Twitter Space participated by Zaki ⚛️🍷, Nick White, Uma Roy, hdevalence.bsky.social 🌘, Christopher Goes

Thanks for joining, we'll wait for the others.

I think we need some kind of like elevator music just to fill the space.

This is more 8-bit than any elevator I've ever been in.

Like, can you just do that automatically?

Maybe we can find a tune that really fits the intense topic of the day.

Uma, you're coming to module summit, right?

I feel like there is some overlap with the stuff that Penumbra is doing.

Like, do you think he's going to be here soon?

Yeah, let's, like I invited Henry in here.

I just was looking to follow along, but you know, great to be hanging around.

So everyone's talking about Intents, but I think there's still a bit of an information gap.

You know, it's like the early stages of people figuring out and understanding what they are.

And, you know, the 3 speakers that we invited today all gave talks at Research Day in May.

And if you haven't watched those talks, I really encourage you to do so.

And I think, I don't know if they coordinated this or not, but I would say that they successfully nerd sniped everyone that was at the conference on Intents.

And something that was kind of something that people were already talking about became really the topic of the hour.

And so I'm really excited to have these 3 speakers on with us today, because they each have a really good view.

And luckily, we also have Henry from the number who, I guess, just joined.

And hopefully, we can include him in parts of this conversation.

I first encountered the idea of intense when I picked up a copy of the Noma white paper at Cosmoverse last year.

And I read it on the flight home, or rather I tried to read it.

And I remember the idea of intense stuck out to me as something that was very novel and made a lot of sense, but I only understood it at the surface level.

And then when I tried to go deeper, I got completely lost.

And so I've been learning a little bit more about intense over the coming, over the last few weeks and months, as I think everyone else who's probably on this Twitter space have been as well.

But I think the goal of today's Twitter space is to answer the question, you know, WTF are Intents And like, why do they matter?

Like, what do people need to know about them, especially all the builders in the audience?

And so, yeah, I couldn't think of a better guest to have on to answer this.

So why don't we go ahead and do a round of introductions from each of you, and then we can dive into the meat of this conversation.

Zucky, longtime cosmonaut, longtime blockchain builder, co-founder of Sommelier, yeah, 1 of the people.

I gave a nice like 10 minute intense talk at Research Day which I think is fairly digestible.

We're a company focused on more secure and more general interoperability.

And I also gave a talk at Research Day talking about cross-chain interop, bridging, and Intents and how it all comes together.

And Zaki was actually 1 of the big original inspirations for my even starting thinking about Intents.

was all from your group chat, telegram messages about Intents and being excited.

And I was like, oh yeah, I should look into this.

And then we have the OG nerd sniper of all, Chris.

I credit myself only with abstract philosophical nonsense.

And then later on, other people assign coherent meanings, and I just get to claim that I was right all along.

I've worked previously on Ivc for the Cosmos project, and I now work on Anoma, which does use the word intent, although I guess I'd like to like, you know, we in no way aim to assert a monopoly over that word.

You know, we've been using it for a while because it's a helpful design concept for us, But I think 1 reason the intent meme is so popular is that it ends up being kind of a way to describe commonalities between a lot of these systems and what they're trying to do in perhaps different specific ways.

So, you know, we just want to contribute to that discourse.

I want to start with the most basic, basic question, which is what are intents?

What would a good definition of intents be?

So my, my, okay, so I like to start with what problem they solve rather than what they are.

Because I feel like the best, like that's the clearest explanation of what an intent is.

Like, hey, you know, millions of people are like sitting there with their Meta masks, clicking through transactions happily and like using blockchains.

You know, when I like when we, you know, 3, 4 years ago is like there were like hundreds of people using blockchains and now there's millions.

But like a lot of this to me came from, so Similia is this sort of app that's designed, is this framework or protocol or application for making DeFi easier to use, especially like complex DeFi things like providing liquidity on the decks, running like a leverage strategy, that kind of stuff.

And I think we've like succeeded assuming someone can actually get into 1 of our smart contracts.

And that seems to be like the hardest usability barrier that we encountered as we were building Sommelier.

Is it's, you know, you start out with a user and the user's like, I have some coins somewhere.

They're like, I have a coin on a centralized exchange.

I have a coin on, I have some coins on L2s.

The answer to the question is like, okay, cool, I have these things and they're like, I want to use your app, I want to get the benefits of having my money in real yield ETH.

But like people are like how do I do this.

Now depending on where you are you might have to like send your money to like a wallet on chain.

You might have to use a DEX or a centralized exchange to swap this.

You might have to bridge your coins between chains, you have to use the right bridge to end up with the right asset, you might have to use IBC inside of Cosmos, like any of these, you have all these different answers.

And Basically, there's been a bunch of problems with that.

It's amazing to me that anyone successfully does this.

I was helping last night someone from the ETH community who wanted to buy a bad kid on Twitter.

He's like, this is the hardest problem with computer science.

And I showed him some apps and stuff like that.

And it was a totally unsatisfactory answer.

We have meme coins where large numbers of people come on.

It's only available on decentralized exchange.

And like they get they lose money to MEV bots, they have to know about gas.

It's like, you know, this is to me like, oh, like we built all of this amazing infrastructure, but like this is the usability story that we presented people with, and it's like clearly a fail.

The problem is we don't have good enough UIs, we don't have good enough UI frameworks, I mean, we don't have enough services.

And so we tried to build that for Sibelia.

We tried to build routers to route people into our contracts.

It was like it's been a never ending nightmare.

There are certainly better routing frameworks from teams like Enso coming out.

But like it's still it's pretty difficult.

And then like when you add the cross chain piece to this, it becomes like an unsolvable nightmare.

The problem statement is, all right, we built all these amazing blockchains.

You know, they're scalable, they're fast, they can handle large transaction volume, but no 1 could use them.

And the idea is that we could build infrastructure where people could say, I am willing to trade X for Y.

I have some USDC and I want to buy Pepe, and I'm willing to trade it for at least, I want a minimum of this much Pepe for my USDC, they would be able to sign a statement and then if and some off-chain actor figures out how to get Pepe into their account, provides a proof like over a bridging protocol, you know something that is identifying your knowledge proof, something like that that is available with smart contract.

Smart contract says, yep, as promised, you provided this much pepe, you can claim the user's USDC.

And the idea is the user doesn't need to know about gas.

And then we can construct these things correctly.

Maybe the user gets a refund for some of the MEV that they created.

That's what kind of a simplified description in my mind of what intents are.

Was that financial advice, by the way, buying Pepe?

I am bad at trading meme coins I don't know how.

I do believe that that is a legitimate use case for a blockchain I do believe that that like I think we should like meet our users where they are.

And if our users cannot buy their Pepe and that's what they want, we have failed them.

Okay, so it sounds like that's a really good motivation for Intents.

It sounds like you see it as a way to solve a lot of user experience problems that like coming from a completely different angle than the traditional approach, which is like, you know, we need to build better wallets, etc.

It's like, well, actually, just build a system where the users actually don't interact that much with the guts of blockchains.

And someone else does it on their behalf.

Just to like quickly say this is it's like I get, I become frustrated with the idea that ultimately you're describing a wallet that basically knows everything that a market maker knows.

It knows about tracking prices, it's tracking gas, it's tracking arbitrage opportunities, it knows fair prices for things.

And I'm skeptical of anyone's actual ability to build that.

Okay, so Henry, you sound like you want to say something, but I guess I was gonna move.

I was just gonna jump in and say like, there's sort of your comment, I think draws to this question of like, okay, what is a wallet, right?

And 1 of the things that I think is kind of interesting to do in this ecosystem is like, imagine you're like looking at it, and you just kind of like defocus your eyes.

And like, let things like blur a little bit and see like, what are the areas where things blur into other things?

And how could the boundary like, there are all these, if you take any component of the system and zoom in on it, there's going to be a bunch of complexity there.

And if you like zoom in, you can say, oh, it has the XYZ internal parts, right?

But it's an interesting exercise to kind of like, let your vision blur, like lose sight of what are the boundaries between these different things and how could those boundaries be possibly reconstituted?

And could it be that if you build this whole kind of like intense settlement like system, where, oh, well, it turns out that means you're effectively like building in like the capabilities of a market maker, maybe that actually just is sort of a part of this like bigger like wallet assemblage.

I mean it sounds like the I mean it's the common through line there is that we need to kind of like, take a step back and re-evaluate some of like the base assumptions of like how we want to build blockchains and like what the different components do and should be responsible for.

I want to ask, I want to turn over to Chris and Uma to also take a stab at describing what are intents and why they matter.

Yeah, I can also take a shot at it I think Zaki motivated the reasoning for him getting into thinking about this really well And I also had a really similar experience.

So it's a saying we're trying to do like interoperate better more secure interoperability And we are fundamentally right now building this like really secure messaging protocol.

And for myself to operate our protocol, we need to like run relayers across a bunch of different chains.

And I would say as like a fairly sophisticated user, I would dread managing all my balances across all these different rollups.

And that was me as a fairly sophisticated user.

There's all these problems around which bridge should I use, which is the fastest, like where do I go for each different chain.

And then I think moving towards this app chain world or app roll up world, the problems get so much worse because it's unrealistic to expect any 1 company to maintain all these integrations.

So say you have a bridge aggregator coming out.

Well, how are they going to maintain this really long tail of integrations.

And it feels like fundamentally something's something's broken here.

I think in terms of defining or starting to define what is an intent, I think we've talked a lot about the problem.

And I think the fundamental problem is today transactions are very declarative.

So if you think about something like, I want to buy a particular coin on Uniswap for this price that's saying, I'm going to specify the venue at which I trade, I'm going to specify which chain I traded on, and I'm going to specify like my other parameters.

And in this like very multi-domain world, say you're trying to get like the best execution price across a variety of venues.

As a user, Like you shouldn't need to specify like, oh, I want to do this much of a trade on this roll up and this much of the trade on this other roll up because the liquidity is like better for these reasons.

And so I think an intent is where a transaction is like declarative and specifying like all this stuff like what then you want to do stuff on how much you exactly want to do.

An intent is like saying, you're specifying what you want your outcome to be.

So basically, like, I have some coins now.

And I want these other coins, like I want my Pepe coin.

And someone else basically figures out the best venues, the best execution, the timing, wherever that is.

They're a sophisticated actor and then they help fulfill your intent.

So I think going towards a definition that's, I guess, not very mathematically precise, but more philosophical is transactions are declarative and the onus is really on the user, whereas intents are users expressing what they want the end state to be, and then other people figure out how to get there.

It's interesting that I feel it sounds like a lot of the people who are most bullish on on tense or have encountered them are the people who worked most closely with cross-chain systems.

And like, we can talk about that more later on.

But it's interesting to notice that pattern, you know, I feel like maybe people who only, you know, live on 1 chain don't, don't experience these pain points quite as acutely.

Chris, do you want to take a stab at defining intense?

So, you know, I think Zaki and Uma did a great job going over sort of the practical UX reasons why you might want to think about system design this way.

And I am a big fan of what Henry mentioned, you know, zooming out and blurring your eyes, or so to speak.

So to do a little bit of that, I mean, personally, I guess I came at the concept of intense originally, from just thinking about what coordination systems do and the, you know, the like OG coordination system that we all exist under the aegis of is natural language, right?

And if you think about like, in the Enoma, 1 of the Enoma papers, which contains lots of mistakes, please don't treat taken as canon, but I think we use the example of hunters trying to encircle a deal a deer, which is maybe not something many of us do in this conversation, not vegetarian, but like in principle, If you are trying to encircle a deer with other hunters, what you need to communicate with them in order to coordinate your action is a bunch of preferences and plans, right?

You need to communicate all of these internal states that aren't visible in the external world which you all observe.

So you're communicating something about internal states and in particular you're communicating what you want and kind of what you are able to or plan to do.

So that you want to like kill this deer or this other deer and that you're able to shoot this arrow or you know move in this direction, your current position is X, right?

So typically those in just English, as far as I know, would be referred to as intentions or something like this or a shortened version of intents.

And So that is how I got the word, at least personally when I was writing with it.

You know, I think different, the intense can seem probably nebulous and abstract and maybe even like marketing.

And I'm sure that sometimes it is that, as all words are.

But to me, to kind of generalize over what people seem to be using the term to refer to, I would say intense or credible commitments to preferences over the state space of a system.

And there are different systems with different state spaces, right?

So like Ethereum or Ethereum plus some roll-ups or, you know, Celestro or some Cosmos chains, you can kind of define the boundaries of the system in different ways.

And then to say, to view that system from an Intents-centric perspective is to say that, okay, Intents defines some preferences a user has over the state space of future possible executions of a system.

And then what we want to do in matching intents and settling is to find ways that we can satisfy multiple users' preferences that also satisfy the constraints of the system itself, that the signatures are checked or the linearity we want to be enforced is enforced, and then settle those appropriately such that we can make a credible promise that the user's preferences are respected, right?

That if they said X and Y and Z in an intent, that the system actually does X and Y and Z or it does something that satisfies the preferences they've described or nothing.

So we want this kind of correct atomicity guarantee.

And I mean here not atomic in the sense of like atomic multi-blockchain or something that is related, but a distinct concept, just atomic in the sense of either the intent is settled and the user's express preferences are respected or it's not.

And you can, Enoma, I guess, takes a view of this definition that also includes privacy.

So our definition of intent is something like commitment to credible commitment to preferences over the, you know, also over the state space of the system, but where the state space of the system here is kind of redefined to include who knows what, right.

So it's almost a commitment to information, future information flows in the system.

And that's, I guess we're kind of going after the general definition because we think that's an interesting question, but I don't think it's, you know, that's not the end all be all.

I think that the concept of intent is useful because it allows you to describe the relation between the user of the system and the system itself very well, in that the user can say what they care about specifically, as opposed, you know, they care about things that they can measure and the intent can express the measurements, the outputs they care about in the system.

And they might not care about a lot of details of execution, or they might care about kind of, you know, properties of those execution traces, but not the exact traits, right?

You know, in a system like, oh, I don't want to front-run Henry, but as far as I understand, in a system like Penumbra, users might care about something like the fairness that all intents settled within 1 batch, however that's defined, gets like the same price, and the price is calculated fairly as the midpoint, something like this.

So that's an example of a property of an execution path, but not an exact 1.

Credible commitments of preferences over the state space of a system.

I think that's a really, that sounds like a very, I don't know, complete and like specific definition.

Now that we have that sort of the ground, you know, ground kind of covered the background established, I want to ask something that I think a lot of people have been wondering, and I've noticed people bring up a lot in the Twitter sort of discourse, which is, what is the difference between intents and things like account abstraction that, you know, a lot of people have been talking about for a while or things like pay masters, like, or also some people say, Oh, well, you know, limit orders are just intense.

Like, how are intents different to some of the things that like already exist or people have been talking about?

I think I spoke a lot about this in my research day talk about how account abstraction and intents are related.

So I think account abstraction basically is this way or it's this protocol And it can help enforce like very specific intents.

So like take a really concrete example of I want a rate limit on a smart contract wallet.

Like for example I only want a thousand dollars per month to leave my account.

You're enforcing some preference over the state space to go back to Chris's terminology.

You're saying like, oh, any state space, which like at the end of the month has more than a thousand dollars living in my account is like not acceptable to me.

And then the smart contract wallet has like logic in it to enforce that intent.

So I think account abstraction is just a spec for a smart contract wallet.

And in particular, like, it can enforce very specific intents that relate to the state of your account.

So it can enforce a rate limit, or things like social recovery.

And then it has this concept of a paymaster to help deal with intents around gas.

So, hey, say you have an intention that's like, I wanna pay for gas in USDC, and I wanna reimburse someone else for gas.

Well, you can enforce that in this way with like the account abstraction spec.

But fundamentally, I think account abstraction is a spec and it's a protocol in service of very specific intents.

And for anyone who's looked at ERC 4337, I think the spec is very long and winding and complicated because basically, I think the creators took, let's say, 5 common user intentions that they want to enforce, like rate limits, social recovery, gas abstraction.

And then they stuffed it into this protocol.

And then they for each part of the protocol, like the paymaster or the smart contract wallet validation, enforces each of those intents specifically.

And it's not like a very general system, like it's kind of brittle.

And I think if you look at all the account abstraction diagrams, it's really complicated because they kind of worked backwards from, hey, I want to enforce these very specific intents.

How can I make the protocol do what I want to do in a way that's compatible with like Ethereum?

So I think in that way, it's kind of ugly and like not general enough.

And for example, an account abstraction, it does not help you solve the problem of, OK, I have ETH on Ethereum and I want to get the best price as much Pepe as possible trading across a variety of venues and across a variety of L2s, rollups, app chains, whatever.

I think like the biggest problem with account abstraction is that it's a single domain protocol.

And I think a lot of what intents solve is actually like dealing with multi-domain stuff.

So I think account abstraction, TLDR is like an intent specific app is what I called it in the talk.

And I think it just doesn't solve a lot of the problems with multi-domain that I do think intents do solve because account abstraction was designed in this very single domain way.

So I think intents are a very useful abstraction and even more useful in the cross-domain world in a way that account abstraction is like, I think, very fundamentally flawed.

So yeah, it kind of traction is sort of like a, a limited, like subset of, like, intense intense is like a much more general, wider concept that can encompass a lot more user experiences and is like inherently like cross domain rather than single domain.

Anyone else have any takes on this question?

Eli Krenske made a really good point to me, which was 1 thing that it might be very familiar to like, at least DeFi savvy users is like the concept of liquidation, right?

And so a liquidation is basically like you, you know, when you have like say, like a vault on maker, right?

And you're like, hey, I've locked up some ETH, I've been some die.

Basically, you bind that vault to an intent that says that if the price of ETH falls below a certain place, you have the right, someone has the right to take the ETH out of my vault and sell it for DAI to pay back the debt.

And like what I think has gotten people excited about Intents is that we've been like, you know, from like seeing, you know, billions and billions of dollars of liquidations happened in DeFi successfully to you know, seeing these like off-chain actors that are in the account abstraction spec to seeing like how much stuff is happening in the MEV space with like actors like inferring intents from users' transactions and then acting on them and bundling them and extracting MEV from them and all this stuff.

There is this whole rich ecosystem of off-chain actors and the question is can we align those off-chain actors with like users' goals, such that like, we can make the entire blockchain UX, you know, a hundred X better.

Yeah, And in fact, I kind of like did an overheard tweet.

Basically, there was like something that you had said, which is that intents turn toxic order flow into like non toxic order flow and they turn bad cross-chain UX into like good cross-chain UX.

Yeah, just to add on to something that was saying about, and also you mentioned about sort of in a cross chain world, the problem appears more naturally.

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Exploring Intents