AutoFi-Nexus

AutoFi Nexus is an end-to-end system that autonomously manages cross-chain DeFi portfolios by combining (1) AI agents that decide when and what to do, (2) an intent-based atomic cross-chain execution layer, (3) ultra-low-latency on-chain state indexing, and (4) explorer-grade verification for transparency. The user experience: a user defines high-level “portfolio intents” (rules/targets) then the system continuously monitors, decides, and atomically executes rebalances, yield harvests, staking/unstaking and liquidation protection across chains — with a live dashboard showing provable on-chain evidence of each action.

AutoFI Nexus

Key value props:

Autonomous agents (Vincent) making and triggering decisions.

Avail “intents” to ensure cross-chain actions are atomic (all succeed or nothing).

Envio HyperIndex for millisecond-level data freshness.

Blockscout integration so every action has an on-chain, verified footprint.

System architecture — components & responsibilities

High level components (and how they connect)

User / Frontend

React app (connected wallets via standard web3 modal).

Lets users declare “intents” like target allocations, rebalance thresholds, or harvest cadence.

Subscribes to Envio for live updates and pulls Blockscout for on-chain proof pages.

Vincent Agents (Automation Engine)

Long-running agent processes (could be serverless or hosted VMs/containers) that:

Subscribe to Envio streams for real-time balance/APY/price data.

Evaluate user-defined intents and market signals (price, liquidity, gas).

Generate intents (high-level atomic action requests) when triggers occur.

Sign and submit intents to Avail Nexus SDK (or to a coordinator service that writes the intent to the Avail rollup).

Avail Nexus (Intent Execution Layer)

Receives intents (instructions like “swap X on chain A, bridge, deposit Y on chain B”) and coordinates atomic execution across chains.

Ensures either the full rebalance completes or no funds move (preventing partial, dangerous states).

AutoFi Core Smart Contracts (Solidity)

Orchestrator contracts deployed on each target chain to:

Hold or manage agent approvals (e.g., allowlist of agent relayers).

Provide on-chain hooks for intents to call into: swap adapters, vaults, staking contracts.

Emit clearly-structured events for Blockscout and Envio to index.

Safety modules: timelock, per-user/strategy caps, emergency pause.

Envio HyperIndex & GraPsCL (Indexing & Subscriptions)

Indexes on-chain state with millisecond latency.

Provides subscription channels to Vincent agents and the frontend for live balance/position/tx updates.

Blockscout (Explorer / Verification)

Verifies smart contract source & bytecode.

Displays events and transactions triggered by Vincent/AutoFi contracts so users can audit agent actions on-chain.

Relayers / Executors

Optional relayer network that actually signs and broadcasts transactions on the appropriate L1/L2 after intent resolution — in tandem with Avail’s execution guarantees.

Monitoring & Observability

Logs, metrics, tracing for agent decisions (why an action fired), indexing health, relayer status, and failed intents.

Alerting for anomalous agent behavior, failed executions, or oracle anomalies.

Runtime flow (detailed step-by-step)

User intent creation

Wallet → Frontend → user sets rule (e.g., “Keep 50/50 ETH/USDC across Ethereum + Polygon; rebalance when allocation deviates > 5%”).

Frontend writes a strategy object to AutoFi smart contract (or stores the intent in a strategy registry / off-chain DB + on-chain commitment).

Continuous monitoring

Vincent agent subscribes to Envio feeds for price, on-chain balance, vault APYs, and gas.

Envio’s HyperIndex pushes millisecond updates to agents and frontend.

Decision & plan generation

Agent evaluates logic: thresholds, slippage tolerance, estimated gas & swap fees, cross-chain latency.

Builds a plan: sequence of actions (swap on chain A, lock and intent swap/bridge, deposit on chain B) with parameters.

Intent creation & submission

Agent converts plan into an Avail intent object (structured, signed).

Submit intent via Avail Nexus SDK or through a coordinating contract/relayer to Avail.

Atomic execution (Avail)

Avail coordinates cross-chain steps; if any step would fail (insufficient liquidity, slippage, bridge failure), the transaction is reverted and no state changes occur.

On-chain operations

AutoFi core contracts receive the calls from Avail, perform swaps or deposits, and emit standardized events (ActionInitiated, ActionCompleted, RebalanceSnapshot, etc.) for auditing.

Live update & verification

Envio indexes the events immediately and pushes updates to the dashboard.

Blockscout stores verified transaction and contract verification details, which the UI links to for on-chain proof.

Agent bookkeeping

Agents log decision rationale (inputs, expected outcome, chosen gas limit) to an append-only off-chain store for audit and ML-training later.

How it was built — the nitty-gritty dev details Smart contracts

Language & framework: Solidity, hardhat (or Foundry) for builds, tests, and deployments.

Contracts:

StrategyRegistry — maps user → strategy struct (targets, tolerance, whitelisted agents).

AutoFiExecutor — receives Avail-mediated calls, executes swaps via DEX adapters, handles deposits/withdrawals to vaults.

Adapter pattern — one adapter per DEX / farm to isolate logic and reduce upgrade surface.

Gov & Safety modules — Pausable, Ownable/AccessControl, CircuitBreaker for emergency stops, per-strategy daily limits.

Events: carefully designed, structured events for Envio/Blockscout to index (use concise field names and canonical format).

Verification: contracts are verified on Blockscout (source + compiler settings) to allow explorer proof.

Vincent agent implementation

Language & runtime: Node.js/TypeScript or Python — agents run as services; decision logic is a mix of deterministic rules and ML models (if used).

Decision loop:

Subscribe to Envio WebSocket or gRPC feeds.

On new data: run deterministic checks (allocation deviation, APY delta, urgent liquidation risk).

If an event passes thresholds, simulate the action (using on-chain simulation RPCs or a local MEV-style simulation runner) to estimate gas & slippage.

Build and sign Avail intent.

Safety:

Multi-sign thresholds for high-value operations (e.g., intents above X USD require human approval or additional agent quorum).

Explainable logging: store exact inputs & a short natural language justification for the decision.

Avail Nexus integration

SDK usage:

Use Avail Nexus SDK to create intents rather than raw transactions. Intents are structured, typed objects with preconditions, timeouts, and required confirmations.

Include a dry-run step: Avail supports intent validation before execution.

Atomic semantics:

Intents specify rollback semantics and slippage caps so Avail enforces either full application or full rollback.

Envio HyperIndex & GraPsCL usage

Subscription:

Agents and frontends subscribe to Envio topics: token balances, contract events, vault yields.

Use Graph-like query endpoints for historical state and HyperIndex for real-time deltas.

Schema:

Maintain canonical schema to avoid inconsistent displays across frontend/agent: balances[user][chain][token], strategy[ id ].snapshot.

Blockscout integration

Verification:

After deployment, auto-verify contracts via Blockscout API (sends sources and metadata).

Event linking:

Frontend builds links to Blockscout tx and contract pages to let users inspect proof of actions.

On-chain proof:

Index Blockscout event logs to cross-reference with Envio; verify event hashes match.

Frontend

Tech: React, TypeScript, walletconnect / MetaMask, Envio subscription client.

UI features:

Real-time strategy dashboard (allocation bars, APYs, last actions).

Expandable evidence view per action (signed intent, tx hash, Blockscout proof).

Strategy editor with simulation preview (simulate expected post-rebalance state).

UX notes:

Show agent decision rationale and confidence score (so users trust automation).

Allow manual override and “pause agent” per strategy.

Dev tooling / CI

Testing:

Unit tests for contracts (Foundry or Hardhat + Waffle/Chai).

Integration tests using local forking (mainnet fork to simulate DEX liquidity).

Simulation tests for agents using Ganache/Hardhat fork and Envio stub responses.

Security:

Static analysis (slither), symbolic testing (mythril), fuzzing (foundry fuzz).

External audits for core executor contracts.

CI/CD:

GitHub Actions for test + contract verification (auto-verify on Blockscout via API).

Dockerized agent images with healthcheck endpoints.

Deployment:

Scripts that deploy to multiple chains (Ethereum, Polygon, etc.) and register contract addresses in Avail intent mapping.

Notable engineering hacks & pragmatic compromises

Intent abstraction to avoid bridging races: instead of writing bespoke bridging code, the system emits Avail intents that encode the entire cross-chain flow. This simplifies rollback and halves the edge cases around partial bridge success.

Adapter pattern for DEXs: instead of a monolithic swap manager, each DEX has a thin adapter contract. New DEXes are added by deploying a new adapter and registering it in the AutoFiExecutor. This reduces re-audit needs.

Off-chain decision logs for auditability: agent rationale is stored off-chain but hashed and committed on-chain in an AgentCommitments table so on-chain linkability is maintained without gas costs for verbose logs.

Simulation-first execution: before sending intents, agents do a local simulate & gas estimation against a forked node to avoid submitting doomed intents.

Dynamic gas budgeting: agent estimates and pads gas dynamically depending on current mempool conditions to reduce failed txs while controlling cost.

Security, attack surface, and mitigations

Primary risks & mitigations:

Compromised agent keys: store agent signing keys in HSMs / KMS; use threshold signatures or multisig for high-value intents; enforce whitelists & time locks.

Malicious or buggy agent behavior: sandbox agents, simulate before submit, and have guardian controllers that can pause agent actions.

Unexpected DeFi failures (slippage, oracle manipulation): use multiple oracles or medianized price feeds via Envio + on-chain checks; include slippage tolerances and liquidity checks.

Cross-chain replay / partial exec: Avail atomic intents address this by design; still include idempotency tokens and timeouts.

Contracts vulnerability: use thorough audits, restrict upgradeability (proxy admin multisig), and implement circuit breakers.

Privacy leak from live index: limit what Envio pushes publicly; keep sensitive user decisions hashed on-chain and only reveal necessary data in dashboard.

Observability, auditing & UX for trust

Decision provenance: each action links to:

Agent inputs (Envio snapshot),

Intent payload & signature,

Avail intent execution trace,

Final tx hash on Blockscout.

Replayable audit: saved snapshots + agent decisions let auditors replay the exact sequence under a forked mainnet environment.

User controls: opt-in automation levels (auto, semi-auto, manual), per-strategy caps, and pause/withdraw buttons.

Testing & staging specifics

Local forking scenarios:

Use mainnet fork to test rebalances across real DEX pools.

Stress tests: synthetic flash crashes to exercise liquidation protection.

Chaos testing:

Introduce relay failures, delayed Envio updates, and Avail intent rejections to verify safe rollback & user notifications.

Penetration tests:

Red-team the agent logic: try to trigger edge cases where multiple concurrent intents interact.

User testing:

Simulated “paper trading” mode that runs agents against historical data (backtesting) and produces expected vs actual results.

Partner integration benefits (practical)

Vincent SDK: gives an agent orchestration API and standard for autonomous decisioning — reduces time to implement continuous monitoring and complex decision flows.

Avail Nexus: removes the need to custom-implement safe cross-chain bridging and atomicity; saves engineering effort and lowers risk.

Envio HyperIndex: drastically reduces agent reaction times compared to traditional subgraphs — enables near real-time actions.

Blockscout: offloads contract verification + explorer UI, making audits and user trust easier.

All of this is summarized in your project brief.

AutoFI Nexus

Limitations, tradeoffs & future work

Limitations / tradeoffs:

Complexity & trust: introducing agents increases attack surface; users must trust the agent framework and relayers.

Gas & cost: cross-chain atomicity can be more expensive (Avails intents may involve more orchestration).

Third-party dependency risk: outages in Avail or Envio could temporarily stall automation.

Regulatory / compliance: fully autonomous finance may have regulatory implications in some jurisdictions.

Future work:

Add ML models to optimize rebalance timing and fee minimization (with guarded retraining).

Decentralize agents via a reputationed agent marketplace (multiple agents compete to service strategies).

On-chain attestations of agent rationale (ZK proofs for decision constraints).

Expand supported chains and yield sources; improve UX for risk metrics and strategy templates.

Example concrete artifacts you can point to / produce next

If you want, I can produce right now (choose any and I’ll generate immediately; no waiting):

A proposed Solidity interface for AutoFiExecutor + event schema.

A TypeScript skeleton for a Vincent agent decision loop (Envio subscription → simulate → sign intent).

A JSON schema for the “strategy” object that the frontend stores.

A testing plan with specific forked test cases and metrics to measure reliability.