DeFi has matured enough to provide multiple liquid venues for executing just about anything. Want to trade tokens? There’s Uniswap, Aerodome and Curve. Want to bridge to another chain? There’s Circle’s CCTP, LayerZero, Wormhole and Axelar. Want a loan? There’s Aave, Morpho, Fluid and MakerDAO/Sky. Inevitably, aggregators pop up to provide best execution services.

DEX and bridge aggregators employ sophisticated route-finding strategies and complex on-chain codebases to deliver the single best deterministic execution path for the user. The underlying markets they aggregate are typically already efficient enough that execution improvement is less than 1% in the vast majority of cases. Bear in mind, the aggregators are essentially separate protocols themselves and carry additional gas overhead and smart contract risk. One might think the juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze but more than $300 billion in volume ran through these aggregators in the 2024. Demand flows in directly as the aggregators become distinct execution venues in their own right and also through wallet integrations. MetaMask has processed over $47 billion in swap and bridge aggregation volume. The average execution improvement might just cover the 0.85% convenience fee it adds to these transactions.

Yield aggregation, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. Because DEX and bridge transactions settle quickly, there is an undisputed best path based either on pricing or time to finality. While swaps and bridges are one-night stands, yield-based transactions are long-term relationships. The volatile nature of interest rate curves in most yield-bearing protocols means that a single snapshot in time is essentially meaningless. And yet, this is how people are shopping for yield today, either as a yield farmer or as a borrower.

Existing yield aggregators like Beefy and Yearn use strategy vaults to capture yield through fixed execution paths to a small number of underlying protocols. More importantly, they are singularly focused on the yield bearing side of the equation. Morpho’s deprecated Aave optimizer offering might be considered a loan aggregator in the loosest sense since it overlaid its peer-to-peer marketplace with a dynamic interest rate that was bounded by Aave’s borrow/lend rate spread. A successfully matched ETH loan on its P2P marketplace would yield an execution improvement of 2.7% (0.07% APR less) for the borrower and ~36% for the lender (0.66% APR more). This improvement would be sustainable for both sides while the loan was still actively matched in Morpho’s P2P market. However, this execution improvement is solely within the confines of one venue (Aave) and not across multiple venues.

All existing yield bearing and borrow aggregation approaches do not allow for global execution venue access. At best, they optimize between two or maybe three protocols on the same chain. Rebalancing yield bearing strategies across multiple protocols is usually done only occasionally and due to limited execution paths, accessible upside is much more limited than what the global market expresses. The vast majority of all borrow and lend positions today are leaving money on the table and lots of it.

There are technical and ideological reasons for the status quo. For one thing, the best execution venue to capture the best yield could be on another chain. The logic to chain all this together deterministically in a series of smart contracts that chain hop and venue hop continuously, is too complicated and risky. The other reason is perceived safety. DefiLlama classifies protocols into “Safe” and “Degen” buckets. Even Morpho is considered a Degen protocol. It’s a subjective measure based largely on the Lindy Effect rather than any actual guarantees against loss. “Safe” in this context doesn’t mean you have any meaningful protection against loss of funds but rather that it hasn’t been significantly hacked yet.

An intent-based design for yield aggregation paired with economic guarantees can better capture the full spectrum of yield opportunities on-chain, cross-chain and off-chain. The first advantage is that execution is theoretically unbounded and delegated to a yield solver. Venue risk would still exist but it can be reassigned to the yield solver and backed up by a guarantor (like a restaking provider) through a bond in return for a portion of the execution improvement. This tranching of risk and yield capture can create a dynamic where borrowers and lenders have economic guarantees against loss while solvers and guarantors can go through price discovery for risk and strategy execution.

How would one measure execution performance continuously? Well, one would need a baseline measurement to see where the global average yield for a given market is on any given day. This can be communicated through an independent oracle. Yield captured above this baseline can be shared between the yield solver, the guarantor and the lender. A sophisticated lender can do the solving themselves.

Another key advantage of this design is that downstream execution logic lives outside the protocol, significantly reducing the smart contract footprint at risk. Many deterministic aggregators have lost millions due to large, continually mutating codebases and faulty downstream integrations.

What I’ve just described is Starta’s net-new lending protocol design. We have spent a year designing and implementing the key components. There is no single volatile rate curve within Starta but rather our own Global Rate Index oracle (powered by OpenLayer) that sees all major rate models. Borrowers get a loan that is always guaranteed to be competitive. Lenders can trade risk exposure for increased yield.

A multi-chain, multi-protocol loan aggregation layer has never existed before. We are changing that.