Intent Trading Opens a New Era of Intelligent Web3 Interaction

Summary

1. Understanding Intent: Anoma's top-down approach and TG Bot's bottom-up approach
2. In-depth Intent: AI Becomes the New UI - From Complex Commands to Simple Intent
3. Navigation Intent: Concept Evolution, Interaction Paradigms, Current Status and Trends
4. Guiding Intent: Challenges and Prospects of Intelligent Web3 Interaction

In June, Paradigm published an article titled "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks," which introduced the concept of intention to the public for the first time. Intention-related protocols and infrastructure rapidly developed, becoming a hot topic of discussion in the crypto community at the ETHCC conference in July.

Intention is not a new concept; it has always existed in the cryptocurrency space. From aggregators and centralized exchanges to contract wallets and cross-chain DeFi, there are attempts to abstract and automate operations. Chainlink and automated middleware have also made attempts in this regard.

Intention to bring new changes. In the past, product interaction was at the core, while in the AGI era, human-computer interaction is at the core. AI/LLM contains enormous potential to enhance encrypted interaction.

Top-down Anoma and Bottom-up TG Bot

In the past six months, there has been a booming development of related projects. The following two examples provide a glimpse of the overall picture.

The most notable is the Anoma Foundation. Against the backdrop of severe homogenization in Layer 1, Anoma secured $57.8 million in funding with its "intent-centric" architecture, ranking 7th in funding for non-issued Layer 1/Layer 2.

Adrian Brink, the founder of Anoma, introduced the core of Anoma during his speech at EthCC:

• User Interaction: Send transparent, private, or protected intents to the Anoma black box architecture.
• Intent collection and matching: The parser collects intents, performs balance state transitions, and achieves counterparty matching.
• Transaction Processing: The matched transaction is submitted to the crypto mempool, validators package the block and perform verification, ultimately completing the status update.

The Anoma team has identified the underlying pain points of blockchain protocols and believes that an intent-centric architecture is the third generation of Dapp architecture, allowing users to define the desired outcome state and achieve efficient and customized privacy transactions.

Anoma is developed by the Heliax team, which consists of 37 interdisciplinary members. Although progress has been slow, a complete innovative ecosystem has been formed, including projects such as Anoma, Namada, AnomaVM, Typhon, and Taiga.

In contrast, TG Bot demonstrates the landing potential of Intent in segmented scenarios through on-chain automated trading tools. TG Bots like Unibot allow users to conduct automated DEX trading via Telegram, providing numerous features. The total market value of the TG Bot sector has approached 200 million USD.

Anoma represents top-down innovation, while TG Bot represents bottom-up transformation. Both aim to simplify the user interaction experience, introducing a new programmable and customizable user interaction interface - User Intent Layer, allowing users to bypass complex on-chain operations and define transaction status based on intent.

AI Becomes the New UI: Command Interaction vs Intent Interaction

AI is introducing the third user interface paradigm in computer history, where users simply tell the computer what they want, rather than how to do it. The three paradigms are:

1. Batch processing
2. Command-based Interaction Design
3. Intent-based Result Specification

Every revolution in interactive modes creates new business models. LLM-based generative AI brings disruptive changes to human-computer interaction, transforming the original software UI interaction into a ChatGPT chat window interaction. LLM + crypto introduces a new proposition based on intent interaction to the crypto world, with the potential to make blockchain interactions smarter.

The Evolution of the Concept of Intent, Interaction Paradigms, Current Status and Trends

The concept of intent originated from the Web2 era. From search engines to e-commerce platforms, intent-based architectures have continuously evolved. In 2017, Gartner officially proposed the concept of "intent-based networking," signaling the trend of automation and intelligence in the Web2 era.

In Web3, the concept of intention is not yet clear, but there is some consensus:

• Paradigm: The intention is declarative constraints, allowing users to delegate transaction creation to third parties while retaining control.
• Anoma: The intention is a message sent by the user, expressing custom preferences and defining constraints executable by the system.
• Propellerheads: The intention is to simplify complex transactions that require assistance from others through outsourcing.

In Web3 intent-based transactions, users create intents off-chain, outsourcing to parsers, encapsulating the complexity of blockchain interactions while retaining on-chain control and lowering the interaction threshold.

The intent also introduces the concept of an "intent-centric" architecture. Related cryptographic protocols and infrastructure embed an interaction layer between users and Crypto, leveraging LLM to provide a better on-chain interaction experience.

LLM+Crypto brings a new paradigm of human-computer interaction, which can directly convert user intentions into smart contract calls. In the future, intent-based Web3 interaction intelligence is expected to significantly reduce the complexity of on-chain interactions.

Currently, Web3 projects are exploring intent potential from different perspectives. They can be divided into four categories from the interaction perspective:

1. Infrastructure: DappOS, Flash 2.0 SUAVE, Anoma, Cow Protocol, etc.
2. Supporting Facilities: ERC 4337, account abstraction related, intent related, etc.
3. Enterprise Applications: Transaction Parser API, Intent API, Intent Transaction Infrastructure, Composable Intent Tools, etc.
4. Consumer Applications: Smart Wallets, DEX, Web3 AI Agents, Smart Search Engines, etc.

The consumer application layer shows great potential:

• Wallet Intelligence: ERC-4337 introduces a user intent layer, with ZeroDev and others promoting AA+intent, giving rise to smart wallets.
• DEX architecture transformation: CoW Hooks, UniswapX, etc. allow off-chain matching with on-chain settlement, and a new Intent-based RFQ narrative is emerging.
• Intelligent interaction entry: Transforming Web3 front-end interfaces with TG Bot and others, focusing on understanding user intent and automating execution.

Challenges and Prospects of Intelligent Interaction in Web3

The interactive experience of Web3 products urgently needs improvement. The intent-centric future faces many challenges:

• Lack of intent-related programming languages
• Lack of appropriate intent architecture
• Lack of domain-specific parsers
• Intention to achieve centralized closure
• Lack of front-end intent recognition parser
• Lack of composable intent realization
• Intent Security Risk

But the prospects are promising. After the emergence of the Intent-centric protocol, Web3 is expected to evolve into a more user-friendly intelligent interaction interface. In the future, users will be able to interact with mainstream applications in a one-stop manner, as simply as using Uber.

On-chain interactions will become more intelligent, customizable, and fair. Ordinary users can leverage third parties to complete customized transactions, becoming the true masters of on-chain activities.

Whether it is account abstraction, chain abstraction, or intent, Web3 has finally begun to focus on user experience. The dawn of intelligent interaction is illuminating this dark forest.