In the evolving Web3 landscape, a new user interaction method is developing rapidly - Intent-Centric. Without losing autonomy, users only need to express what intentions/demands they want to get results, and the complex paths and implementation processes involved are handled by protocols/third-party solvers.

Just like if I want to buy a "Far Ahead" now, I only need to fill in my name, address, and phone number in the e-commerce mall to place an order, sign for the courier and get the physical object without having to worry about logistics and delivery. Or, just like saying to ChatGPT "help me summarize the Ethereum white paper in 1,000 words", it can do it for you.

Intent-Centric can greatly enhance the user experience, composability and privacy of the current Web3.

From the user experience perspective, the essence of Intent-Centric is to simplify the user experience. By emphasizing "goals and results" rather than "processes", users do not need to be exposed to complex interaction processes.

From the perspective of composability, protocol applications customized for user intent can achieve maximum compatibility, thereby fostering a richer and more cohesive Crypto ecosystem.

From a privacy perspective, users can avoid revealing detailed information or data about themselves by simply expressing their intentions.

Just like the online shopping example above, in Web2, we can experience all kinds of smooth operations and minimalist user experience design. But in Web3, the high threshold of user experience has become one of the important reasons that hinder the large-scale adoption of Web3. Even the simplest Swap requires tedious operations such as wallet creation and management, wallet connection, contract signing, etc., and may also cause excessive slippage due to factors such as MEV and poor liquidity.

Therefore, the emergence of Intent-Centric, which breaks down user needs and helps execute them, is by no means accidental. Instead, together with Account Abstraction, TGBot, and MPC wallet, which are also designed to simplify the user experience, it continues to push the narrative of "Web3 mass adoption" to new heights.

Intent-related infrastructure

Account Abstraction

Account abstraction was a popular concept before, emphasizing that users should use more specific smart accounts to do more specific things.

Finalizing the account abstraction of ERC-4337, realizing smart accounts, giving more login methods, social recovery and other capabilities, lowering the threshold for new users to enter Web3 applications, allowing new users to enter applications that can express intent. In addition, smart account bundled transactions, gas payment and other capabilities can also better realize Intent-Centric. If each interaction requires authorization, this will inevitably lead to a cumbersome and slow process of realizing user intent.

Therefore, Smart Accounts have the potential to become the true front-end entry point for Intent-Centric.

The leading wallet projects currently working on achieving account abstraction include: Safe Wallet, Biconomy, ZeroDev, Argent, Ambire, Sequence, etc.

AI

Integrating AIGC similar to Siri and ChatGPT in the wallet allows users to express their intentions by talking to AI. This may be the final form of Intent-Centric. Moreover, AI built on a large number of large language models is also the most effective tool for deciphering user intentions. Only by deciphering the user's intentions can third-party solvers be more clearly executed. This year's ETHGlobal Paris hackathon winning project Bob the Solver is a good example. The old MPC wallet Particle Network is also working on such projects.

Although the ideal is great, it is still some distance away from being realized.

As of now, it is difficult for AI to be 100% accurate in capturing user intentions, and it is difficult for users to express more complex intentions. For example, I expressed my intention to AI: based on the average price, mint an NFT in the XX NFT series, but my account balance cannot be less than $5.

This sentence contains both explicit and implicit intentions.

The explicit intent is “To mint an NFT, my balance cannot go below $5,” which makes my intent very clear.

The implicit intent is “based on the average price”, which is only a rough description of the intent. Obviously, the AI ​​must also understand and analyze the following questions:

• What is the average price?

• Which platforms are being referenced?

MEV

MEV (Miner Extractable Value) is a long-standing challenge in DeFi, with users often facing adverse outcomes as miners exploit their positions at the expense of ordinary users.

However, the realization of user intent needs to be outsourced to the solver, so the MEV generated by transactions in Intent-Centric is also one of the issues that need to be focused on.

Currently, Essential and Flashbot SUAVE are trying to solve this problem.

Intent-Centric Infrastructure

Juvix

Juvix is ​​a programming language designed by the Intent-Centric public chain Anoma. Developers can use Juvix to easily implement application logic containing public, secret and encrypted data.

Bob the Solver

Bob the Solver is working on an AI solver and an account abstraction wallet. The AI ​​solver is equipped with a machine learning model that can classify the user's intent. For example, if a user expresses the intention to purchase a specific NFT, the solver will accurately decipher the intent and find the best path to achieve the desired result. After that, the solver will forward the intent and the best path to the account abstraction wallet, which will execute the transaction according to the best path.

OK contract

OKcontract created a "low-level intent" standard to simplify the difficulty for developers to integrate transactions into any web page/application.

Delegatable

Delegatable is a tool and framework for implementing universal delegation on Ethereum, enabling users to delegate friends/third-party agents to perform actions on their behalf without having to pay gas fees or conduct transactions. The agent batches transactions, which can reduce gas fees and improve efficiency.

DApps with specific intent

It is worth mentioning that Intent-Centric did not appear in Web3 after Paradigm published its research article; on the contrary, protocols for executing user intent have existed for some time. In different vertical fields of Web3, there are already many protocols or functions for specific intents.

In the oldest field of Web3, DeFi, users’ intentions are usually oriented towards generating revenue and utility. Based on this intention, many DeFi DApps can be called the predecessors of the Intent-Centric narrative.

For example, the most familiar aggregators such as 1inch and Blur are designed to help users save the trouble of finding the best trading path and profit strategy. Users only need to enter their trading intentions, and the smart contract will arrange the best route. They only need to make the final decision.

Another example is Unibot and other TGBots that became popular some time ago. They cleverly transform complex on-chain operations into decision-making in Telegram chat options. Users can select the corresponding options to perform transactions, interact with airdrops, snipe the opening of the market, and other operations that are relatively complex for new users.

As for issues such as MEV and transaction slippage, some new and old DeFi protocols are helping users with their intention of "better transactions", for example,

• CoWSwap, 1inch Fusion, UniswapX: off-chain matching, transactions are completed on-chain by the solver, complex transactions do not require multiple payments of gas fees, and no gas fees are required if the transaction fails.

• Seaport: A fully decentralized alternative to Opensea, with off-chain matching and on-chain transactions completed by the solver. Users do not need to pay gas fees when placing orders.

• Symmio: An intent-based on-chain peer-to-peer derivatives trading platform. When a user sends a transaction, all other users can see the transaction information. If they accept the transaction, they become the counterparty/solver. There is no capital pool involved in this process. What A earns is what B loses.

• BASED Markets: An on-chain trading platform based on the Symmio trading framework.

• BananaHq: Use Intent-Centric, ERC-4337 and zero-knowledge proof to build a smart wallet to lower the threshold for new users to enter Web3.

Universal solution

The blockchain-centric architecture represented by Ethereum today provides a key property: programmable settlement, which is sufficient to support simple specific intent DApps, but difficult to implement complex intents. Some projects are creating general solutions for Intent-Centric, providing the necessary properties for any specific intent DApp from the beginning.

Anoma

Anoma is an Intent-Centric + privacy-preserving public blockchain for counterparty discovery, resolution, and multi-chain atomic settlement. It is suitable for building DApps on it that involve users issuing an unlimited number of complex intents.

Anoma has raised a total of approximately US$57.8 million, including a successful Series A round of US$26 million in November 2021, with a project valuation of approximately US$260 million. Although Anoma is still in its early stages, its white paper dates back to 2018. After years of incubation and evolution, it has an absolute lead in time and technology in the Intent-Centric field.

The core workflow of Anoma includes the following steps:

• User Interaction: Users can send transparent, private, or protected intents to Anoma’s “Intent Propagation Network.”

• Intent Collection and Matching: Solvers in the network collect intent and perform balanced state transitions to achieve matching. For example, if a user chooses to exchange 1 Bitcoin for Ethereum, there must be another user who reverses the transaction to achieve a balanced state transition.

• Transaction processing: The matched transactions are submitted to the mempool, and the validator will send the block packaged by the proposer to the execution layer to complete the execution and verify the validity, and finally complete the state root update.

Anoma's core technologies include Taiga (a private state transition framework integrated into the intent propagation layer and matching layer), Typhon (a cross-chain atomic transaction consensus mechanism), MASP (a multi-asset shielded pool), Vamp-IR (arithmetic circuit language), Juvix (a programming language), etc. From the very beginning, it was used to build a specific intent DApp, so when it comes to the implementation of Intent-Centric, Anoma is indispensable.

Essential

On September 21, Essential, which focuses on building universal intent-centric solutions, announced a $5.5 million seed round of financing.

Essential's solution is mainly divided into three parts. The first is to create a standard for users to express their intentions. By adopting this standard, no matter which chain, they will have a common framework for expressing and solving intentions; the second is an Ethereum standard for intent-oriented account abstraction. By leveraging account abstraction, users will allow solvers to execute transactions to realize their intentions; the last is a new Intent-Centric blockchain.

Compared to Anoma and Essential, which directly create new public chains, dappOS and Particle Network have adopted a new approach, packaging existing DApps to become the intent layer of Web3.

dappOS

In July 2023, dappOS completed a seed round of financing jointly led by IDG Capital and Sequoia China, and had previously received pre-seed financing from Binance Labs.

dappOS is the first Web3 operating protocol and an Intent-Centric protocol. By providing a multi-chain smart account (unified account) dappOS Account and a solver network dappOS Network, and integrating more than 20 industry-leading DApps, users can create and manage wallets, experience different chain DApps, manage multi-chain assets, and conduct complex transactions as smoothly as using common apps.

For example, if Xiaoming has a total balance of 100 USDC in the dappOS unified account, 50 USDC of which is on the Ethereum chain and 50 USDC on the BNB Chain, Xiaoming only needs to sign a confirmation transaction once to use the total balance of 100 USDC on GMX on Arbitrum or Benqi on Avalanche. This is where dappOS Account and dappOS Network come in handy. Users can use dappOS as easily as using CEX transactions, and all the processes involved behind each transaction are executed by the solver.

With the launch of dappOS V2 in early September, it is no longer just a theoretical concept, and Perpetual Protocol is the first to be integrated into it. More leading DApps will be integrated in the future, such as Perpetual, Benqi, QuickSwap, KyberSwap, GMX, KuSwap, Pangolin, etc. Thanks to dappOS, users can now use Perpetual Protocol, which was originally only available on Arbitrum, across various chains such as BNB Chain, and users can use any token of their choice to settle Gas fees.

Particle Network

Particle Network officially launched its V1 product at the end of October last year, a Wallet-as-a-Service product based on MPC-TSS, and upgraded it to an MPC+account abstraction wallet when ERC-4337 was launched. The highlight is that based on MPC's secure key fragment management and execution environment, users can log in in a familiar Web2 way without worrying about the custody of private keys and mnemonics; at the same time, the wallet experience is improved based on account abstraction, such as unified gas fees, batch operations, etc.

In the 10 months since V1 was launched, hundreds of DApps of various types have integrated Particle Network's products and services, including Xter.io, Hooked Protocol, ApeX, 1inch, and CyberConnect, basically covering the top projects in each track.

After the Intent-Centric concept became popular, Particle Network "continued to work" and announced the upgrade of the new version V2. As it introduces itself, Particle Network V2 will be a Web3 access layer based on Intent-Centric.

Particle Network V2 builds a solver network based on the existing MPC+ account abstraction wallet and integrates hundreds of DApps. It also adds an AIGC to the wallet. Users only need to express their intentions directly to this AIGC, and the solver will calculate the best path to execute from hundreds of DApps based on the user's intentions. Particle Network V2 is committed to the final form of the aforementioned Intent-Centric.

In summary, dappOS is like the WeChat applet platform, abstracting the concepts of public chains and interactive processes, allowing users to use dozens of DApps on different chains in one wallet at the same time; Particle Network V2 is more like ChatGPT, where users only need to talk to AIGC, and AI will automatically help them complete complex transactions. Once the products are perfected, both will play a very important role in attracting new users of Web3. Anoma and Essential are more like iterating the current Web3 and maximizing Intent-Centric. Although there is still a long way to go, once mature and a good developer and user ecosystem is built, it is expected to trigger a new round of explosive growth in DApps and usher in the next era of Web3.

DYOR

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