By Daniel Luca
In the blockchain ecosystem, there's an ongoing quest for a foundational shift that will pave the way for the next wave of user adoption. This involves a deep reevaluation and reinvention of how on-chain transactions are executed, centralizing around the innovative concept of "Intents".
Humans desire outcomes, while the “how” is a side effect that must be solved to fulfill their wishes. It is more natural to think about the desired side effect instead of defining all the necessary steps to get there. Intents specify the desired outcome without detailing the exact execution path.
We currently have “transactions” that are extremely specific and rigid about their parameters and imply an exact execution path that includes the originating account, smart contracts, gas amount and prices, chain IDs, nonce and other details that most users don’t really have to fiddle with.
The promise of Intents comes to abstract away all of the superfluous details that users usually don’t care about to get the simple outcome of “I want 100 A-TOKENS, and I am willing to pay at most 50 B-TOKENS”.
Intents become even more promising if you could abstract away the different chains and L2s we currently have. If I want a specific NFT, I should not care where the NFT is hosted. If I want to be exposed to a specific asset, it doesn’t really matter where the asset (or its representation) exists as long as the trust assumptions and set conditions are met.
There is a recent industry understanding that something is missing for mass adoption to happen. Intents-based solutions are expected to dominate in providing that part (alongside Account Abstraction).
These three principles are crucial to achieve mass adoption.
By providing a simpler, more natural way for users to express their goals, we eliminate knowledge barriers and save them from getting stuck in execution details.
Intents simplify the interaction between users and complex systems by abstracting the intricate details of how objectives are achieved. This simplicity is centered around the user's ability to express what they want without understanding the underlying technical processes. For instance, users can state their intent to obtain an NFT and are willing to part with a collection of tokens and NFTs, and the system takes care of the technicalities.
Following the theme of simplicity, the optimization principle in an Intent system takes this user-centric approach a step further by ensuring the most efficient use of a user’s assets. In the context of trading NFT’s or tokens, the system not only understands the user’s goal, but also actively works towards achieving it with the minimum necessary expenditure of assets. When the user expresses their intent to acquire an NFT, the system doesn’t just execute the trade; it optimizes the transaction to use the least amount of the user’s assets while still fulfilling the desired outcome. This optimization is crucial as it adds significant value to the user’s experience and assets.
This principle is defined in direct opposition to the ideas expressed in the Paradigm article quoted below.
The occasions on which MEV negatively impacts user execution generally arise due to high degrees of freedom that transactions give up to their executors (e.g. slippage limits). It is thus no great leap in logic to assert that intent-based applications which surrender greater degrees of freedom should design their systems for execution with greater caution.
An intent-based solution has the potential to make things easier by reducing fees while providing better prices or quite the opposite. By integrating this optimization principle, the intent system becomes more than just a facilitator of transactions; it becomes a steward of the user's assets, safeguarding their interests and maximizing their value.