Trade across chains with Balanced Intents
Balanced launches intent-based trades to unlock the most efficient cross-chain trading experience.
The time has come for a more efficient trading experience. Today marks the official launch of Balanced Intents, which enables low-fee, zero-slippage, cross-chain trades with 5 second settlement times.
Starting with SUI and ETH on Arbitrum, Balanced Intents will soon unlock access to a wide variety of trades across supported blockchains.
Learn more about intent-based trades and how Balanced will roll it out over the coming months.
What are intents and why do they matter?
Intent-based trading unlocks near-instant trade settlement at a fraction of the cost. Here’s how it works at a high-level:
- Traders submit a swap request (an “intent” to trade).
- A solver (market maker) immediately releases the funds to fulfil the swap, with no slippage risk borne by the trader.
- The solver finds the most cost-effective path to rebalance itself.
You’ll trade with intent automatically, whenever it provides a better rate than the Balanced liquidity pools. Soon, you’ll also be able to trade between a wide variety of tokens that have no liquidity on Balanced.
When it comes to cross-chain intents, Balanced is in a prime position. Few options exist outside the EVM ecosystem due to the lack of market makers. But ICON can use its network-owned liquidity to act as the solver, and the relays and other infrastructure it demands are already available through ICON’s cross-chain framework.
As there’s a lot of competition within the EVM ecosystem, Balanced has launched a proof of concept between SUI and Arbitrum ETH, and an SDK for DEX aggregators is almost complete. The goal is to win all SUI<>ETH trades via these aggregators, which will drive more volume and fees to Balanced without people using the app directly.
If you trade on Balanced, the only interface change you’ll notice is the route – an indication that you get to enjoy zero slippage, lower fees, and 5 second transaction times for certain trades. And soon, access to a wide range of tokens on supported chains.
From proof of concept to full rollout
The ICON solver currently supports SUI<>ETH trades between Sui (via Cetus) and Arbitrum (via Uniswap). Intent-based trades are available for this pair in the Balanced app, and are coming to DEX aggregators soon.
As it’s a proof of concept, you can trade a maximum of $5,000 with intent until we gather adequate data to refine the system. Eventually, Balanced will be able to handle intents involving any token on these blockchains, with trading sizes up to $80,000.
Additional tokens will be available to trade early in the new year, starting with those you can already use as collateral: the SUI and ETH liquid staking tokens, and tBTC.
The time it takes to support additional chains will vary based on the blockchain and the exchange we use for it. Each new blockchain requires a liquidity module so the solver can recognise pools on the chain, and an execution module to enable the actions required to fulfil the intents.
As most EVM chains are similar, they should be quick to integrate, but specific factors like gas management or block times could increase complexity.
Development for non-EVM chains like Solana will take longer as the modules need to be built from scratch, but work is already underway to support intents on this chain.
Much like Balanced’s cross-chain connections, we expect support for new blockchains to start out slow and accelerate over time.
Trade with intent on Balanced
The release of Balanced Intents marks a new chapter in Balanced’s cross-chain trading experience. Swaps will become faster, cheaper, more diverse, and you can trade large amounts with zero slippage.
To experience the power of Balanced’s intent-based trading, visit app.balanced.network/trade and swap between SUI and Arbitrum ETH.
For any questions about intent-based trading, visit the ⚡️intent-trades channel on Discord.