Aperture Finance: The Perfect Combination of AI and "Intent Architecture"

Author: Mia, ChainCatcher

As Aperture Finance's total trading volume on the intent platform surpasses $1.3 billion and the number of users exceeds 150k, along with recent frequent news about Aperture, rumors about the project's token listing have begun to circulate, attracting the attention of the crypto community.

AI and "Intent Architecture"

The vision video released by Aperture on Twitter has sparked imaginations about the ultimate form of Aperture's products—users simply need to tell the chatbot to help them claim Airdrop tokens, and the system can automatically traverse various chains to find projects with airdrops based on the user's wallet address and authorization, completing the claim automatically. This automation can significantly reduce the time users spend tracking project updates on Twitter, eliminate the risk of being deceived by phishing sites, and directly reduce the time spent interacting with each project's claim site, among other benefits. Following this development direction, it is estimated that having the bot directly help users claim airdrops is just around the corner.

This scenario is a typical example of the mutual empowerment of artificial intelligence (AI) and intent architecture (Intent-based Infra). By interacting directly with ChatGPT through text, expressing needs, the system automatically extracts, identifies, and confirms user intent, submits it to the solver network, which seeks optimal solutions and paths, and finally executes the task through a bidding model assigned to the best solver.

There are many similar scenarios, including automatically completing trading strategies through solvers, optimizing positions, and periodically scraping data for analysis, etc. The combination of AI and intent architecture will fundamentally disrupt traditional technical architecture and user experience.

Review of Aperture's Background

Aperture first gained attention in 2022, with founders from Silicon Valley tech companies, including senior programmers and product managers from Google, Netflix, and AWS, with educational backgrounds from Stanford University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2022, it focused on a DeFi cross-chain investment ecosystem, particularly volatility hedging strategies on Terra. In February 2022, it completed a $5.3M seed and strategic round of financing, led by ParaFi Capital and Arrington Capital, with other investors including Costanoa Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Rarestone Capital, and Krypital Group.

The platform achieved a TVL of $120M in just three weeks. The project offered a synthetic stock token strategy for UST deposits, providing a stable strategy for users to earn more UST, but with the collapse of Terra's algorithmic stablecoin, UST depreciated significantly. During the same period, the Mirror Protocol was also hacked, but Aperture won unanimous praise from investors and users due to its thorough and considerate aftermath handling. Aperture is also one of the few projects that maintained the same brand after the end of Terra.

Since late 2022, with the collapse of FTX and other events, the market took a sharp downturn, and many strategy projects ceased operations, including well-known projects like Friction and RoboVault. Aperture was the first to transition from strategy to underlying architecture, proposing "Composable Automation," which refers to combinable automated strategies. It shifted from providing investment strategies to offering infrastructure, allowing users to build their own strategies. This architecture, which starts from user needs and automatically seeks optimal solutions based on user intent, is the precursor to intent architecture. As of the completion of this article, Aperture is the only project in the intent track with actual products and large-scale trading volume.

Background of the Intent Track

In June 2023, the investment firm Paradigm published an article titled "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks" (Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks), proposing a development architecture defined by structure rather than process, marking the beginning of intent architecture. As the concept of intent continues to ferment in the market, Binance Research published an article titled "Demystifying the Intent-Centric Thesis" (Demystifying the Intent-Centric Thesis), identifying Aperture as a member of the intent ecosystem.

In the intent track, the concept of the "Intent Layer" has recently been widely discussed, with its core idea being to introduce user-friendly interfaces, such as mobile wallets, as intermediaries for interacting with DeFi, lowering the barriers to DeFi operations. At this level, "intent" is no longer limited to direct interactions between users and DeFi platforms but represents an off-chain signed message that indicates the state transition and specific encoded results that users wish to achieve. This design pattern improves user experience and execution quality, allowing users to approve the desired outcomes while complex operations are handled by parsers. Additionally, it enhances efficiency, as multiple intents can offset or generate economic benefits, improving overall efficiency. Furthermore, the flexibility of off-chain computation helps improve efficiency as it is not constrained by on-chain computation limitations. This intent-based design pattern brings multiple advantages to DeFi, greatly enhancing user experience and execution quality while improving overall efficiency.

Key conceptual projects in the intent track include Anoma Network, Particle Network, CowSwap, and Essential. Aperture's innovation in the "Intent Layer" is the introduction of human natural language interaction through ChatGPT channels.

Solver Network and Sub-Products

It is reported that Aperture Finance's self-built intent architecture is already taking shape, allowing developers to interact directly with the platform via API. We are still waiting for the specific launch time of the ChatGPT interaction experience.

The categories of solvers in Aperture Finance include:

• Liquidity management intent, currently deployed on 9 EVM-compatible chains, including Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Base, BNB, Avalanche, Scroll, and Manta. It provides condition-triggered position management based on future market conditions, including automatic management based on token price, LP component ratios, and time. For example, if the ETH price rises to $4,500 and remains at that level for 48 hours, adjustments will be made to the ETH/USDC LP position. Cumulative strategy trading volume has reached $1 billion.
• ApertureSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) deployed on the Manta Pacific chain based on UniSwap V3, provides liquidity providers with customized intent rebalancing. In the Manta ecosystem's DEX category, it currently ranks second in TVL, but has the highest trading volume across the chain.
• Temporal Intents, including limit orders with attached yields and optimization of large trade order segmentation.
• Subscription Intents, including periodic trading and rebalancing.

From the information shared by Aperture, it appears that the project will categorize solvers within the network into several tiers based on security, solving efficiency, and fees, implementing competition and result selection with different logic at different levels. In addition to continuing to expand the solver network, Aperture has also seen collaborations with other large solver development teams, such as Propeller Heads and Enso Finance, to achieve accelerated expansion.

Token Model

According to Aperture's tokenomics, the Aperture token will have three main functions:

• The token plays a core role in the solver network. As the solver network opens up, more third-party solvers will join, at which point Aperture will require third-party developers to stake Aperture project tokens to implement an accountability mechanism, penalizing solvers that fail to complete tasks or engage in malicious behavior by reducing their staked tokens. Solvers with consistently excellent performance will receive token incentives.
• The token will be used to offset platform fees. As an intent platform, Aperture's total trading volume has already exceeded $1.5B, and according to official news, there are plans for future fees, making the token a core utility for fee offsets.
• Used for governance. Users can submit proposals by staking tokens to make decisions on various aspects such as platform fees, partner funding, and DAO fund usage.

Additionally, Aperture has recently released details of its Airdrop activity, and we look forward to more detailed information in the future. The intent track is still heating up, and Aperture's introduction of ChatGPT as an interaction method adds a new highlight to the AI narrative. The project may have further token issuance arrangements and promotional activities for the Airdrop, and we are eagerly watching!