What are Intents Actually Solving? with Declan Hannon (Aurora Labs)

And so when you kind of look at this, like, walk us through sort of all the components that go into actually, like, as you said, from a user perspective, it's like, oh, I have Sol, I'd like Zcash, or I have Zcash, I'd like Sol.

I click a button, some magic happens, I get it where I want it.

What's actually going on behind the hood? And what are all the sort of different parties involved in that process?

Yeah, so from a user's perspective, it's actually pretty simple, right? So they'll express what intent it is.

So let's say, for example, it's depositing USDC into a vault on Morpho.

Now, the first step is for the solvers to kind of answer that incoming request.

And this is where our decentralized solver network comes into play.

So instead of just following a predefined route, multiple solvers will evaluate how they can fulfill that intent.

And they'll consider factors like available liquidity, execution costs, or the potential speed of being able to kind of fulfill that intent.

Once that's been done, They'll coordinate with whatever infrastructure they need to so they can tap into bridges, DEXs, you know, or other products that they've got.

And then once that's done, the near-intense protocol itself will verify and second that.

And Aurora will then surface the final result back to the application that's using the product.

So if we kind of walk through

like a history of different methods of swapping, we start out with the original Bitcoin Craigslist, meet a guy in a parking lot, hand him some cash, he sends you some Bitcoin.

Like that is like DeFi version zero, right? And then we move into these very simple, you know, AMM formulas, which are like a fairly passive activity where like you see pricing responds to the various balancing in a liquidity pool.

And then we sort of moved into different systems that now use order books sometimes.

There's also prop AMMs, which are at different type of system that is effectively an on-chain quant trading and market making strategy like under the hood where does the liquidity provisioning come from because intense is not it's not a direct period of here swap in the typical way there is still some type of market making either automated or manual system involved correct

Yeah, so a lot of that is done at a protocol level, right? So, for example, with Aurora Intents, we're not providing direct liquidity ourselves.

So, of course, NIR is involved in that process and the solver networks themselves are also from some of that liquidity.

And so when you guys are kind of like thinking about building on top of like one of these primitives that like Near has developed, like what do you sort of see as the opportunity? And how is this like what made you guys decide like, hey, this is a market that there needs to be folks making more accessible and serving data in?

Yeah, no, it's a great question.

So I guess there's a number of factors, right, that are at play here.

So there's quite a lot of partners that are actively using both Aurora Intense and Near Intense already, right? I think the lifetime volume is like 21 plus billion.

Yeah, it's

crazy.