The Future of Intent-Based Architectures and MEV Accounting

Intent-based systems like UniswapX and CowSwap abstract execution, creating a new MEV supply chain. Users submit desired outcomes, not transactions, shifting the MEV battlefield from the public mempool to private solver networks. This creates a new accounting problem: who captures value and how is it measured?\n- Solver Competition: Dozens of solvers compete to fulfill intents, internalizing MEV as profit.\n- Opaque Value Flow: MEV is no longer a simple block builder tip; it's a complex fee shared between solvers, fillers, and potentially users via rebates.

New accounting frameworks are required to track value flow in intent-based systems. This moves beyond simple gas fees to measure Solver Extractable Value (SEV) and User Receivable Value (URV). Protocols like Across with their RFQ system and intent-centric rollups are building this infrastructure from day one.\n- Granular Attribution: Track which solver won, their profit margin, and the user's net improvement over a public DEX.\n- Transparent Rebates: Quantify and return a portion of captured MEV to the user, turning a cost into a potential benefit.

As intents proliferate, the role of the generalized block builder (e.g., Flashbots SUAVE) diminishes. Execution becomes specialized per intent type (swaps, bridges, limit orders), handled by dedicated solver networks before a transaction is ever submitted. This fragments the MEV landscape.\n- Vertical Integration: Solvers may integrate with specific liquidity sources or layerzero for cross-chain intents, creating walled gardens of efficiency.\n- New Power Dynamics: Value accrues to the entity controlling the intent routing layer and reputation system, not just the block space.

Intents don't eliminate the need for settlement; they require a more robust and programmable one. This drives demand for app-specific rollups and shared sequencing layers that can natively enforce intent outcomes and fairness. EigenLayer-secured AVSs could provide decentralized solver networks.\n- Programmable Finality: Settlement must handle complex, conditional outcomes promised by solvers.\n- Credible Neutrality: The settlement layer must prevent solver collusion and ensure execution guarantees, or users revert to vanilla transactions.

Unbundles trading into intent expression and competitive execution. Users sign orders, solvers compete to fill them across all liquidity sources, capturing MEV for user benefit.

• Key Benefit: Guarantees best execution via off-chain competition, abstracting away gas fees and slippage.
• Key Benefit: MEV is recaptured for the user as improved pricing, turning a systemic problem into a feature.

Treats the blockchain itself as an intent-matching engine. Anoma's architecture separates intent dissemination, solving, and settlement, while SUAVE creates a neutral marketplace for decentralized block building.

• Key Benefit: Universal intent layer enables complex, multi-chain transactions (e.g., swap X on Chain A for NFT Y on Chain B) as a single user operation.
• Key Benefit: Democratizes MEV by creating a transparent auction for block space and execution rights, reducing extractive searcher dominance.

Builds infrastructure to measure, attribute, and redistribute MEV. Essential's mev-rs client and Flashbots' SUAVE aim to make MEV flows transparent and accountable at the protocol level.

• Key Benefit: Protocols can quantify their MEV leakage (e.g., to centralized sequencers) and design economic mechanisms to recapture it.
• Key Benefit: Enables fairer value distribution by allowing validators, users, and dApps to participate in and benefit from the MEV supply chain they generate.

Uses intents not just for better UX, but as a coordination layer for capital efficiency. Across uses intents to enable optimistic bridging with pooled liquidity. CowSwap's batch auctions create coincidence of wants, eliminating slippage and MEV.

• Key Benefit: Capital efficiency via intent-based pooling; liquidity isn't locked on destination chains until a fill is guaranteed.
• Key Benefit: MEV elimination through batch auction design, turning a competitive, lossy process into a cooperative, surplus-maximizing one.

The economic design of solver competition (e.g., in CowSwap, UniswapX) can fail, leading to a few dominant solvers forming a cartel. This recreates the miner extractable value (MEV) centralization problem intent architectures aim to solve.\n- Risk: A >51% solver market share cartel can censor transactions and extract maximal value.\n- Example: Early CoW Protocol auctions often saw a single solver win.

User-signed intents are powerful but ambiguous. Malicious solvers or intercepting relays can exploit poorly defined constraints.\n- Risk: "Griefing" attacks where a solver fulfills the literal intent but not the user's expectation, wasting gas.\n- Vector: In Across, LayerZero OFT, or Socket intents, a malicious actor could front-run with a worse exchange rate that still meets the signed minimum.

With intents, MEV is bundled into a net outcome price. This obscures the source and distribution of value, making it harder to audit fairness and creating regulatory gray areas.\n- Risk: Solvers internalize arbitrage that should go to LPs (e.g., on Uniswap pools), distorting market efficiency.\n- Challenge: Protocols like Flashbots SUAVE aim for transparency, but intent aggregation inherently hides the execution path.

Intent ecosystems (e.g., Anoma, Essential) may create walled gardens of solvers and liquidity. This fragments liquidity versus a shared mempool, reducing price competition and increasing systemic fragility.\n- Risk: A solver failure in one intent network could cause cascading failures, unlike atomic blockchain rollback.\n- Analogy: Similar to cross-chain bridge risk concentrated in a few validators.

Intents for cross-chain actions or conditional logic (e.g., "swap if price > X") require trusted data feeds. This reintroduces the oracle problem that decentralized finance (DeFi) has struggled with, creating a central point of failure.\n- Risk: A manipulated price feed from Chainlink or Pyth can trigger unintended, unfavorable executions.\n- Scale: Billions in intent-based derivatives could rely on a handful of data providers.

Removing transaction details protects users but also makes it easier to hide malicious logic in signed intent payloads. "Sign this to claim your airdrop" becomes a universal attack vector.\n- Risk: Widespread phishing where users sign intents that drain assets across multiple chains via LayerZero or Circle CCTP.\n- Mitigation: Wallet UX must evolve faster than attacker creativity.