The Future of Bulk Purchasing: Swarms of Agents and Combinatorial Auctions

Agents need to source assets and liquidity across multiple chains, but bridges are slow, expensive, and insecure. Manual execution creates latency and counterparty risk.

• Solution: Programmable intent-based bridges like Across and LayerZero.
• Agents express a desired outcome (e.g., "get 1000 USDC on Arbitrum"), and a solver network competes to fulfill it optimally.
• Enables ~5-30 second settlement vs. 10+ minutes for canonical bridges.

Large orders on DEXs suffer from frontrunning and price impact, leaking value. Agents cannot efficiently discover fragmented liquidity.

• Solution: Combinatorial auctions and batch mechanisms like those pioneered by CowSwap and UniswapX.
• Multiple agents' orders are batched and settled in a single block via a batch auction, eliminating MEV and finding optimal clearing prices.
• Enables $10M+ order sizes with minimal slippage by tapping into private solver networks.

Agent-to-agent deals require escrow and counterparty trust, creating systemic risk in multi-step procurement workflows.

• Solution: Atomic composability via shared settlement layers like Ethereum L1 or secure rollups (Arbitrum, zkSync).
• Smart contracts act as a neutral, trust-minimized clearinghouse, ensuring all-or-nothing execution for complex, multi-asset trades.
• This reduces collateral requirements by enabling netting across a swarm of agents, collapsing settlement into a single state transition.

Users must manually route across dozens of DEXs and bridges, paying gas for each failed step. This creates a ~$100M+ annual MEV loss from sandwich attacks and failed transactions.

• Key Benefit 1: Intent abstraction lets users specify what they want, not how to get it.
• Key Benefit 2: Solvers compete to find the optimal path, capturing value for users, not extractors.

UniswapX replaces on-chain routing with a permissionless network of off-chain solvers. It uses fill-or-kill Dutch auctions to guarantee the best price across all liquidity sources.

• Key Benefit 1: Gasless signing for users, with fees paid in output tokens.
• Key Benefit 2: Native cross-chain swaps via a unified intent, abstracting bridges like Across and LayerZero.

Coincidence of Wants (CoW) enables peer-to-peer trade settlement within batches, eliminating AMM liquidity needs and minimizing MEV. Its solver competition is a primitive for complex intent fulfillment.

• Key Benefit 1: Batch auctions create a combinatorial market, solving for optimal netting.
• Key Benefit 2: Surplus maximization from MEV recapture and gas optimization, returning value to users.

Future protocols will coordinate swarms of autonomous agents to execute large, multi-asset purchases (e.g., an index fund) via a single intent. This requires combinatorial auctions to source liquidity atomically.

• Key Benefit 1: Atomic composability across DeFi legos (lending, derivatives, NFTs) in one transaction.
• Key Benefit 2: Price discovery shifts from individual pools to a global optimization problem for solvers.

These are not apps but foundational architectures. Anoma's intent-centric design and Essential's modular intent layer provide the settlement and coordination fabric for swarms of agents.

• Key Benefit 1: Native privacy through intent masking and zero-knowledge proofs.
• Key Benefit 2: Cross-domain resolution allowing solvers to fulfill intents spanning rollups, appchains, and L1s.

The economic core shifts from LP fees to solver fees and MEV recapture. This creates a competitive market for transaction efficiency, aligning profitability with optimal user outcomes.

• Key Benefit 1: Performance-based revenue for infrastructure providers (solvers, sequencers).
• Key Benefit 2: Verifiable execution via fraud proofs or ZKPs ensures solvers cannot cheat the auction.

Combinatorial auctions for bulk purchases create massive, multi-chain MEV opportunities. Searcher bots will evolve from simple arbitrage to complex, coordinated swarms that can front-run or sandwich entire settlement batches.

• Attack Vector: A swarm identifies a pending bulk NFT purchase and front-runs key assets, inflating the clearing price.
• Systemic Risk: Failed auctions due to price manipulation cause cascading reverts and wasted gas across hundreds of user sessions.

Bulk purchases often rely on price oracles to value disparate assets (e.g., ERC-20s, NFTs, LP positions) for a single combinatorial bid. This creates a critical centralization and manipulation point.

• The Problem: A single corrupted oracle feed for a niche asset can distort the entire basket valuation, leading to unfair settlement.
• The Solution: Require multi-oracle consensus (e.g., Chainlink, Pyth, API3) for basket pricing and implement circuit breakers for rapid price deviation.

Swarms of user-owned agents bidding in open auctions are vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks that waste resources and block legitimate settlement.

• The Problem: A malicious actor can flood the auction with fake bids or transactions, forcing honest agents to compute worthless permutations, exhausting their gas budgets.
• The Solution: Implement stake-slashing for bad bids and sybil-resistant participation proofs (e.g., token-gated, proof-of-humanity) to raise the cost of attack.

Bulk purchases that aggregate liquidity across chains via bridges like LayerZero or Axelar inherit their underlying security assumptions. A failed bridge message dooms the entire multi-chain transaction.

• The Risk: Users face partial execution—assets are deducted on Chain A but never received on Chain B, with no atomic rollback.
• The Mitigation: Use optimistic or zero-knowledge proofs of execution for cross-chain settlements and require solvency proofs from liquidity providers pre-settlement.

Systems like CowSwap and UniswapX rely on a decentralized network of solvers competing to fulfill user intents. For complex bulk orders, this can break down.

• The Problem: No single solver can compute the optimal cross-chain, multi-asset solution, leading to suboptimal fills or no fill at all.
• The Solution: Implement solver specialization and sub-auctions, allowing solvers to collaborate and share fees for solving portions of the combinatorial problem.

Open auctions and intent broadcasting reveal a user's complete purchasing strategy. For institutional bulk buys, this is a critical data leak.

• The Risk: Competitors can reverse-engineer portfolio strategies or trading algorithms from public bid data on networks like Across.
• The Solution: Integrate threshold encryption (e.g., Shutter Network) or ZK-proofs of intent to hide basket composition until settlement, forcing solvers to bid blindly.

Manually sourcing liquidity across dozens of DEXs and bridges for a complex portfolio rebalance is slow and leaks value. You pay gas on each failed transaction and suffer from MEV sandwich attacks on every leg.

• Cost Leakage: ~2-5%+ lost to slippage and fees on multi-step trades.
• Time Sink: Hours spent on manual routing and monitoring.
• MEV Exposure: Each on-chain action is a target for front-running bots.

You declare your desired end-state (e.g., 'Convert 100 ETH into a basket of 5 DeFi blue chips'). A swarm of specialized agents (solvers) competes to find the optimal path, batching and settling the entire transaction atomically. This is the core innovation behind UniswapX and CowSwap.

• Atomic Settlement: All-or-nothing execution eliminates partial fill risk.
• Solver Competition: Drives costs down to true economic equilibrium.
• MEV Protection: Solvers internalize arbitrage, turning a threat into a source of user savings.

The final piece is a mechanism to auction off a bundle of interdependent intents across multiple domains (e.g., bridging ETH from Arbitrum and swapping for tokens on Base). Protocols like Across and LayerZero's DVN model hint at this future. Solvers bid on solving the entire bundle, not just individual components.

• Cross-Chain Atomicity: Enables complex, multi-chain DeFi strategies in one click.
• Liquidity Aggregation: Taps into $10B+ in fragmented cross-chain liquidity.
• Expressiveness: Users can define intricate conditional logic (e.g., 'only bridge if the destination swap price is above X').

This future requires a new middleware layer. You'll need an intent-centric mempool (like Anoma, SUAVE), a solver network with provable execution, and shared sequencing for cross-domain bundles. This stack abstracts away chain-specific complexities.

• Developer Abstraction: Builders define what, not how. The network handles execution.
• Verifiable Outcomes: Cryptographic proofs or fraud proofs ensure solver honesty.
• Universal Liquidity: Any asset, on any chain, becomes a composable input to any transaction.