Urani's Intents
Last updated
Last updated
Intents are a type of orderflow auction mechanism employed in decentralized finance to help mitigate the negative externalities associated with , such as high slippage from sandwich attacks.
They represent what a user wants to achieve when interacting with a protocol and can incentivize a healthy free market, allowing users to capture the value they create.
At Urani, an intent is a piece of data binding programmatic commitments to a user's request. It specifies the asset pair, amount to trade, and expiration, among other things.
This data initially appears as JSON, but internally, it's converted to Solana's native data types ().
Moreover, users submit a signed "intent to trade" message instead of directly submitting a trade, allowing the Urani Protocol to execute the trade on the user's behalf.
The Urani Protocol then aggregates these intents into discrete (rather than processing orders on a first-come, first-served basis - ), and assigns them to .
Once the batch period ends, the optimal execution for each order is settled on-chain.
Here is a high-level explanation of how RQFs work:
1️⃣ The investor specifies the details of the trade they want to execute (e.g., the type and quantity of the asset they want to buy or sell, and any specific terms or conditions).
2️⃣ The RFQ is sent to selected dealers or market makers, who respond with quotes that include the price at which they're willing to buy (bid) or sell (ask) the asset, trade size, and expiration time.
3️⃣ The investor reviews the quotes and decides which one to accept, negotiate further, or decline.
In traditional finance, , particularly in over-the-counter (OTC) markets like bonds, currencies, and derivatives. When a trader wants to buy or sell an asset, they can send an RFQ to multiple dealers or market makers to get quotes for the desired transaction.
Although RFQs and intents operate similarly and are often interchangeable, Urani's intent model differs fundamentally in its direction, democratization of surplus, and focus on the MEV agents (and yes, Urani's intents have some resemblances to ).