What is happening in the intent-centric track? Which projects are worth paying attention to?

What's happening in the intent-centric track? Which projects are worth attention?

Author: Haotian; Source: Author’s Twitter @tmel0211

Recently, many projects have emerged in the Intent-centric track. In fact, they have always claimed to be promoting Mass Adoption and reducing the barriers for users to participate in DeFi. However, due to the paradigm shift caused by LianGuairadigm, they have been focused on the “intent-centric” track.

In the previous article, I explained in detail what intent-centric infrastructure is. In this article, I will take a panoramic view of the intent-centric track and let everyone intuitively feel what is happening in this track.

From the illustration in the previous article, it can be seen that the so-called intent interaction layer is actually a mystery “black box”. The user’s explicit demand, implicit preference, and other factors will become programmable after going through the black box, and then executed by various backend DeFi infrastructures, ultimately providing a result to the user.

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Users can express complex intentions in a minimalist way, and after a complex process in the backend that the user is unaware of, they will obtain a result. Hey, isn’t this what AA abstract wallets, MPC Wallet, and others have been advocating for Mass Adoption?

Why is it called Account Abstraction? What does it abstract? It abstracts multiple intentions such as “social recovery, multisig, gas payment” that users may have. However, the “intent” included in AA contract accounts is mostly based on the executable range of the Ethereum EVM virtual machine framework.

For example, gas payment can be implemented through methods called by proxy contracts. In theory, as long as the user has deposited a certain token in the proxy contract, it can be used to pay for gas, even if it’s not a native token. The logic for native tokens is just simpler.

Another example is multisig, which means designing multiple admins in addition to the owner in the contract account, and specifying triggering conditions (e.g., at least two out of three people agree). When executing, the contract will check whether the multisig conditions are met. If they are met, the execution will proceed; otherwise, it will be rejected.

You may have noticed that the way account abstraction simplifies user “intent” is to use a combination of contracts and proxy contracts to fulfill complex requirements. Therefore, AA accounts also belong to the category of intent-centric, but one is more concrete, and the other is still a macro concept, with Mass Adoption being the ultimate goal.

Implementation of “intent-centric” in the DeFi field

If we consider SMCs, MPC Wallet, etc. as part of intent-centric, you will surely think of projects like UniswapX, CoWSwap, 1inch, SolvProtocol, TeamUnibot, and many others, because they are essentially strategic plans for intent, such as gas-free transactions, anti-MEV measures, ERC3525 new standards, and automated execution. They just haven’t been explicitly described as such.

The offline pre-processing order mechanism introduced by UniswapX is an intent;

CowSwap’s implementation of anti-MEV features is based on offline pre-set intentions;

Solv has added complex financial intents such as conditional payments, fund references, role and permission management to the ERC3525 standard;

Unibot implements automated trading intents by pre-setting parameters and rules in the background of social chat applications.

In general, intent Centric can be divided into four categories based on its implementation:

1. Centralized intent, providing centralized client extension solutions, mainly built on social platforms, exchanges, and other backends using trading bots;
2. Structured intent, providing smart contract, agent contract combination, and offline expansion solutions, with preset parameters adapted for execution on the EVM virtual machine;
3. Distributed intent, using a new distributed collaboration paradigm, building intent Centric infrastructure with Sover+Executor, including modularized reconstruction of data layer, consensus layer, and interactivity;
4. Intelligent intent, serving as a carrier for AIGC as input+outcome, programming and executing complex intents of users through AI trained through DeFi.

Whether it is introducing off-chain node client extension data availability services, implementing complex requirements in the existing EVM framework through smart contracts or agent contract combinations, automating trading through various social platforms or exchanges using trading bots, or envisioning semantic implementations based on AIGC artificial intelligence in the future, they are all intent black boxes.

Because they are all trying to transform the original instruction paradigm into a declaration paradigm, fundamentally, they are all aiming for Mass Adoption.

Several Alpha intent projects: @anoma, a new intent infrastructure public chain; @dappOS_com, a multi-chain fund integration solution built on intent; Flashbot2.0 SUAVE, a decentralized network built specifically for MEV intent; @intentessential, providing specific DSL language and standards for intent; @BrinkTrade, a new DEX driven by intent.

Anoma, a new intent infrastructure public chain

Anoma is the project that first proposed the concept of intent-Centric. It raised $25 million in its third round of financing and has more than 30 investors. Anoma defines a new paradigm for a new public chain, which integrates various intents such as user transactions, privacy, and security. After being programmed by Solver, these intents are unified and executed by the gossip Network. The chain is based on a highly modularized foundation that can integrate various solutions such as zk and layer2, thereby achieving decentralized operation of multi-to-multi abstract intents.

This project belongs to a forward-thinking project that establishes new paradigm frameworks and standards. The overall framework has already exceeded the paradigm of the current EVM smart contract. The only drawback is that the implementation may take a long time, but it should be able to represent the ultimate form of the distributed intent market.

DappOS, a multi-chain fund integration solution built on intent

dappOS is an innovative product in the existing smart contract framework category. It is a web3 operating system incubated by Binance. It focuses on multi-chain fund integration, allowing users to directly access applications on any chain with their on-chain accounts. It has already established practical collaborations with more than 20 DApps such as GMX, Perpetual, and KyberSwap. In my opinion, it connects the fragmented multi-chain scenarios through the dappOS Network, while also building a decentralized incentive mechanism between Super nodes and Service nodes, solving the problem of large asset transfer losses in the past and avoiding the “always problematic” cross-chain bridges.

The intent of this project helps users improve the experience of multi-chain asset liquidity. After signing and authorizing, users will generate a virtual wallet (AA) on the DappOS chain, which interacts with various chains and DApps. Users only need one interaction to achieve multi-chain asset scheduling.

Flashbot 2.0 SUAVE is a decentralized network built for MEV intent.

Flash 2.0 SUAVE is an intent abstraction network specifically designed for MEV scenarios. It is easy to understand that MEV arbitrage is also the most rigid intent in the financial field. As we all know, Flashbot has almost monopolized the position in the Ethereum builder node and even in the cross-chain scenario. This makes MEV bots have to engage in Gas War to successfully capture profits. This not only harms the public chain user experience but also increases the risk of MEV operations and concerns about “interception” from miners. So what should we do? Flashbot has built a decentralized MEV-geth and MEV-relay service node, which is equivalent to an off-chain black box. MEV trading opportunities can be fully digested here, reducing the congestion impact on the public chain and maximizing the extraction of MEV value.

This project is a new paradigm in the MEV field. Its emergence may transform MEV from a disliked image in the past into a bot robot that promotes price stability on the chain. It’s quite interesting.

Essential provides specific DSL language and standards for intent.

Essential also tries to implement its own intent plan in the MEV field because what it describes in its documentation is similar to what SUAVE is doing. However, SUAVE itself does not focus on intent Centric, and it is estimated that the profit-making organization is not interested in packaging itself with new concepts. Essential can be regarded as one of the future competitors of SUAVE. It solves various problems in the MEV scenario by customizing DSL intent language, integrating AA account abstraction standards, modularizing intent layers, etc., and allocates control to participants such as Searcher, Builder, and Validator.

Brink Trade is a brand new trading system driven by intent.

Brink Trade is an automated intent order matching system specifically built on the smart contract framework, including Limit orders, Stop-loss orders, etc. It also has the concepts of Solver and Executor. The former refers to various contracts constructed in a decentralized manner, as well as proxy contracts, while the latter refers to market makers and institutions with the ability to execute these on-chain orders. It is a protocol focused on intent trading systems and can also be understood as a freely tradable market built by various types of open contracts. Without a doubt, the AA account wallet is also the foundation, and various contracts are integrated from the open-source market through SDK plugins provided by the platform.

It can be said that the limit orders implemented by DeFi are the most primitive intent trading. This is a conditional intent. When the price meets a certain condition, the transaction is triggered. There are also continuous intents, such as investing a certain amount of assets every 5000 blocks on Ethereum, or Multi-Step intents, and so on. Brink aims to fully leverage the composability of smart contracts within the EVM framework. Limit orders, stop-loss orders, etc. are also the core of high-frequency trading scenarios. If Anoma is a completely abstract intent, the practicality of Brink’s trading intent will be relatively higher.

Bob the Solver

The core of Bob the Solver is to abstract the Solver in the intent layer, and the Solver builds transactions, which are then executed by the Account Abstraction (AA) wallet. The Solver is trained by a machine learning model and can classify the user’s intent, match the corresponding path, and complete the transaction. The AA account can collect and organize transactions from the Solver and pay a certain amount of gas fees. The Solver can be an independent AIGC model tamed by AI, nested in various wallets and DApps, to mine and identify users’ intent.

The Solver, based on the training of artificial intelligence, directly opens up the imagination space of intent-centric concepts. It is equivalent to establishing a strong connection between the AIGC field and blockchain application innovation. The combination of the two can make great breakthroughs in developing intelligent Solvers. However, the challenge is how to make AI compatible with the complex DeFi financial logic and models at present, and how to efficiently extract the user’s intent that is valid and programmable for execution? Note: The above-mentioned projects include public chains, MEV, DEX, Wallet, etc., most of which are in the Alpha stage. I mainly analyzed the technical implementation logic behind them. Friends who pay attention to the development of the intent-centric track can take note, but this does not constitute investment advice.

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