What is an Intent?
Learn about intents and how they can be used to outsource transaction creation to a third party without relinquishing full control. This post explores the definition, risks, and benefits of intents.
Georgios Konstantopoulos
very greek accent. cto & research partner @paradigm. optimist and rustacean 🦀 // we're hiring - dm if you wanna work together on hard internal eng problems
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NEW post with @0xQuintus from Flashbots!
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
What is an intent? What are they good for? What are their risks?
In this post, we seek to unpack this new (or not so new?) exciting transacting paradigm.https://t.co/dIjCrnChtr 1/n -
See Quintus' thread for a brief summary:https://t.co/0TPlgNMten
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023 -
I'll share my main takeaways:
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
Definition: "An intent is a signed a set of declarative constraints which allow a user to outsource transaction creation to a third party without relinquishing full control to the transacting party." 2/n -
Intents are both new, and old! 0x-style limit orders are a type of intent.
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
More recently, intents were found in Seaport orders! https://t.co/caG35TIL3n 3/n pic.twitter.com/1rlL9ugqot -
Transactions vs Intents:
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
When submitting a transaction, users specify the exact computational path.
When submitting an intent, users specify the goal and some constraints, and a matchmaking process decides the computational path to be taken. 4/n pic.twitter.com/AA0TFjxjGW -
An intent gets first gossipped into an "intentpool" which may be public/private permissioned/permissionless. Where you land on that 2x2 is important.
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
Post-/matching, intents get added to the usual mempool we all know, or get sent onchain via MEV-Boost style auctions. 5/n pic.twitter.com/EHfU01sAB4 -
Designing the right mechanisms here is not trivial!
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) June 1, 2023
We still have open questions about how to maintain open participation w/o MEV Stealing or DoS attacks.
We also don't have great language for intent expression.
Reach out if that sounds interesting! 6/6 fin