From its inception in 2019, it’s always been ParaSwap’s vision to be a key contributor to a decentralized, integrated, and massively adopted DeFi ecosystem.
Today, we have two major announcements taking us several steps forward in this direction, marking the present and the future of the execution of this vision.
The Present: Announcing ParaSwap Augustus V6
ParaSwap Augustus V6 is a major update to ParaSwap’s V5 aggregator smart contract, which introduces three main improvements that will lead to an upgraded trading and developer experience:
- Unbeatable Gas Efficiency: the V6 design was focused on optimizing gas consumption along the entire aggregation process. As a result, V6 is the most gas-optimized contract in the aggregator ecosystem, being on average 14.8% more efficient than Augustus V5 and 6.6% more efficient than the current second most efficient aggregator. This implies that users who traded on Augustus V5 and the second most efficient aggregator in the past 90 days would have saved $2.2M and $496,000, respectively, in gas fees if their trades were processed through Augustus V6.
Optimized gas efficiency should lead to ParaSwap being selected as the source for a trade more often in environments such as meta-aggregators, DEXs, and AMMs using aggregators to do trades and wallets offering simple swap UIs to their users. - Integration Scalability: V6 improves the speed at which new liquidity sources can be integrated into ParaSwap. While DexLib already gives developers an independent way to request integrations into our aggregator with +155 integrations, V6 significantly improves the process of reviewing and approving new liquidity sources. The less complex system will expedite new liquidity sources to be added much faster to ParaSwap.
- Trade Safely: V6 also introduces additional checks to minimize trade reversals and maximize reliability, resulting in a smoother trading experience for API partners and users.
By introducing additional safety measures for unique tokens like rebase, and new or highly volatile tokens, ParaSwap offers increased peace of mind when trading while reaping all other benefits.
In the last three months, 70% of ParaSwap’s volume came from partners using ParaSwap API. By improving our pricing, their share of transactions should increase, resulting in a significant growth in trading volume in the foreseeable future as more partners upgrade to the new contract.
We are extremely proud of the team for this incredible achievement and excited to see its impact on the trading experience for millions of users. Augustus V6 will be fully deployed to all supported chains in the coming weeks.
The Future: The Dawn of Decentralized Intents
While the new aggregator contract is a great step toward the usability of blockchain trading, in recent months, a key innovation line has taken off to make the experience even more seamless: intents-based architectures.
In today’s blockchain designs, users must declare the exact transaction a protocol should perform on their behalf, specifying most parameters and owning the consequences. To simplify the trading experience, intents-based solutions allow the user to declare the outcome of the interaction rather than the specific steps that should be followed.
As said by Adam Boudjeema, imagine you’re at a restaurant. You order a dish from the menu instead of telling the chef every step of cooking your meal. The chef knows what to do.
Intents enable many other features beyond usability improvements, such as account abstraction, gasless interactions, off-chain alternative quotes for liquidity, cross-chain swaps, chain abstraction, and many more. Thanks to these opportunities, they’re expected to play a big role in the mass adoption of blockchain applications, as they remove some of the most significant blockers for the average user.
Issues with current intents architectures
Our research has identified that all existing intents-based solutions suffer from a lack of trustlessness and decentralization. These issues come down to three key factors:
- Single-point matching engine: Even if different liquidity quotes are given from many parties, there’s always a single entity connecting the user requesting the quote with the final amount provided. Thus, an essential part of the intent computing architecture tends to be hosted on centralized solutions.
- Permissioned whitelisting: Despite multiple parties participating in price auctions, not everyone can onboard permissionlessly in the system to provide liquidity. Instead, a manual process decides who gets to participate in the system. In most cases, this is the same party hosting the previously mentioned centralized matching engine, adding a two-point centralization risk.
- Trust-required code environment: As a single closed entity is running the source code, there is no easy way to verify that the system is acting in a fair and neutral manner. This differs from systems where different entities can compile and run the architecture.
These bottlenecks prevent the conditions of Decentralized Finance from being met. To address this, we have been researching a solution to make the intents ecosystem as trustless and seamless as possible. We’re committed to building this missing piece of critical infrastructure, a decentralized layer for decentralized Intents, dInts.
To understand what needs to be built to create a Decentralized Intents ecosystem, we need to understand how the elements in an intents blockchain setting interact whenever an intent is submitted:
- End User: The person who wishes to place their order. For most users, the intent trading experience will be no different from that of the usual DEX or Aggregator experience, thanks to the presence of relayers.
- Relayers: The main role of a relayer is to interface between the End User and the solver. Relayers are not essential for an auction submission, and advanced users can interface with the solver directly without going through one. The role of a relayer is the most flexible one out of all of the parties, but every relayer will have to:
a. Receive trades from an end-user
b. Provide quality control of the requests to ensure they are valid (the user has the balance needed to fulfill the trade, for example)
c. Forward the fulfilled intent from the network to the end user. - Auction Participants: These entities interact with the solver to fulfill intents. They participate in the network to deliver the best possible rates for End Users.
For most protocols, the key centralization point is the solver. For that reason, a Decentralized Intents Layer (DIL) is necessary to provide a trustless order-flow-solving infrastructure that relayers can access, and builders can customize to their needs.
Introducing Portikus
Portikus will be a decentralized intents-solving network, a key piece of infrastructure in the intents ecosystem, fulfilling the decentralization and trustlessness principles of DeFi.
By following the dINT structure instead of the centralized solving model, a few new advantages are unlocked from this modularity, such as but not limited to:
- Relayers can customize their intent experience relative to others while still tapping into the existing Decentralised Layer, being able to bring innovation to the space without losing on the network effects.
- Users can enjoy significant quality-of-life improvements to their trading experiences, such as MEV protection, Gasless Swaps, or native account abstraction, if the relayers configure their requests correctly.
The launch of Portikus will be phased in five stages in the coming months to onboard various participants into the ecosystem and ensure focus and a smooth and secure experience for all.
- Stage 1 — Doric: users will be able to interact with an intents DEX-like experience with usability improvements like gasless transactions and MEV protection.
It will be powered by ParaSwap’s aggregator and the first iteration of the Portikus decentralized auction engine while, at this stage, it is still being centralized. - Stage 2 — Ionic: introducing extra liquidity sources, external solvers, and market makers beyond ParaSwap, all trying to beat the aggregator’s price.
- Stage 3 — Corinthian: launch of the decentralized intents layer testnet network, allowing ecosystem projects to test and integrate the auction engine in their own protocols.
- Stage 4 — Palladium: introduction of a payment model such as Payment for Order Flow (PFOF), Commission-based, Subscription-based, etc, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the network.
- Stage 5 — Vitruvius: upon scaling the node operator set and the first protocols leveraging the network are launched, full deployment to mainnet and realizing the Portikus vision of decentralized intents (dInts) transactions.
We invite anyone who can help us make this a reality to collaborate with us and build in the open future compatible with the core principles that both ParaSwap and the EVM ecosystem are built upon: Open-source, trustless, and secure.
If you are a builder or project interested in helping build this next stage of trading in DeFi, do not hesitate to reach out and help push forward the next stage of DeFi!
Engage
If you want to be part of the community building Decentralized Intents into reality, visit portikus.xyz and mint the Archway Heliasts OG NFT on Zora, available until February 20th.
