IntentX Twitter Spaces - The Power Of Intents

In IntentX’s Twitter Spaces which took place on March 7, 2024, Levy from IntentX hosted Lafa from SYMMIO and Theseus from Thena to discuss innovations and partnerships of IntentX, SYMMIO, and Thena’s meta frontend service, and more! Read our notes below to learn more.

Background

Levy (Host) – Contributor at IntentX

Lafa (Guest) – Contributor at SYMMIO & Advisor at IntentX

Theseus (Guest) – Co-founder of Thena

IntentX – a next-generation OTC derivatives exchange offering perpetual futures trading

SYMMIO – a new trading primitive, enabling leverage trading of any asset on-chain

Thena – native liquidity layer & AMM on BNB Chain

SYMMIO’s Meta Frontend Service: Impact & Partnerships

Levy introduces Thena and SYMMIO as significant partners and mentions the recent announcement of their meta frontend service, highlighting its impact on the SYMMIO ecosystem, IntentX, and Thena’s use of this product in their DeFi suite.
Theseus says he oversees operations including product management, business development, and strategic planning. He describes Thena as the second-largest index on BNB, offering spot markets with concentrated liquidity, automated liquidity management for LPs, perpetual contracts backed by the SYMMIO tech stack, and an upcoming social DeFi product to engage users with rewards and trading competitions.
Lafa shares his background in crypto since 2013 and, his experiences with mining farms, and smart contract development since 2018. He expresses a desire for permissionless derivatives markets, which led to the development of a permissionless delivery system now live since September with IntentX and SYMMIO.
Levy talks about the relationship between IntentX and SYMMIO, describing SYMMIO as a global derivative settlement layer and IntentX as a frontend connection, facilitating user trades that are executed, settled, and cleared on the SYMMIO layer.
Lafa discusses the current state of SYMMIO, considering it early in development but highlights recent achievements like stop-loss features and looks forward to gasless and instant trades. He highlights the importance of these features for improving user experience and mentions planned updates for market maker capital efficiency.
Levy mentions the significance of gasless trading acknowledges IntentX and Thena as early adopters of SYMMIO and highlights the scale of the project’s impact on DeFi. He highlights IntentX’s efforts to enhance the RFQ model and improve user experience with additional features and UX parity with order books.
Levy notes the competitive trading experience IntentX offers and superior to order books in terms of speed and gas costs. He discusses IntentX’s focus on scaling their solver network and introducing new products, aiming to offer capabilities beyond what order books can structurally achieve.
Levy introduces the service front-end model, an open infrastructure layer for projects to tap into, which decentralizes the layer and adds modularity. He explains how Thena and other partners can leverage SYMMIO in various ways to improve the ecosystem and drive adoption.
Levy highlights the effort IntentX has put into improving the user experience, from data analytics to front-end features like stop loss and take profit. He discusses the inefficiency and lower quality ecosystem that would result from each front-end building similar features independently.
Levy outlines the partnership offer to front-end partners and select protocols, offering technological advancements in exchange for a share of revenues. This collaboration aims to improve the SYMMIO ecosystem by attracting more volume and driving adoption.

Partnership Perspectives: Enhancing User Experience in Decentralized Trading

Theseus acknowledges the significant upgrade in user experience the partnership will provide. He recounts how Thena was the first to adopt a semi-frontend and the improvements needed for a good user experience. He highlights Thena’s focus on smart contracts and the challenges of developing a new front-end.
Theseus explains how the service front-end model was an attractive opportunity for Thena, allowing them to provide a top-notch user experience without diverting resources from their core product development. He highlights the importance of focusing on their roadmap, core product development, and marketing.
Theseus expresses his expectations for the partnership to enable hypergrowth for Thena, particularly in terms of user onboarding and volume generation, highlighting the potential for organic traction without referral programs or trading incentives.
Levy says that Thena aims to tap into a different ecosystem and user base than IntentX could, highlighting the collaboration as mutually beneficial.
Lafa explains that the goal for SYMMIO was to outperform centralized exchanges and make decentralized Perps and derivatives trading mainstream. A key issue identified was the UX on centralized exchanges, which led to the idea of allowing anyone to build their front end atop SYMMIO. This approach enables exchanges without current technical capabilities to improve UX and be at the forefront without technical work.
Lafa describes the meta-frontend approach as a solution for exchanges to offer better UX and engage with SYMMIO more effectively, despite the general busy nature of the crypto space.
Levy shares IntentX’s vision of becoming more involved in infrastructure, aiming to partner with key players and contribute to the ecosystem. He highlights the potential for growth in on-chain derivatives, which currently represent a small fraction of the total derivatives market, seeing it as an opportunity for collective growth without competition over a small existing user base.
Regarding IntentX’s UX and experience, Levy addresses how they plan to differentiate from other front ends. He highlights the importance of good UX, which requires experience, feedback, and continuous refinement. He discusses overcoming early issues and moving towards scaling, noting the complexities introduced by their exchange model.
Lafa touches on the concept of modularity in DEX, focusing on UX and risk engines as key areas for improvement. He cites incidents of market manipulation and the need for transparent, modular risk engines in a decentralized context, where each market maker or solver has their own risk engine, leading to better overall system resilience.

SYMMIO-Orbs Collaboration: Enhancing On-Chain Derivatives and Social Finance

Levy highlights the importance of solver diversification and mentions SYMMIO‘s collaboration with Orbs Network, aiming to integrate and start a competition among solvers to optimize systems and offer various products.
Theseus reflects on his DeFi journey, starting with working on on-chain perps and recognizing the limitations of Oracle-based perps. He appreciates the model developed by Lafa and sees it as superior for on-chain trading, including perps, options, and spot trading.
Theseus explains choosing SYMMIO for integration due to its potential beyond current platforms, citing its ability to launch with a wide range of assets and not requiring liquidity incentives. He highlights focusing on user experience and the cost-benefit perspective.
Levy acknowledges the incremental improvements in the market but sees SYMMIO as a leap forward for on-chain derivatives, noting the time and innovation required to build new systems and products.
Theseus introduces Arena, a social finance product for creating trading competitions to onboard users and seed rewards. He sees this as a key strategy for user engagement and growth.
Theseus discusses leveraging on-chain perps for liquidity providers to mitigate risks associated with concentrated liquidity and to potentially profit from bullish positions on assets, highlighting the need for new use cases to scale perp demand.
Theseus mentions the focus on integrating Alpha with their spot markets to enhance returns and exposure for LPs, aiming to provide tools for funds and institutions to confidently invest in concentrated liquidity positions.

IntentX’s Vision: Enhanced Trading Experience, Sustainable Incentives, and Strategic Partnerships

Levy expresses excitement about the future of IntentX, focusing on creating a superior trading experience, engaging design, intuitive platform use, and analytics. They look forward to the launch of their token, aiming to create value for stakeholders. Levy highlights the partnership with Thena and the benefits of integrating into the Binance ecosystem, enhancing IntentX’s position beyond just a DEX.
Theseus adds that the intent to design products for onboarding the next million DeFi users is a key reason for partnering with IntentX. He highlights the importance of unique user experiences and feedback in product development to stand out in the crowded DeFi space. Theseus says that rethinking user onboarding strategies is essential for future growth.
Levy agrees, stressing their shared values and visions, and discusses the incentives landscape in DeFi. He questions the sustainability and ethics of protocols’ incentives, aiming for IntentX to offer a user-friendly approach that fosters long-term engagement rather than short-term metric boosting.
Theseus explains choosing Arena for its P&L-based incentives to address the issues. Arena allows for customizable trading competitions, engaging communities, and gamifying experiences without relying on short-term incentive structures.
This approach aims to provide value to all stakeholders, including protocols, traders, and LPs, by increasing platform engagement and volume.
Theseus discusses the modularity of their platform, allowing integration with other liquidity sources to ensure competitive pricing and retain users. He says that without offering the best possible trading conditions, platforms risk losing traders to competitors like 1inch, underscoring the need for comprehensive and attractive trading ecosystems.

Innovative Exchange Strategies: Maximizing User Engagement and Liquidity

Levy says that they are excited about launching incentives for IntentX, highlighting the benefits for the community with trading competitions, fee rebates, and improved referral systems aimed at attracting new users and promoting intent-based trading.
Levy mentions the excitement for the trade to earn feature and upcoming launch strategies, expressing anticipation for further collaborations, especially with Thena, to enhance service front ends.
Lafa says that most exchanges focus on market-maker incentives, but SYMMIO differentiates by targeting user-generated volume through direct incentives for market-making and user engagement, aiming for long-term sustainability without relying on perpetual incentives.
Lafa highlights that after onboarding, market makers generate enough revenue to eliminate the need for further incentives, highlighting a model that fosters genuine liquidity and user engagement over artificial incentives.
Levy supports Lafa’s point by noting the efficiency of their system in directing incentives to actual users, maximizing the impact, and fostering a competitive and scalable liquidity solution.
Lafa distinguishes SYMMIO’s approach by explaining that it allows market makers to offer arbitrage opportunities directly to users, reducing execution risk and promoting more organic volume generation.
Levy shares the interest of top-tier market makers in their platform, indicating a strong industry recognition and the potential for rapid growth as the platform evolves and scales.
Theseus introduces the upcoming release of Arena and the audit of their V3, which will introduce various types of AMMs and plugins for expanding the platform’s capabilities into a super financial app, enabling protocols to offer additional services like margin trading.
Theseus mentions plans for introducing fee discounts for token holders and expresses enthusiasm for the innovation and growth the new features will bring, aiming to replicate the centralized exchange model with the advantages of blockchain’s permissionless and open nature.
Lafa shares that they are expanding their current version, having recently launched on Blast, and plans for IntentX to follow soon. They aim to expand to more chains and are developing new features and onboarding more market makers and solvers.
Lafa highlights the introduction of multis solver front end and instant trading, which will enable a state channel for seamless transactions.
Levy mentions working closely on the IntentX side, launching on Blast, and planning marketing campaigns, including a Galxe campaign for traders. He announces UI redesigns and partnerships to enhance user experience and responsiveness, with Thena benefiting from these improvements.
Levy talks about upcoming incentives, airdrops, and an account abstraction solution ready for deployment on their home network, Mantle.

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Show Information

Medium: Twitter (Audio)
Show: IntentX Twitter Space
Show Title: The Power Of Intents: Transforming the Derivatives Landscape
Show Date: March 7, 2024