Recently, in the article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks" by Paradigm, a well-known Web3 venture capital firm, "Intent-centric protocols and infrastructure" ranked first among the ten trends in the encryption field. Combined with The Bob the Solver project and several years of accumulation and exploration of Anomo and DappOs at the ETHCC conference in Paris. It has triggered the industry's focus on Intent-centric architecture and this track. Its core goal is to greatly improve the user experience and completely hide complicated transaction details, so it is regarded as a new engine that promotes the popularity of Web3.
In the Token2049 hackathon, I also worked with the AstroX wallet technical team (a ToB service focused on high ROI growth products) to realize the second place project in the DeFi track based on the intent concept: Ethtent. This article will talk about Intent-centric from the perspective of my own Solver implementation process and the two major applications ERC4337 and UniSwapX.
What is "intent"? Can it be so beautiful? What are its applications? What are the challenges of implementation?
1. Review what is Intent-centric?
Just as the concept of account abstraction is even older than the development of Ethereum itself, the earliest specific concept of "intention" can be traced back to 2018 when DEX Wyvern Protocol introduced its design concept. The core point of its concept is that, unlike the focus of traditional transactions, for ordinary users, what they have always pursued is the consistency and accuracy of the results, not the perfect execution process.
Assume a scenario where I want to complete a swap of a certain token.
In traditional transactions: you must first conduct 3 transactions, transfer ETH as gas, approve the transaction, and then submit the swap transaction
In the transaction intention: only the user needs to sign, I am willing to use X tokens to exchange for Y tokens as quickly and as much as possible, and I can pay a 1% handling fee
We can think of an intent-centric protocol as a set of signed contracts that allow users to outsource the transaction process to a third party without giving up full control over the transaction.
Users only need to clearly state their intention of what they want to do, and all operations can be completed with one signature.
Transaction = how you do it; Intention = you set what you want, but don't worry about how to achieve it.
Analogous to the development of traditional Internet, it has the same experience, from selling what service providers have to matching what users need, and then to intelligent service platforms. Looking back on the rise and fall of the Internet over the past 20 years, the core context is
Early vertical services (various portals where users can look up numbers and find workers to buy services)
Mid-term service aggregation platform (58.com, etc., matching service providers with user needs by aggregating traffic)
Later intelligent platforms (combined with algorithm matching recommendations to improve the accuracy of intent, such as Didi cross-city ride-sharing and customized services)
It can be said that the idea of Intent-centric is indeed very beautiful, and the development history of web2 has also verified that this is the key path to expand the number of users, but is it really so beautiful? Let's start with the market application situation.
2. Typical Applications of Intent-centric
Although the concept of intent-centricity has just been proposed, the number of projects involved is already quite large, or in other words, many of the projects that are being implemented are also centered on user intent. In this article by Bastian Wetzel, various mainstream projects are also classified.
As can be seen in the figure below, many protocols are not general intent solutions, but specific intent solutions, such as Uniswap and Seaport, which are better than web2. Vertical solutions are also the inevitable development path of intent-centered.
ERC-4337 is an infrastructure that assists with the intention. The existence of bundler reduces the need for users to have original gas.
However, our core goal is to explore the business models of these projects and whether they are sufficient to support the implementation of intent. In my opinion, UniswapX is currently at the forefront of implementation, focusing on the implementation of intent around transactions, and ERC4337 will serve as the necessary infrastructure for intent. 2.1 Intent-centric from the perspective of UniSwapX’s economic design
After UniSwapX was officially announced, I participated in the RFQ system as a Filler and as a quoter. The reason why it is one of the most cutting-edge and feasible Intents is that it is the most mature system that directly solves the economic incentive problem of the counterparty of the intent.
2.1.1. Why do we need UniSwapX?
Summarizing the development of UniswapV1-3, it can be said that in the past, the Amm protocol has faced specific problems such as user costs, transaction prices, transaction links, routing services, LP incentives, etc. In today's Swap market, it can be said that MEV completely surrounds the memory pool on the chain, and every large-scale Swap is almost facing being squeezed. Users always trade at the worst price, and the profits are divided by MEV.
The launch of UniswapX is an attempt to solve the above problems from another dimension by completely changing the AMM transaction mechanism.
Further reading: UniswapX Research Report (Part 1): Summarizing the development of V1-3 and explaining the innovation and challenges of the next generation of DEX
2.1.2. What is UniSwapX?
By definition: UniswapX is a new permissionless, open source (GPL), auction-based routing protocol for trading across AMMs and other liquidity sources.
In fact, there are three main types of Web3 trading market operation models. In addition to the AMM model, there are
The order book model of on-chain matching and on-chain transactions. Further reading: "[Contract Interpretation] CryptoPunk The World's Earliest Decentralized NFT Trading Market"
The order book model of off-chain matching on-chain transactions. Further reading: "X2Y2 NFT Market System Operation Architecture"
UniswapX changed the AMM model of UniswapV1-3 to an order book model that matches off-chain transactions on-chain.
2.1.3. How does UniSwapX work?
From the user's perspective, if the scenario is that the user wants to trade ETH<=> and USDT at a price of around 1900 (allowing 2% slippage), all he needs to do is:
Select the order, the price decay curve limits the order time limit (e.g. 1950U to exchange 1ETH within 1 day, the minimum is 1850U)
Sign the order and publish it to the order book service cluster.
Waiting for the transaction, which needs to be discovered and completed by the Filler
For users, that's all there is to do.
From the perspective of Fillers, he is the person who actively completes the user's transaction order. He is a service provider with sufficient funds, proficient information cross-chain services, and full-chain and full DexPool status monitoring.
Scan the Pools of each protocol on the chain to build the basic data required for real-time order calculation
Scan Mempool to predict subsequent price trends
Scan a private network of RFQ Fillers and get first dibs by submitting your quote.
Scan Fillers’ public order information and analyze the best transaction link
If the revenue conditions are met, then participate in the bidding (every minute here needs to be fought for. Under the Dutch auction model, the later the chain is launched, the lower the closing price will be)
Analyze other Fillers’ bidding bottom lines and look for ways to prioritize their bidding in the next profitable order (even if my single profit will be reduced but I will get more orders)
So why does he have the motivation to make such a deal? This goes back to the economic model of UniswapX.
2.1.4 How to evaluate the design intention of UniswapX
Solving the release intention of the intention itself is the key implementation issue.
DEX used to face many limitations of CEX, such as transaction costs, MEV, slippage, impermanent loss, etc. In the future, more professional Filler groups will compete with MEV groups, gradually take a piece of meat in the technological competition, and finally return it to the users, forming a positive cycle of development (more users use UniswapX, and more Fillers get transaction fee dividends).
In addition, the complexity of on-chain transaction splitting and routing will also be dispersed to the back-end system. Users only need to place orders as Party A without having to think about such troublesome routing issues.
So this is a virtuous economic cycle, both parties benefit, and if the economic model is virtuous, it will always be implemented.
Further reading: https://research.web3caff.com/zh/archives/10004?ref=shisi
2.2 Intent-centric from ERC4337
In the application diagram above, the bottom is the section around the account abstraction AA. For a system like uniswapX, since the transaction itself is submitted by Fillers, for users, cross-chain transactions can be completed without gas.
However, during the entire transaction cycle, users still need to submit an approve transaction to allow the uniswapX on-chain contract to deduct the user's amount. If you really want a pure intention transaction model (without the need for users to initiate transactions), you still need ERC4337 as the account entity and paymaster's integrated design.
Regarding what ERC4337 is, its implementation principles, and its development history, Shisijun has made live broadcasts and summaries in the past. For further reading, please use one hour to explain account abstraction.
Simply put, ERC4337 is a set of infrastructure
The chain verifies the user's signature through the entryPoint contract for authentication, and ultimately drives the user's CA account as the identity subject
Off-chain, the user signs UserOperation as an instruction, which is passed to the Bundlers network and packaged in batches by the Bundler for execution on the chain.
The core optimization of this mechanism is to improve local functions through the highly customized capabilities of CA, such as social recovery wallets, or project parties helping users to advance gas fees, supporting USDT as a gas payment method, etc.
But today we are going to analyze the value of 4337 to intent from the perspective of business model.
Looking back, the reason why we think UniswapX has a good business model is that both parties in the token transaction (users and fillers) will benefit from it, and only mev is the loser. But looking back, ensuring the profit and willingness of the counterparty through handling fees is actually just one of the business models, and most of the "intention" applications in the future will follow the model of directly To B for income or the main product To C for book renewal, but the main product's services are not only those that meet the "intention".
Just like as a payment system, WeChat Pay or Alipay, etc., will not charge fees in the C2C flow, but generally will charge a 0.6% handling fee when the merchant pays and withdraws funds (it also needs to pay the underlying transaction system).
In the mobile Internet wars of the past decade, the goal has basically been to increase the number of users, and the closed loop of revenue can be placed after the user base.
Therefore, more Dapps will appear in the future, and in order for users to experience and use their Dapps, they will be happy to provide users with gas-free servers, just like the Lens social protocol. In order to cultivate user usage and content ecology, polygon will first advance hundreds of thousands of dollars in handling fees for users every week. Compared with the subsidy costs of tens of millions per day consumed in the taxi wars, this is just a drizzle.
Then the most standard, most universal payment mechanism, and the most trustworthy platform credit system will inevitably be the paymaster system on ERC4337 (derived from meta-transactions but beyond meta-transactions).
It is a special smart contract account that can pay gas fees for others. The payment master contract needs to perform some kind of verification logic on each transaction and check it when the transaction is in progress. The Paymaster contract can check whether there is enough approved ERC-20 balance in the "validatePaymasterUserOp" method, and then use "transferFrom" in the "postOp" call to extract it. (For the specific execution logic interpretation, please refer to the B station live broadcast screen recording in the extended reading above)
In short, this is a more general gas-free solution than meta-transactions, that is, there is no non-standard confusion and no forward compatibility issues (meta-transactions require contract changes to support)
3. What are the challenges of implementing Intent?
To sum up, the intention is indeed very good, and the intention must be the direction of continuous development and optimization. Apart from the challenges of the business model, what other technical details are the core difficulties in its implementation?
3.1. Contradictions in Combining with AI
Although many intent analysis opinions believe that the transaction intent analysis capability provided by AI is an optimization point of experience, the author has worked in the security strategy industry, and one of his insights is that explainability and reproducibility are the most important links in the application of AI in strategy scenarios. For example, if the account is blocked, if the accurate reason for the strategy hit cannot be provided, it will be difficult to justify once the user files a complaint. Similarly, for any financial system, the pursuit of stability and consistency is the top priority, and no institution can guarantee that AI will not do evil after gaining control of asset permissions.
Therefore, AI can only be used as an auxiliary tool for intent analysis for a long time, and on-chain data analysis requires a deep understanding of the operating principles of blockchain, otherwise false alarms are likely to occur.
Further reading: In-depth EVM-The risks behind the trivial matter of contract classification
3.2. IntentPool’s Anti-DoS Risk and Solver Matching Issues
For IntentPool, which is similar to the memory pool of ERC4337, it will also be a major bottleneck. First of all, intentPool cannot reuse the MemPool memory pool mechanism of current Ethereum clients (Geth, Eirgon), and must build its own intentPool.
Even with ERC4337's BundlerPool as a reference, MemPool designs have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Decentralized memory pool model: There is a problem with the propagation mechanism because executing intents is a profitable activity for many applications. Therefore, nodes operating the intent pool have an incentive not to propagate to reduce competition when executing intents.
Centralized memory pool model: solves the problem of propagation mechanism, but cannot avoid the problem of centralized auditing and intervention.
In summary, it is not easy to design an intent discovery and matching mechanism that is both incentive-compatible and decentralized.
3.3 Intentional Privacy Risks
The signature is irrevocable. Even if an expiration date is added to the signature content, there is still the problem that the signature cannot be canceled at low cost before the expiration date (all cancellations must be posted on the transaction chain).
Therefore, some general intention solutions such as Anomo have emerged that attempt to address the standardization and privacy of intentions.
Privacy protection is difficult to achieve through the EVM system, so there is also development around new privacy-preserving intent languages, such as juvix, for creating privacy-focused decentralized applications. It can be compiled into WASM, or compiled into circuits through VampIR for private execution using Taiga on Anoma or Ethereum.
4. Summary
In fact, it is very gratifying to see that the concept of Intent has become popular. Finally, web3 has begun to stop being so self-satisfied and has begun to try to break through the bottlenecks of popularization for real users. Only by starting from the most practical needs of users, rather than indulging in high-sounding narrative highlights, and putting down one's posture and providing attentive service, can we win the gradual favor of a wide range of users.
The future Intent model will either be similar to UniswapX's willingness to create revenue from transaction fees to subsidize counterparties, or from the perspective of the overall system user stratification, there will be a small number of paying high-unit-price users and a large number of non-paying but important ecological users.
Therefore, the intention itself is to optimize the experience of the product itself, rather than intention for the sake of intention.
Moreover, DeFi will also be the first stage for Intent to flourish. More than 20 DeFi protocols have already cooperated with DappOS. Secondly, Brink Trade has developed an Intent Engine, which can include operations such as Bridge, Swap and Transfer in one intent through a single signature. In addition, old protocols such as CowSwap, 1inch, Uniswap, and LlamaSwap are also constantly expanding their functions to meet more user intentions.
In this Token2049 hackathon, the author also participated in the DeFi track and solved an intent solver for a cross-chain Swap + strategy-assisted fixed investment scenario (the operation of the Ethtent system is shown in the figure below).
I can't help but sigh that, in fact, it is not difficult to realize the vertical intent of fixed needs on the existing EVM infrastructure. The real difficulty lies in the emergence of an intent solver market or a collaborative framework of collaborative standards in the future. How to further combine and reuse different solvers to realize universal and standardized intent solutions, and also to coordinate economic models to solve the wishes of both parties.
Standardization often requires top-down standard definition. Currently, DappOs and Anomo are at the forefront of this path, which is worth looking forward to.
