The problem Symphony solves

What Cadence Is

Symphony by Cadence is the first chain-abstracted perpetuals aggregator that enables a trader to execute any position across any chain at near-instant speed without the need to bridge assets, sign transactions, pay gas, understand chains, etc.

Liquidity Fragmentation

The DeFi ecosystem has reached an inflection point. Within the past two years, liquidity has been completely fragmented across chains. Ethereum dominance is down to nearly 50% since 2021 and with new chains popping up seemingly everyday, liquidity fragmentation will only exponentially increase over time.
Symphony's intent-centric architecture allows for the complete unification of liquidity among all chains and protocols and offers a simplified trade execution on-chain, all at low costs. Our solvers are able to source liquidity and efficient transaction execution wherever it may exist. This enables us to create a unified liquidity layer in crypto and rectify the fragmentation across DeFi.

Poor User Experience and Onboarding

The current onboarding process into crypto is tedious, hard-to-understand, and costs lots of time and money. This is not scalable for the future and the underlying tech needs to be abstracted away if DeFi is to ever become used by the next generation of users.
Cadence utilizes account abstraction, smart contract wallets, gas management, simplified user interfaces, bundled transactions for efficiency, session keys, and much more to drive this retail adoption. This enables the base layer infrastructure to be abstracted away from the user, removing the pain of bridging, swapping, confirming multiple transactions, etc.
Simply express your intent and trade anywhere instantly.

Challenges we ran into

Execution speeds without compromising security

We had to ensure the fastest possible speed of perpetual execution while also maintaining the highest levels of security. We do this with our innovative optimistic execution approach. The user submits their intent and locks their collateral on the source chain and a solver then opens the position with their own collateral but on behalf of the user (possible through our customizable smart account implementation). This optimistic execution step is followed by the slower security step where a cross-chain call back is sent via LayerZero to the source chain indicating whether or not the position was opened successfully, if successful the solver unlocks the initial user collateral, if unsuccessful, the user unlocks their original collateral.

Full user custody

Through our use of account abstraction we ensure that the user always has full custody of their assets. Even when the solver opens a position on behalf of a user, it is the user’s smart account which actually interacts with the DeFi protocol meaning that at any point the user can increase/decrease or close their position directly through their smart account independent of our services.

Position sharding

In order to support sharding, we must carefully track each shard instantiated in the initiate intent function in the solver router contract. Each callback made to the source chain is carefully matched to a valid shard and subsequently finalized, releasing the correct proportion of the total collateral to either the solver or user address. We keep a double mapping of intentHash to protocol address in both the smart account and solver paymaster to ensure that a shard is not executed twice on the destination chain.