What Are Intent Engines in Smart Contracts?

The Evolution and New Challenges

Blockchain APIs are open by default, providing users with far too many choices in Web3 environments—a complexity that presents itself regarding optionality. Such a sea of decision trees and possible actions would best be explored by an automated system, requiring the user to be simply capable and not overwhelmed.

Evolution in the history of the web—from the introduction of search engines on Web 1.0 to social media on Web 2.0—has been about simplifying how users can access information and connections. Similarly, moving toward Web 3.0 should be more about simplification and context of action than information itself. Using algorithms and machine learning, a user should be helped to find and complete blockchain actions effectively—always optimizing for results, not choice.

Intent Engine

As of late, the idea of “Intent Engines” are growing in popularity. Designed for addressing discoverability and security challenges on the Web3 dimension, through mapping, indexing, and contextualizing on-chain APIs. The approach followed here is that of making the experience of Web3 more user-friendly by automatically surfacing paths of decisions and action recommendations as per user intentions and constraints. It’s just an approach that would be improving the ease of interaction with blockchain technologies directly, by making users less reliant on their manual involvement to seek and analyze potential actions.

This pre-defined nature of systems in decision-making within a blockchain ecosystem allows one to catalogue the actions and define the decision trees, hence the optimal paths to have the realization of the desired outcomes. This is evident in the scenario of dealing with USDC within certain DeFi protocols, where the yield rates across various platforms are comparatively analysed to see which would be the best course of action.

Furucombo could be seen as a rudimentary version of an intent engine. It allows users to use and combine smart contract transactions through a more user friendly interface. A true intent engine will be even more seamless and not require these building blocks, opting for a true human language understanding.

The Vision

It is a vision for an even more user-friendly Web3, facilitated via the “crypto super app,” with the use of finite and quantifiable properties of blockchains and smart contracts making interactions with Open Finance protocols easier. Most decisions are taken by the app, therefore reducing friction for the user, and encapsulating the difficulty of navigating the blockchain space into a more elegant and straightforward user experience. Intent is translated from human language, right into transaction proposals on the blockchain.

Key to intent engines, especially with the help of machine-readable languages for a Web3, is the way they will be able to traverse decision trees and create action snapshots. That, in turn, will give the “user interface” in an automatic way that will guide a user optimally in a user-friendly way towards actions. One approach that could be exemplified using pseudo-code by a “Money Market Set” is simplification of interaction with blockchain by intelligent automation.