Last week, we hosted the State of the Intents Nation featuring some of the brightest minds in the intents space. The panel explored how intents are redefining web3, and have the potential to be the foundational pillar of the DeFAI meta in 2025.

Missed it? Check out the recap👇

🤷‍♀️ Why you should care about intents

Intents allow users to focus on the desired outcome (what state update is ultimately desirable) rather than the steps required to achieve it (execution). In an intent-centric world, users specify an outcome, and 3rd-party solvers compete to find the optimal solution on their behalf - how they achieve it is irrelevant.

This outcome-focused approach is highly attractive in crypto, as historically, the delta between what a user wants and what they get after the steps they specify has been large to say the least (think: high slippage, transaction reversion, etc). Intents aim to eliminate this gap by delivering optimal outcomes based on the user’s definition of “optimal” while abstracting away the complexities of execution.

You can think of intents like ordering food at a restaurant: you tell the waiter what dish you want (your desired outcome), and the chef handles the cooking. You don’t worry about the steps - just the end result. Similarly, in an intent-centric model, users define what outcome they want and solvers handle the rest.

💻 Real-world applications

Ultimately you should care about how intents will (and in some cases, already are) shaping how real-world users interact with the blockchain. What this means in real-terms:

- Revert free guarantees: Transactions don’t fail due to high slippage (users don’t waste gas fees on failed transactions)
- Native transaction optimisation: Solvers find the best DEX or platform for execution, removing this burden from users.
- Chain agnostic: Users no longer need to worry about which chain their assets are on. This is analogous to how mainstream users don’t worry whether X uses AWS, GCP, or Azure. Blockchains should operate the same way.
- No gas fees: Solvers can pay gas fees on behalf of users, using the currency users already hold.
- Conditional execution: Intents can update state only when certain conditions are met, for example, when the price of an asset reaches a certain point (native limit orders).

Intents 🤝 DeFAI

The panel made it clear: intents are more than a tool, they’re the foundation for safe, effective and user friendly DeFAI:

- AI guardrails: Intents act as guardrails for AI agents, ensuring AI actions align with user goals (via constraints), reducing risk.
- AI Solvers: Solvers are starting to leverage AI to optimise user outcomes. It’s likely that in the coming months and years, solvers will develop AI systems that can interact with one another to solve intents.
- Usability: intents simplify automation by translating user goals into actionable constraints. Solvers then find the best on-chain execution path, freeing users from micromanaging complex processes.

📈 What’s next for intents

The panel predicts a big year for intents in 2025. Some of the highlights:

- Exponential adoption: More intents-based projects hitting the market, finding product-market fit and seeing exponential user adoption.
- Standardisation: Establishing open standards for intent systems, fostering interoperability and broader adoption.
- Developer Tooling: Building out tooling to make it easy for developers to build intent-based applications.
- Community Collaboration: Expanding conversations to include diverse voices, from developers to end-users, to ensure intents solve real-world problems.

Final thoughts

The panelists underscored the massive potential for intents to make web3 tech more powerful, accessible, and aligned with user needs.

Thanks to @ishaan0x @0xHarbs @simonr0204 @gweiworld for sharing your expertise with us.

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