Discussing intentional narratives: What does a paradigm shift towards intentionality mean?
Original title: Powerful Intents: Part 1 》
Original author: Mike Calvanese, Brink
Compilation of the original text: Deep Tide TechFlow
This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series on storytelling with Intents written by Mike Calvanese and the Brink team.
Intentional narratives are spreading rapidly. They are one of many user experience improvements enabled by account abstraction, another hot topic discussed by Vitalik at EthCC. Intents allow users to define the outcomes they expect to achieve on-chain and outsource the work of achieving those outcomes to third-party solvers, which interact directly with the network and protocols on behalf of the users. Ultimately, this layer of abstraction will make Web3 applications feel like regular applications. It reduces the technical learning curve that currently exists and will help us attract millions of new users.
A paradigm shift toward intent means that future users won’t need to worry about things like submitting transactions, paying gas fees with ETH, mitigating MEV on AMMs by setting slippage limits, aggregating token exchanges for optimal path routing, or routing between networks. Technical tasks such as inter-chain assets.
A simple way to understand intent is to think of it as expressing what the user wants to happen as a statement, rather than as imperative steps describing how something should happen.
current intention
Intention is not a new concept. Before Uniswap and AMMs, Ethereum projects like EtherDelta and 0x offered intent-based order books. The NFT marketplace has been using signature intents for NFT listings and offers for years. New systems like CoW Swap and UniswapX now offer more advanced intent-based infrastructure for ERC 20 limit orders. As things stand, the term intent may seem synonymous with limit order, since in Web3 today the only widely supported intent is I want X, Im willing to pay Y.
Limit order intent structures are typically simple and focused on a single purpose: the intent to exchange for a better price. The user signs their limit order intent and the solver looks for a path to populate the signed intent, either using AMM, other liquidity sources, or in some cases other intents. Solvers are motivated to perform path finding because they get to keep any extra revenue left after the users intent is satisfied.
Many systems have already been built to support limit order use cases, but as more advanced intent-based tools are established, we will start to see more general architectures to support more robust use cases.
Examples of general intent systems are Anoma and Flashbots SUAVE, which are under active development. They will provide an intent propagation layer where users can broadcast signed intents to propagation nodes. These will be intent-specific chains, facilitating connections between intents signed by users and intents executed by solvers on different networks.
Another example is Brink, a solution for creating composable intents. Brink allows users and developers to build, sign and resolve intents based on conditional state across multiple EVM-compatible networks.
future of intention
Lets explore how Web3 intents can grow beyond simple limit orders. Here are some new concepts:
Conditional intent: perform an action when one or more conditions are met
Continuous Intent: expresses the need for repetitive operations
Multi-step intentions: After one intention is resolved, one or more new intentions are opened
Intent Graph: A path formed by a set of related intents
conditional intent
Current Web3 applications only have one type of conditional intent: limit orders. In the future, we will have intents that can be combined with any number of conditions in any state, resulting in any action.
If youre a Web3 user, youve made many conditional decisions in the past. These decisions can be expressed as intents, signed and delegated to third-party solvers. Here are some examples:
Price Threshold: If A/B price falls below X, swap B for A. In traditional finance, this is called stop loss.
Governance decision: If a governance proposal I do not support passes, sell token A.
Wallet Balance: If I dont have enough ETH in my hot wallet, transfer more ETH from my cold wallet to my hot wallet.
Time/Block: If more than X blocks have been mined, transfer ETH to a recipient address.
All of these can be signed as a single intent. Once the conditions are met, the solver will monitor these intents and take action on behalf of the user. If the user signs these conditions as part of the intent, the solver will prove the conditions through some kind of on-chain state check.
Intents can contain any number of conditions. For example:
“I want to buy with DAI when 1) the ETH price is below $1,750, 2) the average DAI yield for lending ETH is higher, and 3) a whale wallet I follow has purchased at least 10 ETH in the past 24 hours 2 ETH.
Users will be able to express their willingness to buy, sell, stake, transfer or cross-chain assets when any number of complex state conditions are met. All this requires is a signed intent.
Continuous intent
Intents will provide a protocol-independent way of performing sequential operations. While current intents typically involve a single signature (limit order) corresponding to a single action, we will soon see the emergence of serial intents.
Users conduct continuous operations today by depositing funds into protocols or exchanges. Here are some examples:
Regular investment: Purchase ETH with DAI at the market price every month. Users typically use centralized exchanges such as Coinbase to do this.
Earning compounding (also known as re-staking): Withdraw rewards from token A, exchange for token B, and re-stake. This is a cumbersome process involving multiple transactions and interactions with multiple DeFi protocols.
Hot wallet recharge: I have a cold wallet with 50 ETH. Whenever my hot wallets ETH balance falls below X, transfer Y ETH from my cold wallet to my hot wallet. A lot of separate transactions are also required.
Payment Flow: Transfer X USDC to a recipient address every two weeks. Streaming payment apps support this functionality, but require users to deposit assets into a smart contract.
Market maker: AMM-based LP positions basically follow an infinite loop pattern of two reverse exchanges: If the price of A/B exceeds X, exchange A for B; if the price of A/B is lower than X, exchange B Change to A.
As can be seen from these examples, current continuous operation requires users to deposit funds into a specific protocol and submit many transactions. With intents, users can express their desired sequential actions with a single signature.
Fixed investment is a perfect example. A user who intends to make a staking (repeated buying or selling over time) can express it as a signature that allows for every 50,000 blocks (approximately once a week in Ethereum mainnet) for exchanging 1 ETH and DAI with a 1% fee (0.01 ETH). The solver will monitor this intent and check the following points:
Does the users account have 1 ETH available for exchange?
Have 50,000 blocks been mined since the last swap?
Is 1% (0.01 ETH) enough to cover the Gas fee for the exchange?
After the solver pays the gas fee, is there enough ETH left to cover the solvers operating costs, which may include the risk of a rollback after losing the PGA (Priority Gas Auction), or any other costs? Is the potential profit worth it to the solver?
If all these checks pass, the solver will send a transaction to satisfy the users intent to exchange ETH→DAI. As long as the users account has enough ETH, a single signature intent for cost averaging can be monitored by the solver and generate a series of consecutive transactions. Users can get what they want without directly interacting with the EVM network or a specific protocol.
Market making using intents is another example of a continuous and potentially infinite action that can be delegated to a solver. A user who wants to do ETH/DAI market making can create an intent that allows DAI→ETH swaps at 1,800 ETH/DAI or lower and 2,000 ETH/DAI or higher ETH→DAI exchange. With this intent, the user tries to lock in a profit of 200 DAI while the market fluctuates between 1,800 and 2,000 ETH/DAI prices.
Think of it as two inverted limit orders, one is filled when the other is opened, and vice versa. Users can sign a single intent to exchange at each price point. As long as the market continues to fluctuate between these price points, the solver can theoretically fill an unlimited number of these orders without any action from the user.
multi-step intent
Intentions can be made up of multiple steps. Think of these intents as a state machine, where each transaction transitions from a previous state to a new state. The new state we transition to depends on the conditions defined by the previous state.
A simple example of a multi-step intent is the classic transactional finance (trad-fi) Bracket Order. They can vary in complexity, but simple versions are often found in trading financial trading applications. With Web3s composability and multi-step intents, we can create very powerful Bracket Orders.
A Web3 Bracket Order intent can be expressed as follows: I want 1 ETH and am willing to pay 1,800 DAI. Once I have paid 1,800 DAI and have 1 ETH, I am willing to hold this 1 ETH until I Can sell it for 2,000 DAI. If the ETH/DAI price drops below 1,620 DAI, I want to minimize losses by selling this 1 ETH, in which case I will accept 1,600 DAI, and Pay the solver a fee of 20 DAI. If I still hold this 1 ETH, when the [Random Governance Proposal] passes, I want to sell this 1 ETH at any price given by the ETH/DAI market and share the proceeds 10% of the total is given to the solver.
This is a relatively simple three-step order with some conditional triggers, but as you can imagine, these types of orders can get a lot more complex.
intent chart
The relationships between user intents can form an intent graph. These graphs represent user-defined groupings of conditions and actions that result in swaps, asset transfers, or other on-chain actions. All the previous examples of intents are really just names given to specific graphical arrangements.
Just as limit order books represent the current state of market liquidity, intent charts can represent conditional liquidity in not only the current state, but many different potential future states.
Consider an example: In a fictitious market where users trade XYZ and ETH, users express intent to buy and sell XYZ under various conditions, such as governance proposal outcomes, mining of specific blocks, market price increases and decreases, or whether other intentions have been fulfilled.
in conclusion
Intentions are progressing, with new developments every day. Here are some helpful resources:
Interpreting Intent: Revolutionizing Web3 User Experience and Order Flow in the Blockchain;
Intent-based architecture and its risks;
SUAVE, Anoma, shared sequencer and super builder.
