So … What TF are intents and solvers actually (for beginners)
So … What TF are intents and solvers actually (for beginners)
Yeah --> we should really explain what we're building.
So, recently we saw a video of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick saying that one of the most important things for a young startup to do is to write a “truly enlightened piece” explaining why they exist.
So because of that – and realizing that like a decent chunk of people (pretty much everyone outside of crypto) have 0 idea what intents and solvers are – we at Axal decided to write a piece explaining it all. Most importantly, we want you to understand WHY this matters, and by you I don’t just mean SF tech nerd or VC, we want our friends and family to understand why this matters.
So, without further ado, here’s our truly enlightened piece on what intents and solvers are, why TF they exist, and why they make a difference.
What’s wrong with Web3 right now?
Well, it's important to understand what crypto/web3 is like right now before you start to explain what it could be. More than anything, it's important to understand this concept of different protocols and layers.
You’ve probably heard of a few crypto projects, like bitcoin or ethereum or solana. While each of these projects have their own framework, they don’t actually work with each other.
That’s kind of a huge problem.
The way users have grappled with this growing and fragmented ecosystem has been quite similar to what is done in web2: custom code to connect third parties, manual processes, or even foregoing certain platforms entirely due to integration difficulties. At best, they end up with a system that works, but takes significant development time and is inflexible with changing needs. At worst, systems have clear failures, are far from optimal in cost/speed, or further centralize.
So to solve this, some protocols have secondary “layers” that are specifically designed to improve functionality, efficiency, or security, adding another level of complexity. These “layers” aim to solve various issues—like transaction speed, cost, or scalability—but they don’t always work smoothly together across different blockchains. This leads to a fragmented ecosystem where each protocol or layer has its own rules, processes, and “language,” so to speak.
Imagine if different cellular networks didn’t interact with each other; interacting with someone on a different carrier required you to constantly switch phones or carriers entirely. Yeah, that would make even me – a newly addicted crypto twitter head – say screw it and go off the grid.
That’s what web3 is like today, and likely a big part of why it's struggling to get people to adopt.
In web3, this fragmentation forces users to manually navigate between these protocols to accomplish even basic tasks like swapping tokens, staking, or transferring assets. In our current system, you often need to pay high fees/deal with lots of manual steps to get anything done. It’s a terrible UX and fragments liquidity across the industry.
Enter intents and solvers.
What are intents and solvers?
FROM CHATGPT: “In the context of cryptocurrency and blockchain, "intents" refer to predefined actions or outcomes that a user wants to achieve without needing to execute every individual step themselves.”
Okay, but what does that actually mean?
Intents can just be thought of as a type of request – where a web3 user has a desired outcome/sets up a parameter for what they want to happen. After doing that, the request is sent out to a market. Once it goes to the market it gets bid on by a network of autonomous solvers (used interchangeably with “agents” below).
These solvers compete to fulfill that said request as easily/seamlessly as possible.
If they fulfill the request, they receive a reward. If they do not, they get punished (collateral is slashed, banned, etc.).
All together, what this looks like in the future is users don’t have to use complex bridges, swaps, or other techy things to engage with the diverse set of web3 products. Rather, using web3 feels as familiar as using pretty much any other online platform.
For example, maybe a request is “Every time I receive tokens that are not stablecoins, swap them to USDC within 5 minutes”. A key thing to observe is that the user is not prescribing a solution or specific “path” to solve the problem, just stating what they want and outcome constraints. Generally, any intent follows the pattern of “I want to go from A to B, I don’t care how you do it but ensure X, Y, and Z constraints are true in state B”.
What is axal doing?
Axal steps into this ecosystem by creating a network of solvers that not only execute users' intents (asks), but does so in a verifiable and general-purpose way.
Axal has a three step process for bringing intents and solvers to web3 (for a more technical audience):
Intent Request Coordinator (IRC) - a user intent entry point for any application.
Intent Solution Coordinator (ISC) - an intent solution pool, running incentive-aligned counterparty discovery mechanisms that depend on the intent type, initially either auction or consensus mechanisms.
Intent Verification Coordinator (IVC) - an environment combining validator software, smart contracts deployed on multiple blockchains, and externally validated security commitments, ensuring that user intents included for settlement adhere to the set constraints and form valid solutions with respect to the intended state transitions.
In less techy words, this three step process allows for users to shoot us over an intent, for the Axal network to then auction that intent over to solvers, who bid competitively to execute the intent, and then finally have that action that is completed get a stamp on the blockchain that says it was done correctly (or incorrectly).
Whereas before you had to do several intermediary steps to speak the language of another dApp on another chain (a→b→c→d), you now get directly where you want to go with intents and solvers (a→d).
Why this shit matters
Leveraging intents and solvers is perhaps the best way to solve the fragmented world of crypto.
It will make it possible for people to essentially do all of their tasks onchain, there’s a strong chance that the promise of web3 could come to fruition.
What does that look like right now?
Well, it looks like being able to make trades, swaps, and bridges in a pretty seamless manner. Right now, you still need to be somewhat comfortable with doing “techy” things to participate in anything onchain like DeFi. For that world, we actually launched Autopilot, a trading bot that can essentially do all of your trading activities for you.
Take our Auto-Cashout feature for example, which acts like a circuit breaker for your wallet: “I have XYZ amount of ethereum; if the price drops below this amount, please convert it to USDC and send it to my CEX wallet.” That’s one intent with three tasks. Axal covers it all with solvers.
This is important for where we are today, but the promise of web3 extends FAR beyond just DeFi.
What is that promise?
More than anything, web3 promises a new way for users to interact digitally without worrying about trusting an intermediary. Primarily, it means that users will “own” the value that they bring online. This has obvious real value like the YouTube videos that you create can be truly owned by you, the data that you bring to online platforms is yours, and you are free to do with it as you wish.
We don’t want to get TOO bogged down on this (feel free to dm anyone on the at getaxal team on X about it though, happy to chat). Let’s stick to the immediate pain point of fragmentation.
Intents and solvers fix fragmentation in crypto by taking users from a→d as mentioned above, but that’s not the endgame. Not even close.
Why this shit really matters
We kind of view it as in 5 years, the internet will be run by intents. In other words, every task you need completed – from booking trips to gambling on NBA games – will have solvers running under the hood to make sure that you get that task done in the most efficient and complete way, guaranteed.
I view this as an internet’s notary public – or something that verifies that the action you outsourced was certainly done. If you can verify multi-step actions, then things like closing costs related to buying a house and entire social media marketing campaigns can all be automated in a secure way.
What verifiable agents propose is, in a way, an evolution of how we engage with the internet. It no longer becomes a place where we merely go to kill time, but rather the internet gets the necessary frameworks to become a mature, true reflection of human actions. What ChatGPT did for information access, Axal will do for tasks.
Why does it matter? Because solvers have the potential to become the end-state of task execution in the digital world.