Selling User Intents as an MEV Product

Users broadcast raw transactions, revealing their intent and allowing searchers and validators to front-run or sandwich them for >$1B in annual profit. This creates a negative-sum game for the average user.

• Value Leakage: User surplus is captured by the supply chain.
• Poor UX: Failed transactions, slippage, and latency are common.
• Centralization Pressure: MEV rewards concentrate validator power.

Users submit a signed intent (e.g., "swap X for Y at price ≥ Z") instead of a transaction. Solvers compete in a sealed-bid auction to fulfill it, monetizing the right to execute.

• User Gets Best Price: Solvers bundle and route across Uniswap, Curve, 1inch for optimal fill.
• MEV Becomes Revenue: Front-running is impossible; value is shared via better prices or fees.
• Guaranteed Execution: Users get fills or pay nothing (gas-less experience).

Platforms like Across, Anoma, SUAVE abstract the solver layer, creating a marketplace for intent fulfillment. This separates expression from execution.

• Shared Liquidity: Intents are aggregated, increasing fill liquidity and solver competition.
• Cross-Chain Native: Intents like "bridge & swap" are atomic, bypassing LayerZero, Wormhole bridge risks.
• Specialized Solvers: Entities optimize for specific intents (NFT arbitrage, limit orders, options).

Intents become programmable primitives. A user's "maximize my yield" intent can be recursively decomposed and sold to a chain of specialized agents, with each layer capturing value.

• DeFi Lego Blocks: Intents compose across Aave, Compound, Lido strategies.
• Dynamic Pricing: Intent value is priced based on complexity, urgency, and chain congestion.
• Protocol Revenue: Applications monetize by operating solver networks or taking a fee on flow.

Intent aggregation creates a natural oligopoly. A few dominant solvers (e.g., CowSwap, UniswapX backends) could collude to suppress competition and extract maximal value, turning a decentralized promise into a centralized rent-seeking business.\n- Risk: Market power consolidation reduces user surplus.\n- Example: Solver cartels could implement soft commitments to avoid bidding wars.

Intents are off-chain, signed messages, not atomic transactions. This creates a time window for exploitation where the intent's fulfillment path can be manipulated.\n- Risk: Solvers or searchers can frontrun the intent fulfillment itself, inserting their own profitable trades.\n- Vector: Similar to time-bandit attacks on traditional MEV, but targeting the meta-protocol layer.

If selling intents becomes the primary revenue model, solvers have a direct incentive to censor low-profit or complex user requests. This violates the credo of permissionless access.\n- Risk: Users with non-standard intents or small trade sizes are ignored.\n- Precedent: Similar to miner extractable value (MEV) leading to transaction censorship, but applied at the application logic layer.

Many cross-chain intents (e.g., via LayerZero, Axelar) depend on external price oracles for routing decisions. A solver with a large intent flow could profitably manipulate oracle inputs to steer execution to their preferred, extractive venues.\n- Risk: Systemic oracle attack vector amplified by aggregated demand.\n- Attack: Delay + Manipulate oracle updates during intent fulfillment latency.

A formalized intent marketplace with identifiable, licensed solvers becomes a natural point of regulatory enforcement. This could force KYC on intent submission, destroying privacy and creating a two-tier system.\n- Risk: The core primitive of user sovereignty is compromised at the protocol design level.\n- Pathway: Regulators target the fiat on-ramps for licensed solver operations.

Solvers will route to the liquidity that offers them the highest rebate, not the user the best price. This fragments liquidity away from public mempools and into private order flows, worsening execution for non-intent users.\n- Risk: Adverse selection leaves the public mempool with toxic order flow, increasing costs for everyone else.\n- Outcome: A death spiral for transparent, open market liquidity.

Users broadcast intents across multiple venues (Uniswap, CowSwap, 1inch), creating inefficient, competing MEV opportunities. This fragmentation leads to suboptimal execution and wasted gas.

• Key Benefit 1: Aggregators like UniswapX and Across internalize this fragmentation, sourcing liquidity from private solvers and public markets.
• Key Benefit 2: Solver competition for bundled intents drives execution quality up and fees down, capturing value that would have been lost to generalized searchers.

Intent selling creates a market where specialized solvers (supply) compete to fulfill user intents (demand). This is the core product.

• Key Benefit 1: Builders/Investors can fund or operate solver networks, earning fees for reliable, high-quality execution, similar to running a high-frequency trading desk.
• Key Benefit 2: Infrastructure like SUAVE or Flashbots Protect acts as the intent mempool and auction house, providing the critical settlement layer for this new market.

The most capital-efficient solver with the best off-chain data (oracles, private RPCs) will win most auctions, leading to solver oligopolies. This recreates the builder centralization problem one layer up.

• Key Benefit 1: Opportunity to invest in decentralized solver networks or middleware (e.g., Astria, Espresso) that provide shared sequencing to level the playing field.
• Key Benefit 2: Builders who integrate intent aggregation directly into dApps (like UniswapX) can capture this margin while maintaining a permissionless backend solver set.

The endgame is not just selling intents, but standardizing the intent language (e.g., Anoma, Essential) so any solver can fulfill any intent from any source. This turns MEV into a commoditized, efficient utility.

• Key Benefit 1: Builders should treat the intent expression layer as the new application front-end; the user experience is the product.
• Key Benefit 2: Investors should back the foundational protocols defining the intent standard and cross-chain settlement layer (e.g., LayerZero, Chainlink CCIP), which will capture fees from all flows.