[REDACTED] 2024 | The Coming Intents Based Commerce Economy Panel

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:05

   all right well you all are in for a special treat on this session we have some of the I think actual experts when it comes to building intent-based products and so what we are going to talk about is really just diving into uh I think actually a couple of uh underexplored areas around intense like not just defining them but really talking about how they can be used and what people don't understand so first let's start off well I guess just a

2. 0:30

   quick round of intros uh so we've got Adrian up here from anoma We've Got Jake from coin fund and then we've got Chris from acros if you guys want to maybe just talk a little bit about you know yourself and your project and then we can uh dive in yeah I'm Adrien from anoma um AA very much cares about building a distributed operating system for generalized intents I think intents

3. 0:53

   are literally the solution for everything it requires counterpart discovery which is like 99% of the stuff we want to do I mean in earlier talk Zaki was talking about how all of these systems are coordination systems and coordination fundamentally requires more than one person and so anything that requires more than one person needs an intent-based system I'm Jake Brookman founder and CEO

4. 1:16

   of coin fund I'm a engineer generalist technologist been working uh on you know focusing on blockchain investing for the last nine years or so um coin fund is a early crypto fund fund based in New York Miami and Boston um and looking at all areas of the blockchain space but I primarily spend my time in you know deep Tech and blockchain infrastructure and I'm Chris um work at a cross protocol as a research engineer I've been with the parent or Uma

5. 1:47

   protocol for close to 5 years now um and yeah it crosses a intent Bridge um our primary use case of intents to begin with is high-speed asset bridging um kind of identifying that the friction point that users experience today really is moving assets and that's where we're starting awesome well yeah so what I wanted to kick it off with is uh where you guys like since you spend a lot of

6. 2:11

   time kind of since you guys spend a lot of time I think kind of like talking about this this product with uh and and the the solution with people on crypto Twitter and broadly in the space like what are some of the common misconceptions like the I guess the the things people aren't thinking about right when they think about intents um yeah I think a lot of people think that intents must be limit orders

7. 2:36

   and will only ever be limit orders I think this is certainly not true I think certainly a lot of the early use cases have intense beave like limit orders but really intense it's all about generalized intense because this is where you get actually most of the composability from the ability to not to have not application specific intents but rather General intents so that solvers can compose across like this safe multi Bic intent plus the sort of

8. 3:02

   gitcoin funding intent plus limit order intent this is where I think you'll see the actual 10x unlocks of intents um because we're just going to make everything about 10x more composable um and then probably another 10x by also making this cross chain composable again uh I would say people have a really poor understanding of what intents are and one of the reasons is that there's a lot of um manifestations of intents in the market like here we have a cross protocol is a very specific

9. 3:33

   dedicated implementation of intents for a specific P purpose which is you know bridging across blockchains here we have a Noma which is a more generalized intense framework that's meant to um kind of encapsulate that functionality in general you have other um projects in the market that for example are creating intents in the context of their own blockchain you have others that are creating intense in the context of not so much interoperability

10. 4:05

    technology itself but an interface to aggregating a lot of different blockchains into into one like intense functionality and so I think until um people can really get their hands on some of these Technologies it's it's going to be a little bit opaque for people but I hope I helped to disambiguate it a little bit yeah I think I have two answers here like the first one is from from like a technical perspective I've heard a lot of uh misconceptions that intents are like incompatible with other scalability or

11. 4:36

    like a account abstraction Solutions um and I kind of to to your point earlier like I think that's not necessarily true right like these systems can be designed to be modular enough that they're compatible with like other components um and then related to this also from like a more technical perspective um I've heard like takes that intents are like strictly more difficult to integrate with versus other types of systems and I think that's also conception a lot of

12. 5:00

    the time because the interesting thing about intense is that they push complexity to the edges right like the the relayer often is the one like or the solver or the whatever we want to call them depending on the system is the one taking on like the path to define the execution right if we're looking at like a swap for example um if you're not using an intent system you need to Define like the full execution Trace uh whereas if it's an intent you just Define the output and push that complexity to the edge so that actually

13. 5:25

    makes Integrations often easier for like intense systems versus other kinds of systems actually I think like now I thinking about this and also listen to your answer it's like intents aren't like in this space we kind of have this idea that it always must be like well X replaces y That's always against something intents are just very orthogonal like intents are a very new thing um that just enables new things it's not intents aren't going to replace VMS for example like virtual machines uh like intent machines and VMS

14. 5:56

    aren't competitive you can build intent machines on top of virtual machines it's like I I think in the space you always have to be very careful to not fall trapped to like oh my word must be replacing your word because this is the only way the attention shifts it's more like this is a like we can build a lot of these things on top of each other without having to compete there yeah I

15. 6:20

    think that's a good distinction so uh you guys both I mean all of you pretty much mentioned like swaps is like I guess the the current most obvious implementation of intents like where do you think we're going to start seeing or are already are starting to see some other applications of intents so maybe I'll go first just because I think we have like level one and then you can go to level n um so swaps beginning but the like key feature that we have in across

16. 6:43

    is this thing called across plus so that's basically like in simple terms like Bridge plus action so that's like Beyond swaps right so you moving between two chains and then you like call some arbitary call data at the end of the bridging action um and our settlement system is verifying that both the bridge or swap plus this like final output have been fulfilled the way that the user had specified um and an example could be like I don't know bridge to a chain and

17. 7:09

    then deposit into a money market right it's like it's marginally additional functionality but for a lot of use cases this is actually like the secret source that they need right like your users at like I want to buy the nft and they don't have assets on that chain but they have assets on base right so then like the bridge plus swap action there is like okay detect that they have assets on the other chain pull the asset ass sets to the Target chain where they want to go and then perform like one action

18. 7:32

    right which could be like combinatorial but yeah so that's like the step one for us and I'm sure like AA has a lot more to say on that all right I can sort of go all the way to step n and we can see if we get there by inductive reasoning um so intense what they generally do is they abstract execution from State layout uh so in an intent you define specifically I currently have state a and I'd like to have state B and I actually don't care how I transition from A to B and the system just checks

19. 8:03

    that or like wherever the intent machine is sort of currently running for example this could be on ethereum this could be on salana this could be on a global an noral L1 it could be anywhere where you can implement the intent machine it the system just checks that your constraints were adhere to right so like that you currently started from State a and only got to State B and so with the limit order for example this just looks like I currently have some eth and I want at least this much Bitcoin and that's then

20. 8:27

    your intent um and so you can imagine now the number of use cases you can build anything that requires counterparty Discovery where you don't have the other leg of the sof of State transition where this could be I have a for B and someone else needs to have B for a in order to make the settable but this doesn't even have to be one for one it can be like I have a for B someone else B for c c for d d for e and then lastly e for a um one very

21. 8:51

    common use case that I think most people don't think about but which is an intense system isn't a rollup like any sort of L2 it's clearly intense entri it's an intense system um because again you just collapse a number of State transitions together into a single state transition um the use case that I'm pretty excited about uh around for example gitcoin where we want to have the ability to actually have very decentralized applications so without

22. 9:15

    having to r on someone like sort of centrally in a Google spreadsheet running the computation of which project should get fund and executing it we can rather say well with intents we all commit to if and only if this project actually gets funding do does our get pulled from our account right so you can do these kinds of things um another very simple example is the no to Safe two out of three multi is an in 10 Centric system because but currently you send

23. 9:39

    your intent your partial signature to uh the NOA safe server effectively and the last person pulls it from there in the future you can just send this to sort of Thea intent gossip Network and then whether your transaction or whether you intent is going to be settable on ethereum or sonana I don't actually care like it's just common infrastructure that handles generalized intents that can then be executed against a normaliz

24. 10:02

    operating system yeah I um it's a good question in terms of applications but maybe like let me give you a view of how intense might um impact smart Contracting itself like I definitely talked to projects at least some projects in the market that have this approach but basically you know today when we Implement um uh daps right we're we're using like imperative programming and writing solidity writing smart contracts with intense networks There's an opportunity

25. 10:35

    to to adan's point to like abstract the execution of that um what comes in intense networks is a you know a kind of an execution Network a relayer network where we're effectively like abstracting the execution away and so what we can actually go and do is go from imperative programming to more declarative programming probably a lot of people this more technical but for anyone who doesn't know what that means um it's essentially a way of like defining the functionality of your pro program

26. 11:06

    through constraints and then offloading the implementation um of your of your contract to a to a network that you don't really care how they kind of fit within those constraints and except as long as they deliver the output that you want and so there's kind of this opportunity to again like change the way that we program applications longer term um and that potentially opens up you know maybe more

27. 11:36

    accessibility to uh to development in in the blockchain space um and sort of like smaller applications more more creative applications actually I I think this kind of declarative intent programming is going to make application development in order of magnit easier than it is right now uh this is I think like one of the biggest Dev unlocks you can possibly we can possibly currently

28. 12:00

    work on which is just when you think of intense your development experience just becomes way better because you don't have to worry about like what specific op codes exist on this on which specific platform the I was going to say maybe we can give like like a concrete example of like like like for example if you're if you're building a DEX you know like an amm today you kind of have to go and do all the work you have to go and Define the curve you have to go and Define like what pools there are right

29. 12:30

    but in a in a more declarative programming setting how would you do this yeah so the way to actually think about this is in a more declarative setting for example using juix and anoma you just write like I currently have this state and I'm willing to hold this this specific other state given some constraints and you really right like I'm willing to sell my e for Bitcoin if the price is above 4K and the weather in

30. 12:52

    Paris is nice and if the weather in Paris is bad then I'm then I want to hold right and this is literally what you write down and then solvers sort of take this constraint and then try to do constraint solving which is they take a number of these intents and then they see if I combine them in different ways do I get something that effectively goes correct afterwards and if it goes correct then you can settle this as a transaction on chain um when it comes

31. 13:16

    more to application development it starts looking a lot more like what constraints do you care for your program for example in an amm you'd care about some specific curve being a tier two but it's not like in a theory we very much write like 1+ one then set nft equals green like you very much like outline the individual compute steps which makes it very complicated to reason about sort of what possible States your program can be

32. 13:42

    in whereas with an intent with a declarative model you just Define like what possible states can my program hold and then like anything that doesn't violate those States is like a correct execution of the program um and this is actually now that we think about that intense will revolutionize ZK and I think most of the ZK people don't yet know that they will need intense but like ZK pushes state to the edge of the network and Heights the compute right um

33. 14:07

    and so we don't currently have a good model on these systems for how to like Express for example that I'm willing to trade a for B but privately because like we can only settle fully fledged things on chain and so what intens actually allow you to do is you can say I'd like to do this state kind of state transition and no one knows who I am but we just modify the state and this is my starting state in this my ending state so between ZK and intense are smart

34. 14:33

    contracts like going away no smart contracts will still exist but more as a verification tool like you just Define what specific things your program cares about and then it verifies it it's actually much closer like maybe in the future most smart contracts just become ZK verifiers that I can totally see uh s of pending some performance constraints yeah makes sense I mean it seems like we've got uh on the one end kind of like today most of the environments are imperative and you have

35. 15:04

    Pro protocols like across and across plus that are kind of iterating on top of that and like designing some Solutions on top of that and then on like the other end of the spectrum you have kind of a Noma where you're building for the declarative future what does the transition period look like and like what do you think of the steps Beyond maybe across Plus on the way to building towards everyone just using the enoma type of approach given that most imperative layer ones are not going away at least the next few months and years

36. 15:29

    um by the way let's start off with I'm a huge fan of across and I use the protocol every time I want to move across chain um and sort of like anoma's goal is not to replace or compete with the cross for example it just like if you eventually want to have much easier time building a cross like AA just provides a bunch of like underlying stacks for you to like not have to write a bunch of solidity contracts in order to like make this happen in practice uh

37. 15:55

    this is really the way I think about AA which is it just makes existing paradigms easier to implement it is not there to replace them it does not compete with a cross and we sort of historically saw this like you could build a lot of things on bitcoin um using Bitcoin script but building that was very difficult and the evm in ethereum like didn't sort of replace those systems it just made them easier

38. 16:18

    to build and as a result over time many more people started migrating towards sort of the evm approach rather than Bitcoin script approach and I think we'll see the same thing U with intents that people people start migrating more towards the generalized intense because it's just going to be easier to build there yeah I mean I think what I'll say there is from our perspective like it's very much trying to take the most pragmatic approach that is like you know we're entering the world of a thousand rollups and they're proliferating

39. 16:42

    everywhere and there's like an immediate fragmentation problem like we fixed scaling on ethereum that's great but we also made the ux like five times worse in the process so like how do we unify that in in the medium term right so that's very much like our intent for now excuse the pun but yeah wait maybe um can I ask a question like there's usually this trade-off we see in Tech where very specific implementations they're specific but

40. 17:07

    they tend to be more efficient and then like very general things are more General but they tend to be kind of like slower and less efficient do you see that trade-off in play in intense as well like between generalized intense networks and um specific implementation this is certainly going to be true on the solver side sort of the more structured the more struct your intent can be the easier your life it will be as a solver right like you can imagine on no you can just write like I

41. 17:37

    currently have this completely opaque State encoded in my own encoding format and I'd like to go to a different kind of state complet encod completely differently that's very difficult to solve because a solver doesn't have a lot of structure to go by um so in that sense generalized intents make things slower unless you start agreeing more on the intent standards like cross dust and like then if everyone just agrees this is what a cross chain um transfer looks

42. 18:01

    like solvers actually have a much easier time um sort of dealing with that kind of structured data yeah and I think the structure is key right this is why we created this EIP with Unis Swap and why we're like trying to like push like one unified way of specifying these things um but yeah there's obviously like a bound on how expressive that can be but again just being like pragmatic like users primarily today want to move assets that's what they want to do and

43. 18:23

    applications that need a move state or you like intense systems like maybe in the future will be the right solution but for now that's like still to be defined and maybe like one last thing one last thought here which we didn't mention yet which is that solver networks tend to be free open markets right and markets are actually like really really effective at optimizing and making you making problems efficient so we've definitely like seen that in a

44. 18:47

    cross for example as your time to execution has gone down dramatically as the nwork this is a key thing for us right and like also it like AIDS with decentralization and permissionless and like antifragility of the system overall right like enabling anyone to be a filler is like a critical component and then you kind of push the complexity to the settlement layer which we didn't really talk about here but that's then like the hard problem is like how do you settle the intents at the end of the day

45. 19:10

    uh on sort of you want to have open networks here for solvers I think the really important thing to understand is you should have uh composable solving like if you have an intent from A to B uh this and someone from b2c a solver needs to be able to sort of create a partial solve because otherwise especially with generaliz in 10 10 systems you end up in this world which we currently see for the rollups which is one Mega solver and sort of like all the rollup interop is currently effectively proposing well let's just

46. 19:40

    get really single large solvers to like do all the interop between all these different rollups and this because fundamentally no one has thought about how do we do composable solving uh so especially as we move towards generaliz intens we really need to think about using composable or Building Systems that enable composable solving so that we can have many competing Sol us that compete in their own niches but we can still sort of like compose these Solutions on top of each other awesome

47. 20:05

    well guys unfortunately we are out of time but thank you so much for all those insights and hopefully the developers out there got a lot of thoughts about how they can utilize these systems so please make sure to check out n across and then I'm sure coin fund has funded a lot of these uh protocols as well great thank you guys