Written by: Xuan Rui|0xDragon888

Summary (TL;DR)

‍‍‍‍‍(1) Understanding intention: top-down Anoma and bottom-up TG Bot

(2) In-depth Intent: AI is the New UI: Complex Commands vs. Simple Intent

(3) Navigation Intent: Concept Evolution, Interaction Paradigm, Current Situation, and Trends of Intent

(4) Guidance Intent: Challenges and Prospects of Web3 Interactive Intelligence

In June, the official website of Paradigm published an article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks", which brought the concept of Intent (intent) to the public for the first time. The protocols and infrastructure related to intentions developed rapidly, and became the official website at the ETHCC conference in July. A topic that cannot be avoided in the encryption world.

Intent is not a new concept. As Mindao, the founder of DForce, said: The trend in the cryptocurrency world has always been to abstract and automate all operations to the extreme. Aggregators, CEXs, contract wallets, cross-chain DeFi are actually doing this, as well as Chainlink and the recent automated middleware, and the recent Telegram bot.

Intentions bring new changes. In the past, the core was product interaction, while in the AGI era, the core is human-computer interaction. AI/LLM (Large Language Model) has more potential to enhance Crypo interaction.

01 Top-down Anoma and bottom-up Unibot

In the past six months, agreements, projects and infrastructure related to intentions have become popular one after another. This article is not intended to explain the concepts according to the script, but to bring two excellent examples to give a glimpse.

Although there are many intent-related projects, the most shining one is Anoma Foundation, which completed its third round of financing of 25M at the end of May 2023. Against the background of serious homogeneity of Layer1, Anoma Foundation, with its intent-centric architecture Anoma (Dapp full-stack architecture) and Namada (privacy Layer1), received a total of US$57.8 million in support from investment institutions in three rounds, ranking 7th in the financing amount of Layer1/Layer2 that has not yet issued coins.

Looking back at Anoma’s public speech at EthCC, founder Adrian Brink said that the magic of Anoma lies in that all interactions start with intent, and the user’s expression of intent is processed by the Black-box Architecture (Anoma black box architecture, also known as Magic Happens), which implements the core transaction process based on intent interaction:

  • User interaction: Users can send transparent, private or protected intentions to Anoma's Anoma black box architecture (intent gossip layer).

  • Intent collection and matching: The solver of Anoma's black box architecture collects intentions and performs equilibrium state conversion to achieve counterparty matching.

  • Transaction processing: The matched transaction is submitted to the encrypted mempool, and the validator sends the block packaged by the proposer to the execution layer to complete the execution and verify the validity, and finally completes the state root update.

Source：https://twitter.com/Delphi_Digital/status/1696626180752056764

Behind the new interaction form, the Anoma team has insight into the pain points at the bottom of the blockchain protocol, and recalls that starting from the scriptable settlement of the first generation of Bitcoin, the architectural limitations of the programmable settlement of the second generation of Ethereum have resulted in the current application protocol having at least A Web2 component that does not enable counterparty discovery and resolution. And said that the intention-centered Anoma architecture is the third generation Dapp architecture of the blockchain protocol evolution, allowing users to define the result status they want, and achieving efficient and customizable private transactions at the intention level. The intent-centered Dapp architecture A new era will usher in.

Source：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdYwfW6tMJ8

Anoma, which has high financing and new technology architecture, is currently built by 37 interdisciplinary members of the Heliax development team. It has been developed for 2 years. Although the Heliax development team has made slow progress, it has formed a complete innovation ecosystem:

  • Anoma: An intent-centered universal Dapp architecture that can be modularly deployed to L1, L1.5, and L2, and can be called as modular components embedded in various EVM frameworks;

  • Namada: Anoma ecosystem’s privacy settlement Layer 1, which adopts PoS mechanism and is used for inter-chain privacy independent of assets. It will be compatible with Ethereum and IBC chains in the future;

  • AnomaVM: Simplify DApp application development on Anoma, using Juvix (intent-centric programming language) and VampIR (circuit programming language);

  • Typhon: Improved Typhon consensus based on Cosmos’ Tendermint;

  • Taiga: Provides a unified execution environment for composable privacy. Taiga defines three types of intents: transparent intent, shielding intent, and privacy intent.

Source：https://heliax.dev/#projects

Although many institutions such as CMCC Global, Electric Capital, and Delphi Digital are enthusiastic about Anoma and express that the intent-centered architecture has unlimited potential in the future, the current top-down Anoma only lays a good technical foundation but does not see the future. It has obtained exciting implementation applications; on the other hand, TG Bot uses on-chain automated transaction tools to open up the implementation imagination of Intent subdivision scenarios.

Unibot is a trading robot (TG Bot) based on Telegram, which allows users to conduct automated DEX transactions through Telegram, and provides functions such as sniper buying, copy trading, DEX limit orders, privacy, and anti-MEV. Unibot replaces Uniswap based on Intent and is cumbersome. interaction to provide a convenient DeFi interactive experience. Unibot has also spawned a number of TG Bot imitation disks. The current total market value of the TG Bot track is close to US$200 million.

Top-down Anoma is an innovation, and bottom-up TG Bot is a change; top-down Anoma starts from the underlying architecture based on intent, but the team is making slow progress; although TG Bot brings users a new on-chain interactive interface , but it is not smart and has many security risks.

Both of them have the same purpose - to simplify the user interaction experience and introduce a new programmable and customizable user interaction interface - User Intent Layer (User Intent Layer), which allows users to skip complex on-chain interactions and based on user intentions Define transaction status.

02 AI is the New UI: Command interaction VS intent interaction

The above two use cases have a basic understanding of intent. Next, it is time to explore behind the intent, AI’s lowest level change in the encryption world—the change in user interaction interface.

The AI ​​paradigm is ushering in the third user interface paradigm in computer history, moving to a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, rather than how to do it.

  • Paradigm 1: Batch processing.

  • Paradigm 2: Command-based interaction design.

  • Paradigm 3: Intention-based result specification.

Every revolution in interaction models in history will produce a new business model. Generative AI based on LLM has brought disruptive changes to human-computer interaction, directly transforming the original human-computer interaction with various software UIs into Chatgpt chat window interaction, which is an unprecedented interactive experience, and LLM+crypto brings a new proposition of intent-based interaction to the encryption world. LLM will also make blockchain interaction potential by discovering and describing user intentions. Smarter.

After deeply understanding the AI ​​intelligence trend behind intentions, we further explore the evolution of the concept of intentions. Intentions are not a new concept, but have existed since the Web2 era. With the rise of search engines such as Google, users can enter intentions, and search engines Serve that intent by providing relevant search results.

With the rise of e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay, there has been a major shift in intent-based architecture, where users can now express their intention to purchase a product and the platform takes care of the logistics. In early 2017, Gartner released a report "Innovation Insight: Intent-Based Networking Systems" that formally proposed the concept of Intent-based Networking. The key to intent-based networking is to present an interface to users, and they only need to express what they want. content, while the platform handles the business details.

Intent-based networking is the development trend of network automation and intelligence in the Web2 era. Gartner Research Vice President Andrew Lerner pointed out in 2017 that intent-based networking will be the next milestone in the network field.

Source：https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3599617

From Web2 to Web3, the concept of intent in Web3 is not clear, but there is some consensus:

  • Definition given by Paradigm: An intent is a set of declarative constraints that allows users to delegate transaction creation to a dedicated network of third-party participants while retaining full control over the process.

  • The definition given by Anoma of the underlying Dapp architecture based on intent: Intent is a message sent by the user to express custom preferences. Intent is a constraint on what the user defines the system can do, rather than a specific execution path.

  • Intent-based transaction infrastructure Definition given by Propellerheads: Intents are parts of a transaction that require help from others. Intents simplify complex transactions by outsourcing the difficult parts to a third party.

In the real use case of Web3 intent-based transactions, users create intents off-chain, outsource them to Slover (parser) off-chain, encapsulate the complexity of blockchain interaction to the parser, while retaining the user's full control over the process on-chain, lowering the threshold for on-chain interaction.

Source：https://www.brink.trade/blog/powerful-intents-part-1

Intent also brings the LLM architecture concept—intent centirc—an architecture centered on user intent. Currently, the encryption protocols and infrastructure related to intent centirc are embedded in the interaction layer between users and Crypto, using LLM to provide better on-chain interactions. experience.

LLM+Crypto brings a new human-computer interaction paradigm, which can directly convert the user's intention into a smart contract call. The user only needs to express the intention like using Apple's Siri, and the robot/Ai Agent/third-party parser helps complete the complex chain. Operation, future intent-based Web3 interactive intelligence has the potential to greatly reduce the complexity of user on-chain interactions.

AI is the New UI. Currently, more and more Web3 projects are exploring the magic of intent. Whether it is intent-based Dapp or intent-based underlying architecture, they are all releasing the potential of intent from different angles. We are trying to sort out this rapidly developing field. , and from an interaction perspective, divide it into four major categories, and track the latest status and trends:

Infrastructure: (Intent-centric intent architecture layer)

  • DappOS: The first intent-centered Web3 operating protocol, which builds an intermediate layer between users and encrypted infrastructure such as public chains and cross-chain bridges, allowing Web3 users to interact with products seamlessly and without awareness. Recently DappOS released V2 version;

  • Flash 2.0 SUAVE: SUAVE is an independent plug-and-play modular MEV full-chain ordering layer. Preferences (the core concept of SUAVE) is similar to the concept of Intent. They provide a way for ordinary users to customize transactions, and ultimately help users complete the transaction. Best execution, Flashbots plans to launch SUAVE Centauri in 2023Q4;

  • Anoma: An intent-centered universal Dapp architecture that can be modularly deployed to L1, L1.5, and L2, and can be embedded in various EVM frameworks with modular components for calls. The latest news in the Anoma ecosystem is Anoma privacy settlement Layer1—Namada is about to exit v0 .22.0 Testnet;

  • Cow Protocol: CoW Protocol builds an underlying settlement network for traders and parsers, and released Cow Hooks, a new intent system in July to implement customized DeFi operations. CoW Protocol’s latest data in August processed a total transaction volume of 1.05B and generated 5.3M profit.

Supporting facilities: (supporting infrastructure related to intent and account abstraction wallet)

  • ERC 4337: The User Operation of ERC 4337 replaces the current transaction memory pool with the user's intent, including gas payment tokens, payment options, and login methods, thereby achieving account abstraction and improving the wallet interaction experience.

  • Supporting facilities related to account abstraction: packager infrastructure (StackUp, Blocknative, Alchemy Rundler, AA-Bundler, infiniteism Bundler), wallet SDK (Safe, ZeroDev, Biconomy);

  • Intent-related supporting facilities: Juvix (intention-based programming language), Seaport (open source NFT trading protocol), Gelato (Web3 automatic execution layer that provides automation services for smart contracts), okcontract (low-level intent automation tool), Delegatable (smart contract authorization agent tool), Hyper Oracle (off-chain automation service), symmio (intention-based on-chain derivatives trading framework).

Enterprise applications: (intent infrastructure for integrated Dapps, API, modular intent layer, domain-specific parsers)

  • Transaction parser API: PropelleHeads;

  • Intent API: EnsoFinance;

  • Intent trading infrastructure: Bob the Solver, Brink;

  • Composable Intent Tool: Essential.

Consumer applications: (intelligent interfaces for user interaction such as Wallets, Dex, Web3 Ai Agents, intelligent search engines)

  • Wallets: Safe, Bitconomy, Argent, Ambire, Sequence, Versa, A3SProtocol;

  • Dex：CowSwap、Paraswap、Uniswap、1inch、BananaHq、basedmarkets；

  • Intelligent front-end: Unibot, Dora, Web3 Analytics, kaito.ai.

Intent-based architecture, supporting facilities, and enterprise-side applications ((due to space reasons, they are only listed here without expanding)) try to solve the underlying problems of intent-based implementation, but infrastructure cannot be achieved overnight. The trend of the intent-based consumer application layer is What is really exciting is that the evolution of interactive portals such as wallets and Dex shows the potential of intelligent interaction.

Wallet intelligence: ERC-4337 introduces a new (UserOps) user intent layer, where users express intentions, and then the bundler (Bundler) converts these intentions into executable signed transactions. The number of ERC4337 users has increased significantly in recent months. ZeroDev, Biconomy and Safe modular smart accounts are the most motivated to promote AA+intent. AA+intent has the potential to spur the arrival of smart wallets (SCW) in the future.

Source：https://dune.com/niftytable/account-abstraction

DEX architecture transformation: Intent Based Trading aims to improve capital efficiency and user interaction experience. CoW Hooks are used to connect complex actions such as transactions, bridging, pledges, deposits, etc. UniswapX already allows users to sign intentions. Off-chain matching, on-chain settlement, Intent-based DEXs such as BananaHq, Brink, basedmarkets, etc. are gradually increasing. A new Intent-based RFQ narrative (SYMMIO) is being staged. As more and more DEXs and aggregators move towards intent-based With the transformation of the architecture, the DEX landscape is undergoing tremendous changes.

Source：https://twitter.com/BananaHQio/status/1694013407929020740

Intelligent interaction portal: Similar to TG Bot's transformation of the Web3 front-end interactive interface, the interactive portal focuses on understanding the user's intentions and systematically transforming them into automated and operable tasks. Not only TG Bot trading robots, but also Web3 Ai Agents and Web3 intelligent search engines are making Web3 interactions more intelligent.

Source：https://twitter.com/awasunyin/status/169540582237605496

04 Challenges and prospects of Web3 interactive intelligence

In the past, the interactive experience of Web3 products did hinder large-scale adoption, and the wealth creation effect on the chain covered up many product problems; now liquidity and user attention are scattered, and on-chain liquidity is scarce.

At the ETHCC conference in July, developers discussed extensively about the future of intent-centric and how to help users complete DAPP interactions more intelligently on Web3. However, intent-centric applications still face many challenges:

  • Lack of intent-based programming languages ​​(like Juvix)

  • Lack of proper intent architecture (similar to Anoma)

  • Lack of domain-specific resolver (similar to Bob The Solver)

  • Intended to be centralized and closed (similar to CowSwap)

  • Lack of front-end intent recognition parser (similar to Unibot)

  • Lack of composable intent implementation (similar to Brink)

  • Intent security risks (mentioned in Paradigm article)

There are challenges but also hopes. With the emergence of intent-centric related protocols, Web3 has the potential to evolve into a more friendly intelligent interactive interface in the future. Users can interact with mainstream applications such as Uniswap, Blur, and AAVE in one stop, just like taking an Uber taxi. Simple, this is the real opportunity for Web3 Dapps to beat Web2 in terms of user experience.

More importantly, combined with Anoma, Flashbots SUAVE, and DappOS's vision for the future intent-centric, the interaction on the Web3 chain will also be more intelligent, customizable, and fair. At the same time, the right to speak is put back into the hands of users with intention as the center. Ordinary users can also arm third-party robots/parsers to complete customized transactions (handling fees, slippage, privacy, cross-chain, MEV or other intentions). In the future, users will no longer be able to He is a passive participant on the chain, or an exploiter of MEV Searchers and Validators, but the real helmsman of the activities on the chain.

Looking forward to the future of Web3 interactive intelligence, whether it is account abstraction, chain abstraction, or intention, Web3 finally cares about user experience, and the rising sun of intelligent interaction is about to illuminate the dark forest.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Web3 Analytics, Crypto V, Haotian, Jason Chen, Luke, Grace Deng, SixSix.eth, POOR DAO, #017, armonio.eth, Kiwibig.eth for very valuable discussions, comments and feedback on this article.