Intents: The Future of Programmatic Settlement

Introduction

Intent-centric networks are a new branch of infrastructure focused on altering the way global state is updated on transaction-based distributed state machines such as Ethereum. At its core, Ethereums fundamental innovation was Turing-complete programmatic settlement expanding on the limited scripting offered by the Bitcoin protocol UTXO settlement model. Parties and counter-parties could now interact without the need of an intermediary by leveraging smart contracts for deterministic settlement logic that mediated the transaction under the programmed settlement conditions. Programmatic settlement despite its immense merit has resulted in a suboptimal UX for the average user requiring users to validate transactions ensuring the parameters result in their desired action. This has resulted in undesired outcomes such as asset theft and in many cases suboptimal execution for their desired behaviour.

Intents offer a new alternative to update global state without the need for end users to verify every transaction parameter before executing a state transition. Instead, Intents only require users to specify what they want to accomplish under a set of conditions and the transaction building is outsourced to sophisticated entities known as solvers who find the most optimal execution path for the users intended action. We believe that intent-centric protocols set the foundations for improving end user UX when performing actions on-chain, significantly reduce the occurrence of asset theft, provides the infrastructure for superior on-chain execution especially when it comes to trading specific actions and overall reduces the mental overhead needed for the average user when interacting with Web3 applications.

Below we will outline the difference between the transaction-based model and the intent-based model, the purpose of solvers in intent-based networks, how applications can leverage intents to improve the end user experience and the underlying architecture of intent-centric protocols such as Anoma and Essential.