Symphony
Symphony is a decentralized finance (DeFi) project described as an "agentic financial layer" designed to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to autonomously execute transactions and trading strategies across multiple blockchain networks. The platform's infrastructure aims to abstract the complexities of DeFi, such as gas fees, bridging between chains, and wallet management, to create a more accessible and efficient environment for both human traders and autonomous systems. The project was previously known as Cadence Protocol before rebranding in 2024. [1] [2]
History
Origins as Cadence Protocol
Development on the project's core infrastructure began around late 2022. [3] Operating under the name Cadence Protocol, the team launched its testnet on the Canto Testnet on July 11, 2023. In early 2024, the project released technical details about its "Solver Network," an architectural component designed for system efficiency, and announced plans to integrate account abstraction features. [1]
On January 16, 2024, Cadence Protocol conducted the Token Generation Event (TGE) for its native token, $CAD, through a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP). Shortly after, on January 22, 2024, the project announced the closing of a strategic angel funding round, stating the capital would be used to build out its perpetuals and omnichain execution capabilities. The amount raised and the investors involved were not publicly disclosed. The protocol continued to expand its ecosystem, integrating the Injective ($INJ) asset in May 2024 and providing guides for users to bridge assets to its network. [1]
Rebranding and Launch
In August 2024, the team began to publicly transition the project's branding, unveiling "Phase 1" of the launch plan for Symphony. The official announcement of the Symphony Network occurred on October 15, 2024, positioning the project as "The Final Frontier for DeFi." Following the announcement, the project introduced a community governance system, publishing a guide on October 16, 2024, to instruct token holders on how to participate in voting on proposals. [1]
Recent Developments
In October 2025, Symphony announced several key partnerships and integrations. On October 9, the project revealed a strategic partnership with Pendle Finance to develop "agentic yield strategies," enabling AI agents built on Symphony to compose and execute complex strategies involving Pendle's Principal Tokens (PT) and Yield Tokens (YT). On October 22, Symphony announced that trades executed through its "Symphony Terminal" were eligible for the Gains Network's "$400K Trick or Trade" competition on the Arbitrum network, signaling its integration within the Arbitrum ecosystem. [3]
On October 24, 2025, in response to a notable AI trading experiment known as "Alpha Arena," Symphony positioned itself as the platform to make similar AI-driven trading capabilities widely available and opened a public waitlist. The project framed the experiment as a proof-of-concept for its core mission, stating, "Symphony has spent three years building the rails for autonomous systems to execute for themselves and soon, for everyone." [3]
Core Technology
Symphony's infrastructure is composed of six interconnected systems designed to manage user intents, execute transactions non-custodially, and maintain state across different blockchains. These systems work in concert to provide a seamless experience for both users and AI agents. [2]
Cortex
Cortex is a permissionless agent network that serves as the foundational layer for non-custodial, cross-chain trade execution. It is designed to facilitate capital-efficient trading by utilizing atomic flash loans. This network allows both human users and autonomous AI agents to coordinate, optimize, and scale their DeFi operations. [2]
Symphony Smart Wallet
The Symphony Smart Wallet is a universal, cross-chain crypto wallet built on the principles of ERC-4337 account abstraction. Its primary function is to simplify the user experience and enable secure delegation to AI agents. Key features include:
- Agentic Execution: The wallet uses scoped session keys and delegated permissions, which allow AI agents to perform transactions non-custodially on a user's behalf within predefined limits.
- User Experience: It abstracts away common DeFi friction points, such as the need to manually manage gas fees, bridge assets between chains, or approve frequent wallet pop-ups for transactions.
- Security and Accessibility: The wallet architecture enhances security and supports social login options, lowering the barrier to entry for new users. [2]
Intent Pooling Engine (IPE)
The Intent Pooling Engine (IPE) is a hybrid, permission-free marketplace where users and agents can submit "intents"—high-level descriptions of a desired outcome, rather than a specific transaction. Whitelisted agents, referred to as Solvers in earlier project literature, stake tokens to competitively bid on executing these intents. The agents aim to find the most efficient cross-chain execution path. The IPE employs a game-theoretic model with proof-of-lock security to ensure agents are held accountable for successful execution. This system is designed to streamline DeFi interactions by automatically sourcing liquidity, executing optimal strategies, and mitigating risks like Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and denial-of-service attacks. [2] [1]
Maestro
Maestro is an omnichain user state management protocol. It functions as a comprehensive ledger that tracks all activities associated with a user's Symphony smart wallet across the entire DeFi ecosystem. This includes trades, positions in various protocols, and overall asset allocations. Maestro provides this unified user state information in real-time to developers and decentralized applications (dApps), enabling them to build more sophisticated and context-aware applications. [2]
The Orchestrator
The Orchestrator acts as the central coordination hub for the entire Symphony ecosystem. It receives high-level intents from users or AI agents and choreographs their execution by integrating all other Symphony components. Its responsibilities include building, validating, bundling, and dispatching optimized and secure agentic transactions. The primary goal of the Orchestrator is to abstract away the complexity of multi-step, cross-chain strategies, ensuring they are executed smoothly and efficiently from start to finish. [2]
The Sharding Engine
The Sharding Engine is a parallelized execution engine created to address the issue of liquidity fragmentation in DeFi. When a user initiates a large trade, the engine splits it into smaller, optimized "shards." These shards are then executed simultaneously across various protocols and chains where liquidity is most favorable. This process allows traders to access deeper liquidity pools, which results in lower price slippage and better execution prices. In effect, the Sharding Engine helps unify fragmented markets into a single, cohesive omnichain liquidity layer for users of the Symphony platform. [2]
Symphony AI Platform
Symphony AI is the primary user-facing application of the ecosystem, designed to make advanced, AI-powered trading accessible to a wider audience. The platform integrates the underlying technological components into a cohesive user interface. [2]
Sympson AI Assistant
Sympson is the platform's AI assistant, described as an "agentic trading genie." It is designed to guide users, interpret their natural language commands, and help them formulate and execute complex trading strategies without needing deep technical expertise. [2]
Features for Traders
The Symphony AI platform offers a suite of tools and features aimed at enhancing the trading experience:
- AI-Powered Signals: Users can trade based on top technical signals generated by AI for any supported asset.
- Automated Strategies: The platform allows users to create and deploy automated trading strategies using AI.
- Optimized Trade Execution: The system automatically finds the best opportunities and execution paths to open and close trades.
- Gamification: A rewards system and leaderboard are included to incentivize trading activity and user engagement.
- Simplified Onboarding: The platform features an instant onboarding process and provides tools for users to track their performance.
- Cross-Chain Access: Traders can interact with any supported chain without needing to manually bridge assets. [2]
Developer Ecosystem
Symphony provides infrastructure, or "rails," for developers to build, deploy, and integrate their own AI agents. The platform is designed to give these agents secure, autonomous, and powerful execution capabilities across the DeFi landscape. Developers can connect their agents to Symphony's systems via an API to initiate trade intents and other financial operations. [2]
The platform exposes an API endpoint for agents to programmatically open trades. An agent can send a POST request specifying parameters such as collateral, leverage, and advanced order options like trigger price, take-profit, and stop-loss levels.
Partnerships and Integrations
Symphony has established partnerships and integrations with several projects in the DeFi space:
- Pendle Finance: A strategic partner enabling the development of agentic yield strategies on Pendle's markets.
- Gains Network: An integration partner, allowing trades from the Symphony Terminal to be eligible for Gains Network's trading competitions on Arbitrum.
- Privy: A partner listed on the project's official website, likely related to wallet infrastructure and user onboarding.
- Arbitrum: The project operates within the Arbitrum ecosystem.
- Injective: Integrated as an asset during its time as Cadence Protocol.
- Canto: The initial testnet for Cadence Protocol was deployed on the Canto Testnet.
These collaborations support Symphony's goal of providing broad, cross-chain functionality for its users and their AI agents. [2] [3] [1]
Tokenomics
Under its former name, Cadence Protocol, the project launched a native token with the ticker $CAD. The Token Generation Event for $CAD took place on January 16, 2024. As of late 2025, public information regarding a new token under the Symphony brand or a migration plan for $CAD holders has not been detailed in the provided sources. [1]