ETHWarsaw 2023: Connor Howe, Enso Finance - DeFi Intents: From a solver

thanks cool so today's topic is defy intent from a solver for those who don't know Ando Finance is a solver for cow Swap and we offer one unified API for bundling and interacting with all defi Primitives so what are intents been a lot of talk about it a lot of hype really intents ultimately are I have X and I want y I don't care how you get that for me the methods that people can do is onchain routing itself maybe Arbitrage maybe sex Arbitrage even using their own flow but hopefully today we can break it down into human and simple terms why do you need intents so let's say for example you want to do a very basic defy action taking a token and depositing on a b pool right now the user flow requires you to go to four different interfaces and do eight different transactions you probably can see this doesn't really work if we want more people to use defi we need to simplify the full interaction with intents now you can just Define an enter beyol x with Y token and the solver ecosystem will determine the best route for doing this also 4367 bundling is not as great as it is perceived so let's say for example you want the user to use 437 smart wallets to be able to get to that end destination they still need to go to all of these different interfaces and then whenever they queue up the transactions for the next transaction they do not have the state because it's not been on Chang just yet so you can intercept all RPC providers inject a fork so you can have a user submit the second transaction and so forth but it's just not good ux so intents ultimately solve these problems a lot of people only talk about the execution of defi but to get to the execution of dii you need one an interface how the interface operates is it simply stating from token a to token B is it a text to action using a language model or whatever it may be saying I have X token and I want to generate the most apy and that needs to have the second part which is more not really talked about an interpretation layer so users defining what they would like and then trying to understand what it means to them actually execute on this and on the execution side such as cow swap Unis swap X 1in Fusion you generally have a solver Network so your request will go there and whoever can fulfill the order with the best route execution can then execute on behalf of this of the user what's the hype um one it's better ux two you'll have recommendation engines to create the user experience a lot more simple so instead of needing to go to all these different interfaces generally speaking you can just search I want to find the best API for X and Y so instead of needing to search for that manually yourself we'll have recommendation engines for providing this two is order efficiency so you'll see all of these different methods that solvers can do so for example many solvers now bring their own flow they hedge their positions than just onchain routing that ensures that they get most of the order flow than paying the gas cost for onchain routing itself as just some general thoughts for being a solver so this graph in the top right the solvers are basically taking your intention which is a human thing I want to go from X to Y and finding the best route to do it so you'll see that there's many people these are solvers have blurred out the names they're on top of the line and the solvers at the bottom underneath so see the the graph that's the the nicest one on top of the line that's us the people below are losing money in every single trade so these people are deliberately burning cash so they can obtain more volume so they can raise money so the solver game is now turning into there is a zero some game you will not make money as a solver because you're you're pushed in the direction to lose money so you can obtain more volume so you can push all the competition out there's also going to be right now there isn't but in the future there'll be a lot more solver offensiveness um one solver infrastructure already got hacked I think they lost 100K 150k not really public but the game changes now because solvers see the the order flow before it even hits the menol so we are the new me in a particular way and if you can get into that order flow and you know what what the order flow is you can use it to your advantage by not only just submitting orders but using in in other strategies and if you can take down other solvers and block all of their infrastructure you can take all of the order flow right you can also front run other solvers we've seen this um you can essentially they estimate that they're going to get X they're going to get y from X and at the point of the trade they're off by 5% because you can just push them and then they need to repay this back to the users so you force them to kind of lose more money over time and just push them out the competition where the future of solvers go um again Zero Sum so you need to have a network just building a solver itself isn't inherently valuable and maybe for the ecosystem and it gives the best rates for the user but if you're building a product uh yeah you're not going to make that much money from a silver so Silvers will turn more into traditional market makers we already have solvers that are coming such as flow Traders and so forth are bu building solvers inside of this ecosystem which the game now is me previous me guys versus traditional market makers and for us we are now creating a network we're looking for anybody that's interested in intents that would like to contribute to some research and we will be creating a full Network around solvers and the intent Network so just to summarize intents aren't as complicated as what they sound it's a nice word for describing stuff and confusing people um but simply put intents are I have a x and I won't why that's all it is and interpreting it tomorrow we're doing a workshop so if we're building a dii telegram bot using our API which is intent based API and releasing this within prod within an hour and a half if you want to use the API here's a QR code and if you are building on our infrastructure already feel free to plug into our Dev telegram chat if you got any questions feel free to let me know thank you