The Future of DeFi Is Multi-Step, Not Multi-Tx

Pioneered the intent-based swap model, abstracting liquidity source discovery and execution away from the user.\n- Solver Competition: Network of fillers competes on price, routing through AMMs, RFQ systems, and private inventory.\n- Gasless UX: Users sign an off-chain order; the filler pays gas, bundling the swap with other intents for efficiency.\n- Cross-Chain Native: Architecture is designed for permissionless order flow across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon.

Solves the cross-chain liquidity problem by separating fast, cheap relay from slow, secure settlement.\n- Hub-and-Spoke Model: Liquidity pooled on Ethereum mainnet; relayers fulfill intents instantly on destination chains.\n- Optimistic Security: A 30-minute challenge period on Ethereum secures all transfers, leveraging the base layer's trust.\n- Capital Efficiency: ~$50M in liquidity can facilitate billions in monthly volume by re-using the same pool.

Provides the foundational middleware for developers to build and fulfill complex, conditional intents.\n- Intent Standardization: Defines a common language (EIP-*) for expressing user objectives, separating declaration from execution.\n- Solver Marketplace: Open network for specialized solvers to compete on fulfilling multi-step DeFi strategies.\n- Atomic Guarantees: Ensures the entire intent bundle succeeds or fails, preventing partial execution and MEV extraction.

Users must manually navigate a labyrinth of dApps, bridges, and wallets to execute a simple cross-chain yield strategy.\n- Sequential Risk: Each of 5+ transactions is a point of failure, front-running, or rising gas cost.\n- Capital Lock-up: Bridging assets takes minutes to hours, creating opportunity cost and price exposure.\n- Cognitive Overload: Non-technical users cannot feasibly manage multi-step DeFi operations.

Shift the paradigm from 'how' to 'what'. Users state an outcome; a competitive solver network figures out the execution path.\n- Abstraction Layer: Hides chain boundaries, liquidity sources, and transaction mechanics from the end-user.\n- Parallel Execution: Solvers can source liquidity and execute steps across multiple chains simultaneously.\n- Economic Alignment: Solvers are incentivized by fees and MEV opportunities, driving efficiency and better prices.

Demonstrated that batching and solving user intents off-chain is the most effective MEV mitigation strategy.\n- Batch Auctions: CoWs (Coincidence of Wants) allow direct peer-to-peer trades, bypassing AMMs and MEV entirely.\n- Solver Submissions: Solvers propose settlement solutions for the entire batch, competing on fee minimization.\n- Fair Settlement: The protocol's core contract acts as a final, neutral arbiter, ensuring solvers cannot cheat.

Centralization risk shifts from validators to a handful of dominant solvers (e.g., CowSwap, UniswapX). Their ability to order and execute complex intents creates a new MEV cartel.

• Risk: Solver collusion extracts >99% of user surplus value.
• Attack Vector: Front-running and censorship of profitable intents.
• Mitigation: Requires verifiable solver competition and credible decentralization.

Multi-step flows across chains (via LayerZero, Axelar, Wormhole) create non-atomic state transitions. A partial execution on one chain can leave corrupt, unrecoverable state on another.

• Risk: $2B+ in bridged assets exposed to inconsistent rollbacks.
• Attack Vector: Exploit latency differences to poison intent fulfillment.
• Mitigation: Requires stronger causality proofs and optimistic challenge periods.

Public intent mempools are a new attack surface. Adversaries can flood the network with fake or unfulfillable intents to DOS solvers or manipulate pricing.

• Risk: Cripples solver profitability, leading to network downtime.
• Attack Vector: Spam intents with impossible constraints or negative value.
• Mitigation: Requires stake-weighted intent submission or private relay networks.

Intents that depend on external data (e.g., "swap if price > X") create a dangerous coupling with oracles like Chainlink, Pyth. Manipulating the oracle directly manipulates execution.

• Risk: $100M+ liquidation events triggered by a single oracle fault.
• Attack Vector: Flash loan to skew price, trigger intent, profit on derivative.
• Mitigation: Requires intent-specific oracle attestations or TWAP-based conditions.

Beyond MEV, solvers can extract value through opaque routing and fee structures. Users cannot verify they received the optimal execution path.

• Risk: Hidden fees and suboptimal routing siphon 10-30% of user value.
• Attack Vector: Obfuscated fee tiers and proprietary liquidity sources.
• Mitigation: Requires open-source solver algorithms and verifiable execution proofs.

Intent standards and infrastructure (e.g., ERC-4337 account abstraction, SUAVE) are controlled by small developer teams. A malicious or coerced upgrade can compromise all dependent intents.

• Risk: Single upgrade can brick or drain $10B+ in managed assets.
• Attack Vector: Social engineering or regulatory pressure on core devs.
• Mitigation: Requires immutable core contracts and time-locked, multi-sig upgrades.

Users still manage gas, slippage, and failed transactions. This is a UX dead-end. The solution is intent-based architectures where users declare what they want, not how to do it.

• Key Benefit: ~90% reduction in user cognitive load and transaction errors.
• Key Benefit: Opens DeFi to the next 100M users by mimicking Web2 'one-click' experiences.

Platforms like UniswapX and CowSwap demonstrate that outsourcing execution to competitive solver networks is the model. This turns toxic MEV into a user subsidy.

• Key Benefit: Better prices via competition and MEV recapture.
• Key Benefit: Guaranteed execution without manual gas bidding, reducing failed tx rates by ~70%.

The winning stack will separate the intent declaration layer from execution. This requires new primitives for intent expression, aggregation, and secure cross-chain fulfillment via protocols like Across and LayerZero.

• Key Benefit: Composable intents enable multi-step, multi-chain flows in a single signature.
• Key Benefit: Breaks liquidity silos, enabling $10B+ in cross-chain capital efficiency.

Solver networks introduce new trust assumptions. A dominant, centralized solver becomes a single point of failure and censorship. The critical research is in decentralized solver verification and proof-of-execution.

• Key Benefit: Censorship resistance maintained via permissionless solver entry.
• Key Benefit: Verifiable outcomes via ZK proofs or optimistic verification slashing >99% of malicious activity.

The greatest value accrual will be at the application layer that owns the intent interface. Think Robinhood for DeFi—aggregating liquidity, solvers, and cross-chain messaging into a seamless product.

• Key Benefit: Captures end-user relationship and the associated fee stream.
• Key Benefit: Proprietary data on user intent patterns becomes a moat for superior execution.

Stop optimizing for sub-second latency. For most DeFi, economic finality—the cost to revert a transaction—is the real metric. A cross-chain swap that is economically final in 2 minutes is superior to a probabilistically final one in 5 seconds.

• Key Benefit: Radically simpler security models for cross-chain apps.
• Key Benefit: Enables use of higher-yield, slower chains without compromising user assurance.