The Core Components of an Intent Architecture

From the end users perspective a true Intents UX has three critical components that most DeFi dapps (the execution UX) currently lack:

1. A novel interface for declaring transactional goals. Users no longer yay or nay a list of steps taken but rather they declare an end state they desire.
2. A network of solvers who can compete to deliver said transactional goal with flexibility on the transactional approach taken to achieve this end state.
3. An arbitrator executor who can accurately rank solutions put forth by solvers and help execute the solutions (recipes) put forth by the winning solver. It is the responsibility of this network to choose solutions based on ranking, hold solvers accountable, and to execute solutions across dapps and blockchains (“global compositionality”).

The creation of this novel interface will likely require a unique domain specific language (DSL) that a front-end can translate Intents to which can thereby be executed and verified on a blockchain. Having a network of solvers is essential for competition to take place leading to better pricing and better results for end users.

In addition to these user oriented components there are also several problem sets that any Intents architecture must design for and abstract away from the user:

1. Verifiability (Global Compositionality): the architecture needs a way to verify that the proposed solution solves the users declared intent. Another way to think of this is that the verification standardization is the innovation that can unlock true “global compositionality”. In other words — if there is a standardized way to verify end states from the Arbitrator Executor regardless of which chain or dapp combination was taken then you can unlock an intent network that is “globally composable”.
2. Ranking (Zk Proofs): In addition to verifying across chains and dapps you will also need to simulate and rank solutions. Certain types of verification can be tedious and overly complex, not suitable for proving on-chain. To address this likely reality a zero knowledge (ZK) proof could be posted on-chain to reduce the computational costs. Of course this Zk solution would not need to be built from scratch — modular solutions such as those built by Axiom or Brevis could be leveraged.
3. Privacy (Privileged Solvers): there are certain Intents which might reveal sensitive information that the end user wants to conceal (e.g. they are worried about front running). A thorough Intents architecture could address this by enabling a subset of solvers, Privileged Solvers. Privileged Solvers are designed for handling privacy-sensitive intents, these solvers possess special trust credentials. Their privileged status allows them to manage transactions requiring stricter security and confidentiality.
4. Unaligned Solver Behavior (Penalization): In order to ensure solvers are fulfilling transactions as intended and not engaging in any nefarious behavior a penalization system will need to be implemented. A crucial aspect of the Intents architecture is its ability to enforce accountability. Should any nefarious activities occur, such as reverted transactions or other malicious events, the Intents architecture is designed to penalize the responsible solvers. This not only safeguards the integrity of transactions but also deters potential malicious behavior by solvers.

Aperture’s General Intent Architecture

Back to our example from above:

Rebalance all my LPs across all chains and DEXes to concentrate 60% of my capital on the highest APR DEX-pool combination, 30% on the 2nd highest, and 10% on the 3rd highest

This is an example of an advanced DEX agnostic, chain agnostic Liquidity Intent. In our second installment we’ll explain how this could become a reality by introducing Aperture’s grand vision for Intents: a network of Solver DAOs powered by a unified interface. In our third and final installment we’ll introduce Aperture’s roadmap for the rest of 2024 — a piece by piece rollout of the General Intent Architecture needed to pull off our grand vision.

Stay tuned!