Forget the process, focus on results—what can Web3's most powerful architecture, Intent-Centric, actually solve?
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Forget the process, focus on results—what can Web3's most powerful architecture, Intent-Centric, actually solve?
The realization of Intent-Centric cannot be achieved without the driving force of AI.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Kyle
Over the past eight years since the birth of Ethereum, the open-source blockchain network, countless competing chains have emerged, laying the foundational infrastructure for on-chain applications in finance, gaming, and other fields. The only regret is that after eight years, the vast majority of internet users still cannot access the Web3 world built on blockchain technology.
Data shows that among a total internet user base of 5.16 billion, fewer than 100 million users own a blockchain wallet—the primary gateway to Web3 networks and applications. Why has Web3 struggled so much to go mainstream?
On one hand, there’s a lack of breakout applications familiar to Web2 users—especially in areas like social media and e-commerce. More importantly, using Web3 remains overly complex: users must constantly calculate “network fees” (gas fees, a key cost of network usage) and sign every interaction via a crypto wallet (similar to granting authorization or verifying transactions).
Recently, a new concept aiming to revolutionize the poor Web3 user experience has emerged—investment firm Paradigm introduced “intent-centric,” outlining a new approach to Web3 interactions centered around “intent.” Ideally, users would only need to express an intent, and all underlying operations would be automatically executed behind the scenes, requiring just a single signature to fulfill the goal.
Intent-centric—focused solely on outcomes rather than processes—sounds highly user-centric. This simplification resembles what AI chatbots do. In fact, artificial intelligence can indeed play a role here.
A New Focus for Web3
A recent research article from prominent crypto investment firm Paradigm has thrust the concept of intent-centric into the spotlight within the Web3 space. The firm placed intent-centric at the top of its list of “ten Web3 trends to watch,” spreading this unfamiliar term across the crypto community and sparking excitement.
“Intent-centric” literally means “centered around intent”—focusing directly on “what you want to do.” It prioritizes results over processes. The idea is to streamline complicated on-chain operations through protocol and infrastructure improvements, making them effectively “one-step” actions. More precisely, by hiding the complexity behind the scenes, users can achieve their goals seamlessly and directly.
For example, imagine a user wants to exchange USDT—a dollar-pegged stablecoin on Ethereum—for ARB tokens on the Arbitrum blockchain. This process resembles an international interbank transfer and typically involves multiple steps: opening a cross-chain bridge (a trust solution between systems), connecting a wallet (account), transferring both USDT and ETH (for gas fees) from Ethereum to Arbitrum, waiting for the assets to bridge, finding a liquidity pool on Arbitrum, and finally executing the swap.
This is a routine flow for experienced “on-chain veterans.” Every day, large numbers of users move assets across blockchains, trade, and stake—but these cumbersome procedures are extremely unfriendly, especially for newcomers who face challenges at every step just to complete basic tasks.
Intent-centric aims to solve exactly these kinds of problems—turning long, multi-step processes into short ones, or more accurately, making those steps invisible (“undetectable”) from the user's perspective.
Ideally, a user simply states their intent: “Convert my USDT into ARB on Arbitrum,” and the intent-centric protocol handles everything behind the scenes—cross-chain transfers, finding optimal swap routes, paying gas fees, and completing the transaction. All these steps happen invisibly; the user only sees a clear outcome: USDT in their wallet becomes ARB.
This closely mirrors the Web2 user experience. For instance, when buying something on Taobao with Alipay, you pay and wait for delivery—you don’t need to know how the money actually reaches the merchant.
The USDT-to-ARB cross-chain swap is just a simple example. In theory, as intent-centric matures at the protocol level, any on-chain action could become one-click: purchasing a specific NFT with one click, instantly finding the highest-yield investment product, and more.
In short, the core idea of intent-centric is to optimize user experience so even beginners can quickly navigate the on-chain world.
So how can this vision be technically realized? Actually, the principle isn’t hard to grasp: break down the intent and delegate each step to specialized protocols.
Take Bob the Solver, which stood out at the recent ETHGlobal Paris hackathon. It’s an intent-based transaction infrastructure composed of two parts: the Solver and an account abstraction wallet (AA wallet).
Bob the Solver provides a model for intent-centric systems
The Solver acts as the orchestrator—it identifies the user’s intent, classifies it, and plans the optimal path to fulfillment. Once the path is determined, the Solver constructs the necessary transactions—akin to drafting a “workflow outline”—and forwards them to a programmable account abstraction wallet.
The account abstraction wallet handles execution. It consists of a “bundler” and a “paymaster.” The former organizes the transactions sent by the Solver, while the latter manages and pays the associated gas fees.
Bob the Solver offers a simple blueprint for the intent-centric ecosystem. Following this model, with sufficiently advanced Solver designs and wallet programming, one-click fulfillment across multiple scenarios becomes achievable.
Potential Integration with AI
After eight years of development, the on-chain application ecosystem now hosts numerous trading, lending, finance, gaming apps, and new asset types like NFTs. With the ecosystem reaching significant scale, the emergence of intent-centric comes at just the right time. Only through a transformative upgrade in user experience can the on-chain world achieve exponential user growth.
Currently, there are few new protocols under the intent-centric narrative, but applications with similar visions have already appeared.
The decentralized crypto trading platform 1inch is a classic case. Compared to the well-known Uniswap, 1inch allows users to execute trades across multiple DEXes in a single transaction. By scanning dozens of DEXes simultaneously, 1inch finds the best price for a given trading pair and executes the trade at the most favorable rate.
Before 1inch existed, users had to manually visit multiple DEXes to compare prices, while also considering slippage and gas fees. 1inch uses proprietary algorithms and aggregates data from over ten DEXes to efficiently discover optimal swap paths, enabling users to complete the best possible trades in real time.
1inch trading interface
Aggregation is a simple yet effective way to simplify user operations. But the on-chain world involves far more than simple A-to-B swaps. There are hundreds of independent public blockchains, each hosting diverse on-chain applications and digital assets. Aggregation alone cannot resolve most operational complexities.
Therefore, realizing the full vision of intent-centric still has a long way to go—and in this journey, highly intelligent AI may become a powerful ally.
AI can excel in natural language input of intents, goal decomposition, optimal path calculation, and operation execution.
Often, user intents are complex or expressed imprecisely, making it difficult for solvers to accurately interpret them and design optimal solutions. AI models trained specifically for this purpose can more precisely recognize user intent, inferring underlying goals and needs from transaction history and behavioral data.
In terms of goal breakdown and execution, OpenAI’s AutoGPT—powered by the GPT-4 large language model—has already demonstrated its capabilities. Given a single task, AutoGPT can autonomously plan and execute it. Its characteristics align perfectly with the requirements of intent-centric systems.
To many experts, the realization of intent-centric will depend heavily on AI acceleration. After all, AI vastly outperforms humans in retrieval and execution speed. Integrating AI will hasten the arrival of a user-friendly blockchain era.
Of course, when developers offload the “middle layer” operations—from intent to result—to AI and third-party executors, it implies that “one-click intent fulfillment” involves multiple parties, raising security concerns. On one hand, intent-centric protocol teams must establish punishment mechanisms against malicious behavior and ensure secure, reliable third-party execution layers. On the other hand, they must enhance technical security to prevent algorithm exploitation or fooling the AI. If any part fails, user rights and assets will be at risk.
Intent-centric presents an exciting future for the Web3 industry. We look forward to seeing more secure and user-friendly “intent-based” applications emerge, revolutionizing blockchain user experience from the ground up.
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