GateLive AMA Recap-Aperture Finance
Q1: What are the main objectives of Aperture Finance? What are the specific problems DeFi is trying to solve with this platform?
The traditional infrastructure has several known problems, including inefficient resource allocation when dealing with multiple protocols, liquidity distribution, and transaction routing. Real-time monitoring and analysis are expensive and complex to implement, and interoperability and integration are challenging. These factors all made it difficult to onboard new DeFi users.
The solution to that is an intent-based infrastructure. Aperture is a pioneer in AI-powered intents. Intent-based infrastructure revolutionizes the way people interact with DeFi, whether it is trading tokens, opening strategies, claiming airdrops, or any other activities. You don’t need to care about the actual processes and details anymore. As long as you have an explicit intent, it will be taken care of in an automated way. The addition of AI elements further enhances the user experience.
Q2: What exactly is an intent-based infrastructure? How does this approach differ from the traditional DeFi model and what advantages does it bring?
A simple example to illustrate the difference — you can think of the traditional non-intent infra as the GPS without the internet. And the intent-based infra as the Google Map with real time traffic info. GPS will always try to find you the path with the shortest distance, and that is process-driven. But Google Map can dynamically find the best route for you based on the traffic. It may not be the shortest in distance, but it gets you to the destination in the shortest time.
Traditional non-intent infra is process-driven. You have to define each step in a transaction and make decisions beforehand, and it doesn’t always give you the best outcome. Either you, as a user, define the process or you use a web-app which has all the steps predefined. With intent, the calculations are done in a dynamic way. As you express your intent, our platform will find the best way to ute the trade to get you the best outcome with the lowest cost.
Q3: Please use specific examples to illustrate how users express their intentions and how the Aperture platform handles them.
In our vision, users can express their intent by chatting with our IntentsGPT, and Aperture will handle everything for the user. For example, the user can type something like “find the best protocol to stake my ETH, prioritize security over profit”, and our AI will uate the options, and then stake the ETH for the user.
Our IntentsGPT is online and our intent-based infra is live on 9 chains. We are still working on the crucial part to marry the chatbot with the infra and ensure security. But we are offering several intent-based transactions on the platform. For liquidity providers, you can go to aperture.finance and set up automated rebalance. You can configure a trigger — if ETH goes down to $3000, then rebalance my ETH-USDC position to a 40/60 ratio. And we will monitor the market for you and ute the order when the conditions are met. This is how we handle a lot of intents now, and it applies to swap, rebalance and limit orders.
Q4: What risks are associated with your users’ use of the Aperture platform and how do you manage them? What risks are associated with your users’ use of the Aperture platform and how are these risks managed, and what technology is used to minimize these risks?
The best thing about Aperture is that we are non-custodial. Other than ApertureSwap, there is no TVL on Aperture, because there is no asset locked in Aperture’s smart contract. We have adopted atomic transactions when processing user requests. What it means is that when we ute a trade for the user, the funds will be transferred to the user’s wallet by the end of the same transaction in the same block. The funds never stay in Aperture’s smart contract, and this eliminates any custodial risks.
As a DeFi infrastructure, security is at the top of our minds. With a top-notch engineering team in Silicon Valley, we have the best resources to scrutinize the code. We have also partnered with major security audit firms to ensure the security of our smart contracts.
Q5: What plans does the future roadmap for Aperture Finance include? In particular, please share specific information about new features and technological advancements.
Intent-based infrastructure is an open infra. We will keep adding new solvers to handle more use cases. We have just integrated PancakeSwap to provide liquidity management for the $2B TVL on the BNB chain. We have also integrated with solvers from projects like PropellerHeads. Having more and more solvers will enable us to discover better routes for transactions. In Q3 2024, we will further expand the features of our IntentsGPT to make the vision of converting intents in human language to optimal Defi outcomes come true. We are looking to build a solid foundation for us to further develop a general purpose intent-based infrastructure with AI enablement.
