Original author: Mia, ChainCatcher
As the total transaction volume of the Aperture Finance platform exceeded 1.3 billion U.S. dollars, the number of users exceeded 150,000, and news about Aperture was frequently reported recently, the news of the projects currency began to leak out, attracting the attention of the crypto community.
AI and “intent architecture”
The vision video posted by Aperture on Twitter triggered everyones imagination about the ultimate form of Aperture products - users only need to tell the chatbot, help me try to receive Airdrop airdrop tokens, and the system will automatically based on the users wallet address and authorization. Go to each chain to browse the airdropped projects and automatically complete the collection. This kind of automation can greatly reduce the time for users to track project updates on Twitter, eliminate the risk of users being deceived by phishing websites, and directly reduce the time of direct interaction with each project application website, etc. According to this development direction, it is estimated that it will be just around the corner to let robots directly help users with airdrops.
This scene is a typical direct example of the mutual empowerment of artificial intelligence (AI) and intent-based architecture (Intent-based Infra). Through direct text interaction with ChatGPT to express needs, the system automatically extracts, identifies and confirms the users intention, submits it to the solver network, and the solver network seeks the optimal solution and path, and finally hands it to the optimal solver for execution through the bidding mode.
There are many similar scenarios, including automatically completing trading strategies through solvers, realizing position optimization, periodically capturing data for analysis, etc. The combination of AI and intent architecture will completely subvert traditional technology architecture and user experience.
A look back at the background of Aperture
Aperture first emerged in 2022. The founders all have backgrounds in Silicon Valley technology companies. There are senior programmers and product managers from Google, Netflix and AWS. Their educational backgrounds include Stanford University, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley.
2022 will focus on the DeFi cross-chain investment ecosystem, especially the volatility hedging strategy on Terra. Completed $5.3M seed and strategic round of financing in February 2022, led by ParaFi Capital and Arrington Capital, with other investors including Costanoa Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Rarestone Capital and Krypital Group.
The platform achieved $120M in TVL in just 3 weeks. The project provides a synthetic stock token strategy for UST deposits. The stable strategy allows users to earn more UST, but with the collapse of the Terra algorithm stablecoin, UST has depreciated hugely. During the same period, Mirror Protocol was hacked and other incidents occurred. However, Aperture won unanimous praise from investors and users because of its proper and thoughtful aftermath. Aperture is also one of the few project parties to stick with the same brand after the end of Terra.
Since late 2022, with the collapse of FTX and many other events, the market has taken a sharp turn, and many strategic projects have ended operations. Well-known projects include Friction and RoboVault. Aperture took the lead in transforming from strategy to underlying architecture and proposed Composable Automation, which is a composable automation strategy. Shift from providing investment strategies to providing infrastructure so that users can build their own strategies. This architecture that takes user needs as the starting point and automatically finds the optimal solution based on user intentions is the predecessor of intent architecture. As of the completion of this article, Aperture is the only project on the intent track with actual products and large-scale transaction volume.
Intention track background
In June 2023, the investment institution Paradigm issued an article Intentional Structure and Its Risks (Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks), proposes a development architecture that defines structure rather than process, kicking off the intent architecture. As the concept of intention continues to ferment in the market, Binance Research Institute issued an article Decrypting the Central Narrative of Intention (Demystifying the Intent-Centric Thesis), using Aperture as a member of the intent ecosystem.
On the intention track, what has been discussed a lot recently is the concept of intent layer. Its core concept is to lower the threshold for DeFi operations by introducing user-friendly interfaces, such as mobile wallets, as intermediaries for interaction with DeFi. At this level, intent is no longer limited to the users direct interaction with the DeFi platform, but is a type of off-chain signed information that represents the state transition and specific encoding results that the user hopes to achieve. This design pattern improves user experience and execution quality, users only need to approve their desired results, and complex operations are handled by the parser. At the same time, it improves efficiency, and multiple intentions can offset each other or generate economic benefits, improving overall efficiency. Additionally, the flexibility of off-chain computation helps improve efficiency because it is not affected by the limitations of on-chain computation. This intent-based design model brings multiple advantages to DeFi, greatly improving user experience and execution quality, and increasing overall efficiency.
The main concept projects of the Intention Track include Anoma Network, Particle Network, CowSwap and Essential. Apertures innovation in the intention layer is to propose a human natural language interaction method through the ChatGPT channel.
Solver Networks and Subproducts
It is reported that Aperture Fiance’s self-built intent architecture has begun to take shape, and developers can interact directly with the platform through APIs. We are still waiting for the specific launch time of the ChatGPT interactive experience.
Aperture Finance’s solver categories include:
Liquidity management intent, currently deployed on 9 EVM-compatible chains, including Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Base, BNB, Avalance, Scroll, and Manta. Provide condition-triggered position management based on future market conditions, including automatic management based on currency price, LP component ratio and time. For example, if the ETH price rises to $4,500 and remains at that price for 48 hours, make an adjustment to the LP position of ETH/USDC. The cumulative strategic trading volume reached 1 billion US dollars.
ApertureSwap, which is a decentralized exchange (DEX) deployed by Aperture on the Manta Pacific chain based on UniSwap V3, provides liquidity providers with custom intention position adjustments. Among the DEX categories in the Manta ecosystem, TVL is currently second only to QuickSwap, but its transaction volume is the highest in the entire chain.
Temporal Intents, including limit orders with profit and segmentation optimization of large trading orders, etc.
Subscription Intents, including periodic trading and position adjustment, etc.
Judging from the information shared by Aperture, the project side will divide the solvers in the network into several levels based on security, solving efficiency and tariffs, and use different logic to achieve competition and result selection at different levels. As well as continuing to expand its solver network, Aperture is also seeing accelerated expansion through partnerships with other large solver development teams, such as Propeller Heads and Enso Finance.
Token model
According to Aperture’s token economics, Aperture’s tokens will have three major functions:
Tokens play a central role in the solver network. As the solver network is liberalized, more third-party solvers will join. At this time, Aperture will require third-party developers to pledge Aperture project tokens to achieve an accountability mechanism, that is, for those who cannot complete the solution or are malicious. Behavioral solver that does slash penalties for staked tokens. For solvers that have consistently performed well, there will be token incentives.
Tokens are used to offset platform handling fees. As an intention platform, Apertures current total transaction volume has exceeded $1.5 B. According to official news, there will be charging plans in the future, so tokens as a fee deduction will be another core use.
For governance. Through staking, users can submit proposals and make decisions on the platforms various rates, partner funds, and the use of DAO funds.
In addition, Aperture recently released the details of the Airdrop event, and we look forward to more detailed information in the future. The intention track continues to heat up. Aperture introduces ChatGPT as an interaction method, adding new highlights to AI storytelling. The project team may have further currency issuance arrangements and publicity activities for Airdrop in the near future, we will wait and see!
