Written by: Tia, Techub News
Although practitioners in the crypto industry seem to be busy tracking various projects every day, it has to be said that the industry seems to have not made any innovative progress for a long time.
Crypto has gone through a period of heated discussions on underlying issues such as governance and currency. Many OGs began to accumulate knowledge of Crypto from the early Bitcoin Talk. At that time, there were some very interesting podcasts, such as "Let's Go Bitcoin" (the co-founder of Chorus One joined the Crypto industry because of this podcast). But nowadays, few people discuss underlying issues. Now, Crypto leaves people with more of an impression of a channel to get rich quickly, and memes are more popular. Expectations for the industry have also begun to shift to whether mass adoption applications can emerge.
Although getting rich is important, meme coins also represent an attitude and a new way of community financing to a large extent. However, understanding the operating logic of currency and discovering the problems in the current collaborative system is a more thorough solution. Moreover, from a more radical perspective, no one knows what changes will happen to the monetary system in the future society.
Anoma is the product of Christopher's thought experiment "Forget about blockchain for a moment, what do decentralized applications really need?" In the summer of 2020, the Anoma team realized that the protocol architecture was becoming stagnant. Although Tezos, Cosmos, Near, Solana, and Polkadot have all been launched, and some emerging protocols have improved specific components, each infrastructure project is essentially another virtual machine.
But instead of getting stuck in blockchain, they pivoted and began to work on real-world problems like collective action problems (multipolar traps, public goods financing), the lack of scalable democratic mechanisms, and money as a coordination mechanism. Then, intent was born.
Although the word "intent" became popular due to Paradigm's famous article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks", the "intent" in Crypto was actually first proposed by Anoma. Nowadays, people have gradually formed a unified definition of intent, and the narrative of intent has also begun to expand to chain abstraction. But if you don't understand the origin of the birth of intent, the word intent may still be a little abstract. This article attempts to describe the world of intent from Anoma's perspective.
The Birth of Anoma
Anoma's narrative is actually very grand. It wants to rebuild collaboration tools. The words "build collaboration" and "tools" sound abstract, but when broken down, they actually come down to two questions: What does collaboration mean here? And why do we need a new collaboration tool like Anoma?
What is collaboration?
In today's society, almost no one can live alone without collaboration. If the whole society is compared to a huge machine, then the role of an individual in it may be a component. Each individual promotes the operation of the social machine through joint collaboration. Fortunately, we are freer than components, with room to move and space to enjoy. Despite this, each individual can only live in the collaborative framework that has been formed in this society. Even if you become a lone ranger and have no contact with the outside world, every trace and every item in your life reminds you that we have been infiltrated by the collaboration formed by the social framework. For example, the computers, tables, and chairs we use when we usually sit in front of the screen to browse articles, the food we eat every day, and the means of transportation we use for commuting are all products of social division of labor and collaboration.
Why build a new collaboration mechanism?
There is an interesting description in Anoma’s vision book, which may give everyone a glimpse into the magic of the existing collaboration mechanism.
In the morning, you want to buy a cup of coffee and an energy bar for breakfast. There are three flavors of energy bars to choose from: banana, chocolate, and hazelnut. Hazelnut is the cheapest, so you choose the hazelnut flavored energy bar. There are also three coffees to choose from: Ethiopian dark roasted coffee, Brazilian medium roasted coffee marked as fair trade, and the signature recommendation. Considering the labor conditions, you choose Brazilian medium roasted coffee.
These three energy bars are produced by three different companies. The raw materials of banana and chocolate energy bars are purchased directly from farmers, and the packaging materials are recyclable, so the price is slightly higher; while the raw materials of hazelnut energy bars are wholesaled from suppliers, and the packaging is imported from paper mills. Because paper mills produce by cutting down trees, the cost is very low, and the price is naturally low. Although Brazilian medium-roasted producers claim to be "fair trade", their workers live above the poverty line. In addition, in order to maintain low costs, the land is over-cultivated.
You work in the purchasing department of a company that sells high-end mattresses. After testing, the company discovered that if it spent one-third of its budget on advertising, it could increase sales by several hundred dollars.
On the subway on your way home from work, the carriage is full of advertisements, but there is nothing you are interested in. You feel bored, so you open a small game purchased in the Android App Store to kill time. This game has an online mode that can match players based on location, so when the program pops up a question about whether it can obtain geographic location, you inadvertently click to agree.
Because of the potential revenue effect of advertising, subways are full of advertisements, which force you to spend money in the app store for entertainment. However, you cannot profit from the revenue brought by advertising, but instead create another consumption scenario: Android games. One-third of the profits from Android games go to Google, which uses this part of the profits to purchase Street View cars that collect user behavior, provide data support for the research on the best geographical locations for advertising, and maximize Google's revenue.
At the coffee shop on the corner, you just want to buy breakfast, but you have inadvertently promoted deforestation and the destruction of farmland. On the subway on your way home from work, you originally wanted to play a game, but you inadvertently helped capitalist surveillance, and the results of this surveillance can be resold to businesses that need advertising, such as your company. "
It can be seen that within existing coordination mechanisms, coordination does occur through currency, natural language, and legal superstructures, but these mechanisms are not adapted to their scale and complexity, leading to a divergence between the results of individual actions and the impact of the system as a whole and the underlying preferences of the participants.
The origin of intention
Anoma reframes collaboration by investigating its nature, deconstructing and abstracting it appropriately, and isolating its contingent dependencies on specific material conditions.
individual
Simple collaboration can be two people working together to complete a task, such as lifting a large stone; adding more people can allow them to work together to build a habitat; turning individuals into groups, collaboration can allow the community to work together to run a school; more complex collaboration can allow different groups to cooperate to form industrial chain collaboration (collaboration between different upstream and downstream companies).
Therefore, the element of "cooperative group" can be abstracted from collaboration, and the "cooperative group" can be divided into "individual" and "group". Although the complexity of collaboration in real life is far beyond "two people working together to lift a stone", no matter how complex it is, collaboration can be abstracted as a combination of "individual" and "individual", "individual" and "group", or "group" and "group". "Individuals" form "groups", and "small collaborations" form "large collaborations".
intention
What is the motivation for each individual to want to collaborate? Intention. Each individual has inner thoughts and intentions, and it is these small intentions that become the motivation for collaboration and promote collaboration. Taking intention as the unit and matching different intentions, the most basic collaboration is formed.
Therefore, in the Anoma architecture, the first thing introduced is the intent, which is understood by individuals as the smallest unit of collaboration. Intents allow partial or unfinished transactions that can be created by anyone. They are messages carefully designed and signed by users to express specific needs or preferences.
Put Intent First
In a world where everything is measured by price and money, there is no doubt that price is the main factor we need to consider when walking in the world. If measuring the world by price is the culprit of collaboration under the capitalist system, then the intention-centric architecture of Anoma is actually "Put Intent First". With intention as the starting point, users express preferences and constraints to influence each other and even generate games, thereby affecting the world.
In a practical sense, "Put Intent First" has another real benefit. A big problem in the current blockchain world is that when designing protocols, it is usually constrained by the blockchain's transaction-centric architecture and some coding restrictions, making it difficult to execute some complex transactions. Intents can skip the adaptation to the blockchain architecture and focus on what the user wants to achieve first.
Universal Intent Machine: “From VM to IM”
Anoma's goal is to provide a common intent machine interface for applications, which means that with Anoma, developers can write applications in terms of intents and distributed intent machines instead of transactions and specific state machines. Anoma provides a common standard for intents and applications that does not restrict what types of intents can be expressed, but allows state, network, and application interoperability. In broad terms, Anoma standardizes the process of verifying that an intent has been met, but does not standardize how the solution is computed. These intents and applications written in Anoma can be ordered, matched, and settled anywhere.
Users also have a high degree of freedom. Users have the space to choose at every stage from the generation of intentions to the final realization. Users can choose whether to disclose their intentions and select potential intention matchers, which can avoid the situation where intention matchers may have too much power in the future to a certain extent. At the same time, users can also choose which chain to go to for the final settlement, which can be Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, etc.
Knowing this, you can probably clearly see that what Anoma has to do here is actually very simple: express intent, match intent, and then use zk to solve the privacy problem of intent.
