Why Your Crypto Experience is Broken (And How We’ll Fix It)
Let’s be honest. Using crypto today feels like trying to fix a car engine when you just want to drive to the store. You’re forced to think about gas fees, slippage, bridging assets, finding the right DEX, and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with your actual goal. You want to swap Token A for Token B at the best possible price. That’s it. Instead, you’re dragged through a multi-step, anxiety-inducing process where one wrong click could cost you dearly. This complexity is the single biggest barrier to mass adoption. We’ve built a decentralized financial system on the back of a user experience that only a cryptographer could love. The long-term vision for a global, permissionless Intent Fulfillment Network is about to change all of that, forever.
Key Takeaways
- Intents vs. Transactions: Intents are about declaring your desired outcome (the ‘what’), while transactions are about executing the specific steps (the ‘how’). Current crypto forces users to handle the ‘how’.
- The Rise of Solvers: A new class of specialized, competitive actors called ‘solvers’ will find the most efficient way to fulfill your intent, abstracting away all the complexity.
- Beyond DeFi: While DeFi is the initial playground, intent fulfillment networks will eventually power everything from gaming and social media to complex DAO governance.
- A Truly Global Network: The end goal is a single, interconnected, permissionless network where any user can express any intent, and a global market of solvers competes to make it happen across any chain.
From Imperative to Declarative: The Paradigm Shift We Need
Think about how you use the web today. When you want to book a flight from New York to Tokyo, you don’t manually ping different airline servers, compare their routing protocols, and then construct a data packet to book your seat. That would be insane. You go to Google Flights or Kayak, state your intent—”I want the cheapest flight from JFK to NRT next Tuesday”—and a sophisticated backend does the rest. It finds the routes, compares the prices, and presents you with the best options. You declare your goal, and the system figures out how to achieve it.
This is a declarative model. You say what you want.
Crypto, in its current form, is almost entirely imperative. It forces you to specify how to achieve your goal. You have to say, “First, approve the Uniswap router to spend my USDC. Then, execute a swap on the 0.3% fee tier pool for WETH, accepting no more than 0.5% slippage, with a gas fee of 25 gwei.” You’re the engine, the mechanic, and the driver all at once. It’s exhausting and ripe for error.
Intents flip this entire model on its head. An intent is a signed, off-chain message that defines a user’s desired outcome without dictating the execution path. It’s a simple statement: “I have 1000 USDC on Polygon, and I want to end up with the maximum amount of ETH on Arbitrum.” That’s your intent. You sign it and cast it out into the world.
The Anatomy of a Global Intent Fulfillment Network
So, you’ve declared your intent. What happens next? This is where the magic of an Intent Fulfillment Network kicks in. It’s not one single piece of software but a dynamic, decentralized ecosystem of interacting components. It’s a living marketplace for achieving outcomes.
H3: The User and Their Intent
Everything starts with the user. They formulate a goal. This could be simple, like “Swap 1 ETH for DAI,” or incredibly complex, like “Take my LP position on Sushi, unstake it, swap both assets for SOL, bridge it to Solana, and deposit it into a lending protocol, but only if the yield is above 6% APY.” Using a user-friendly interface, this goal is translated into a cryptographically signed data structure. This is the intent. It contains the constraints and desired end state, and it’s broadcast to the network.
H3: The Solvers: The Brains of the Operation
This is the most crucial part. A global, permissionless network of ‘solvers’ is constantly listening for these intents. Solvers are sophisticated, profit-motivated actors—they can be anyone from a hobbyist running a script to a massive institutional trading firm. Their job is to find the most efficient path to fulfill the user’s intent. They might:
- Route your trade through multiple DEXs to get the best price (aggregation).
- Batch your transaction with others to save on gas (coincidence of wants).
- Use private inventory to complete the swap without touching a public AMM.
- Perform complex cross-chain arbitrage to source the cheapest assets.
They compete fiercely to present the user with the best possible execution. They take a small fee for their service, which is their incentive to participate. The user doesn’t see any of this. They just see the final result, which is better, faster, and cheaper than they could have achieved on their own.
H3: The Supporting Infrastructure: Relayers and Reputation
Solvers don’t work in a vacuum. The network needs other components to function. Relayers are responsible for actually submitting the winning solver’s transaction to the blockchain. This further abstracts complexity, as the user may not even need a wallet with native gas tokens on the target chain. Reputation systems will also be vital. How do you trust a solver? Over time, solvers will build up on-chain reputations for reliability and efficiency, allowing users and wallets to prioritize those with a proven track record.
“We are moving from a world where users are servants to the blockchain, to a world where the blockchain and its ecosystem of agents are servants to the user.”
Beyond Swaps: The True Scope of the Intent-Centric Future
It’s easy to get fixated on DeFi use cases like swaps and bridges because that’s where the most immediate pain is. But that’s like looking at the early internet and only seeing email. The long-term vision for an intent fulfillment network is so much bigger. It’s a fundamental change in how we interact with all decentralized systems.
Imagine these scenarios:
- Gaming: Your intent could be, “Equip my character with the ‘Sword of a Thousand Truths’.” A solver network would then figure out the best way to do that. Maybe it’s cheaper to buy the raw materials on OpenSea and craft it, or perhaps another player is selling it directly on a different marketplace. You don’t care about the how; you just want the sword.
- DAO Governance: Instead of a simple “yes/no” vote, a DAO could allow for intents like, “I will vote ‘yes’ on this proposal, but only if the treasury also hedges 10% of its ETH holdings into USDC within the same block.” Solvers would then compete to bundle the vote and the hedge into a single, atomic transaction.
- Social Media: “I want to follow everyone who holds a ‘Cool Cat’ NFT and also follows Vitalik Buterin.” An intent system could automatically manage your social graph based on these on-chain conditions, executed by a solver whenever the state changes.
This is about creating a truly composable and intelligent backend for the user-facing web. The blockchain becomes an execution layer that responds to our high-level goals, not a rigid set of instructions we have to follow perfectly.
The Obstacles on the Road Ahead
This utopian vision won’t materialize overnight. There are massive technical and economic challenges we need to solve. Security is paramount. How do we ensure that a solver can’t just run away with the user’s funds? This requires carefully designed smart contracts, cryptographic guarantees, and potentially slashable bonds that solvers must post.
Another huge concern is centralization. What stops a few massive, well-capitalized solvers from dominating the entire network, leading to censorship or fee gouging? Building a truly permissionless and credibly neutral system where small, independent solvers can compete is a non-trivial problem. We need robust economic models and protocol designs that actively encourage decentralization.
Finally, there’s the challenge of intent expressivity. Creating a standardized language to express arbitrarily complex intents without ambiguity is a field of active research. How do you make it both powerful enough for complex tasks and simple enough to be secure?
Conclusion: The Quiet Revolution
The shift to an intent-centric world won’t be a single, explosive event. It will be a quiet revolution. One by one, applications will start hiding the complexities. Your wallet will ask you what you want to do, not which contract you want to call. You’ll sign a message, and a moment later, your goal will be achieved. You won’t even think about the global network of solvers, relayers, and searchers competing in a high-speed, invisible auction to serve you.
And that’s the point. The ultimate goal of a global, permissionless intent fulfillment network is to become so effective, so efficient, and so integrated that it simply disappears. It will be the invisible engine that finally allows Web3 to deliver on its promise of a user-owned internet, accessible and usable by everyone, not just the experts.
FAQ
Is this just a new name for transaction batching or a meta-transaction?
No, it’s a much broader concept. While intents might use meta-transactions (to abstract away gas) or batching (for efficiency), the core idea is the separation of outcome from execution. A meta-transaction still specifies the exact ‘how’. An intent only specifies the ‘what’, leaving the ‘how’ up to a competitive market of third parties to discover.
How do I know a solver won’t scam me?
Security is the biggest challenge. The system relies on a combination of solutions. First, intents are not blank checks; they have strict, unchangeable constraints (e.g., “I must receive at least X amount of Token B”). Second, the smart contracts that fulfill the intents are designed to only release the user’s funds if their conditions are met. Finally, economic security through staking and slashing means solvers have a significant financial incentive to act honestly, as malicious behavior would result in them losing their staked capital.
