Intents & Liquidity
When a borrower draws down an approved financing, the money doesn’t come from a single undifferentiated pool balance — it comes from intents. An intent is a standing offer of liquidity from a pool at a specific rate. This page explains how intents fill a draw-down.
What an intent is
An intent is a pool’s commitment to lend:
Source pool
The financing adapter (pool) providing the capital.
Available amount
How much of the intent is still unfilled.
Rate
The rate at which this capital is offered.
Validity window
The time range during which the intent can be used.
A single market can have many intents at different rates, from one or several pools.
Cheapest-first filling
When a borrower draws down, Atomica fills the requested amount from intents sorted by rate, ascending — the cheapest capital is used first, then the next cheapest, and so on until the draw-down amount is covered:
Each intent fills to capacity before the next is used.
Filling stops once the draw-down amount is reached — leftover intents stay available for others.
The borrower’s effective rate is the blended rate of the intents that filled the loan.
Automatic selection
In the standard borrower flow, intent selection is automatic. The app picks the optimal set of intents and packs them into the draw-down transaction; the borrower simply confirms. A read-only preview may show the selected capacity, the number of intents used, and the resulting rate. Manual intent picking exists only as an advanced option.
Guardrails
Because intents are priced offers with limited capacity, a draw-down respects the request’s terms:
Rate ceiling
For interest-accrual requests, intents priced above the borrower’s ceiling are not used (and if that’s all there is, the draw-down fails with rate exceeded).
Minimum amount
If the achievable fill is below the request’s minAmount, the draw-down is rejected rather than partially settled.
Capacity
If total usable intent capacity is short, the draw-down either partially fills or fails with lack of capacity.
Validity
Expired or not-yet-valid intents are skipped.
Because on-chain intent capacity can be consumed by other borrowers between approval and draw-down, the final fill is only known once the transaction settles — see Financing Request Lifecycle.
Where intents come from
Intents are created on the liquidity side of a market. LPs supply capital into a pool, and the pool (arranged by a Curator) makes that capital available as intents. This is how Arenas connects passive LP deposits to program-specific borrower demand without either side pricing the other manually.
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