NewsFlash Articles Data Fundraising BlockBeats Pro

What business opportunities might Intent-centric bring?

Haotian

Read this article in 11 Minutes

Intent-centric may be an opportunity for wallets to reverse the situation.

The content you provided is:

Source: Haotian

It feels like Intent-centric is a grand narrative, especially with the support of AI. The Intent-based ecosystem seems to be on the verge of a new bull market, arousing the public's longing for "pleasure". But what's the reality? Even the most basic intent narrative, such as the AA wallet, can only work behind the scenes. What about the seemingly cool but impractical AI+intent?

This article explores the predictable business changes in the Intent-centric industry.

Tips: A series of Intent-centric popular science articles have already been written. If you want to gain a systematic understanding, you can go to the highlights section on the homepage to browse on your own.

1. Reordering the ecological structure of DeFi protocols and products, will Wallet become the true front-end entrance?

Current wallets are only asset management (recharge + flash exchange, etc.) and display platforms, located at the end of the DeFi ecosystem. Although wallets have DApp centers to connect applications, the commercial vision of taxing wallets is still far away. Most wallets only help users display assets, and the gap between the entrance to the future Crypto world described by wallets to investors is still far away.

Intent-centric may be an opportunity to turn the tide for wallets.

The user's interaction needs, such as bridge, swap, staking, withdraw, etc., were originally directly interacted with the on-chain contract in the form of instructions. Most DeFi protocols will independently design front-end interaction pages for users to use, and Wallet only plays the role of Connect Wallet+Signature.

The process of intent is essentially an off-chain pre-processing black box. Wallets can become the user intent pre-processing center, used to collect and pre-process user transaction needs, and then link to all DeFi protocols for interaction, without relying on front-end drainage. Only in this way can the commercial potential of using this wallet as an entry point for buying and selling routes be demonstrated. Of course, to be a good solver, wallets will also face significant challenges.

2. "Off-chain" preprocessing + on-chain integration will become mainstream, will UniswapX become the DeFi trading hub?

During the period after the release of UniswapX, everyone felt that it was not very significant and did not follow the paradigm. People also did not find similar features in cowswap, fusion, and other existing platforms to be popular. However, in my opinion, this is only because the overall new architecture of off-chain and on-chain has not yet formed. Only when the off-chain pre-processing environment becomes mature and stable, will the market effect of UniswapX be evident.

Here, "off-chain" actually refers to a set of Solver pre-processing mechanisms, which also need to follow basic standards such as openness, transparency, distribution, and permissionlessness. It is not a traditional off-chain client-server model. "Off-chain" here can be seen as an extension of the structured intent of existing smart contract frameworks.

For example: MEV scenario, miners sort out blocks according to the height of GAS, and MEV robots can harvest benefits by snatching them. This is a point where existing blockchain frameworks are powerless. Now, SUAVE wants to create a decentralized MEV-geth off-chain service node. Most of the potential transactions of MEV will be fully digested through this pre-processing before being submitted to the chain, which will reduce congestion on the chain.

Flashbot 2.0 SUAVE includes MEV-geth and MEV-relay service nodes in its chain architecture. These nodes are an "off-chain" extension relative to the Ethereum mainnet, but they are also an independent chain themselves. This approach of interacting with the main chain through pre-processing on other chains is a structured implementation of off-chain pre-processing. The popular Rollup layer2 is essentially based on this approach.

Based on this understanding, let's take a look at UniswapX. The gas-free, anti-MEV, and pool bidding mechanism it aims to achieve actually relies on a fair off-chain pre-processing environment. This off-chain environment is a permissionless node service model or even an independent sidechain. (This is just speculation, as there are currently no official details available.)

If Uniswap's off-chain preprocessing solution is implemented, assuming it is a chain focused on trading, with the entrance of Uniswap Wallet and Uniswap's top market position in current Ethereum DeFi liquidity, the blueprint concept of UniswapX becoming the future DeFi trading hub makes sense.

3. Solver's multiple implementation paths: Super Smart Contract or AI

AA contract wallet is a structured intent composed of smart contracts and proxy delegate contracts that abstract user-paid gas, social recovery, and conditional execution. This type of intent is implemented through the combination of geeky features in Ethereum contracts and can be thought of as a simple solver.

The future Solver solver is divided into two levels of advancement. The closer level includes the SSC Super Smart Contract and the AA Contract Wallet implementation path, which is nothing more than a more complex combination of methods.

For example: Anoma's solution is to explore a Layer1.5 complex chain structure. Pure transaction intent goes through Layer1, while privacy and security intent goes through Layer2, integrating encryption algorithm technology such as zk-SNARK. The final transaction will be aggregated to the user's client. This blockchain architecture may be the next generation of blockchain intelligent architecture after Ethereum, as it aggregates various technologies under the current blockchain framework and unifies them into a new processing framework system.

Farther layer: AIGC automated execution, is also the most anticipated point after Paradigm proposed the Intent-centric concept. In the future, users only need to chat with AIGC, and AI will automatically help users complete complex transactions. It sounds great, but it will be difficult to implement this process.

On the one hand, AIGC's semantic understanding model is difficult to achieve 100% accuracy in understanding user intent. Currently, users who use chatGPT have similar feelings. On the other hand, after understanding the user's intent, AIGC also needs to have the ability to calculate real-time transaction depth, slippage, and other data for various DeFi protocols, as well as the ability to conduct real-time audits to identify security risks. It also needs to fully understand the communication specifications between various chains and protocols to plan processes reasonably. This not only tests the data capacity of the database, but also requires a "smart" level of real-time learning, analysis, judgment, and application to cope with the complex DeFi environment.

However, the AI transformation of Solver can once again integrate the entrepreneurial forces in the AI field with blockchain. The advantage of the AI direction is technology but lacks a business closed loop, while the DeFi direction of blockchain is just the opposite. The intent track undoubtedly can attract a large number of AI talents, resources, and capital to join. Whether this road can be successful is not the point. It has a large enough imagination space to gather innovative forces in AI+Crypto and drive new technologies and applications together, which is enough to support a new narrative.

We will find that these commercial changes have already been happening quietly. Some wallets are making efforts in the direction of AA, Uniswap is laying out on wallets, V4, and UniswapX, Flashbot2.0 has a new MEV solution, and of course, there are some cool products that have already applied AI to DeFi interaction. They are all doing "Solver Solver" and looking for a step-by-step practical path towards Intent-centric.

Of course, these may happen in the future, or they may ultimately be just a hypothesis.