Behind the Explosion of TG Bot: Intent-based Trading is Opening the Door to Intelligent Web3 Interaction

Summary

(1) Understanding the intent: Top-down Anoma and bottom-up TG Bot

(2) In-depth Intent: AI is the new UI - Complex Commands VS Simple Intent

(3) Navigation Intent: Evolution of the Concept of Intent, Interaction Paradigms, Current Status and Trends

( Guidance Intent: Challenges and Prospects of Intelligent Web3 Interaction

In June, Paradigm released the article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks," which brought the concept of Intent to the public for the first time. Related intent protocols and infrastructure rapidly developed, becoming a hot topic in the crypto world at the ETHCC conference in July.

Intent is not a new concept. As Mindao, the founder of DForce, stated, the crypto space has been rigorously abstracting and automating operations, from aggregators, centralized exchanges, contract wallets to cross-chain DeFi, and there are also Chainlink and the recent automated middleware and Telegram bots.

However, intention has indeed brought about new changes. In the past, the focus was on product interaction, while in the era of artificial intelligence, the focus is on human-computer interaction. AI/language models contain immense potential to enhance encrypted interactions.

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01, Top-down Anoma and Bottom-up Unibot

In the past six months, agreements, projects, and infrastructures related to intentions have gradually gained popularity. Here, we will take a glimpse of the overall picture through two typical examples.

Among the projects related to intentions, the most eye-catching is the Anoma Foundation, which completed a $25 million Series C funding round at the end of May 2023. In the context of severe homogenization in Layer 1, the Anoma Foundation secured a total of $57.8 million in support from investors with its intention-centered architecture Anoma)Dapp full-stack architecture ( and Namada) privacy Layer1(, ranking 7th in terms of funding amount among unissued Layer 1/Layer 2 projects.

Recalling Anoma's public speech at EthCC, founder Adrian Brink stated that the magic of Anoma lies in the fact that all interactions begin with intent. The user's expressed intent is processed through Anoma's black box architecture ), also known as the magic box (, to realize the core transaction process based on intent interaction.

• User Interaction: Users can send transparent, private, or protected intentions to the Anoma black box architecture.

• Intent collection and matching: The parser of the black box architecture collects intents, performs balanced state transitions, and achieves counterpart matching.

• Transaction Processing: Matched transactions are submitted to the encrypted transaction pool, validators send the blocks packaged by proposers to the execution layer, complete execution and verify validity, and finally update the state root.

The Anoma team has identified the pain points at the underlying layer of blockchain protocols and reviewed the evolution from Bitcoin's scriptable settlement to Ethereum's programmable settlement. They believe that the intention-centric Anoma architecture is the third generation Dapp architecture of blockchain protocols, allowing users to define the desired outcome state and achieve efficient and customizable privacy transactions at the intention layer.

Although Anoma has gained favor from many institutions such as CMCC Global, Electric Capital, and Delphi Digital, this top-down architecture has only laid a solid technical foundation so far, and we have yet to see any exciting practical applications.

On the other hand, the TG Bot has opened up the imaginative space for the implementation of intent segmentation scenarios using on-chain automated trading tools.

Unibot is a Telegram-based trading bot that allows users to perform automated DEX trading through Telegram, offering features such as sniper buying, copy trading, DEX limit orders, privacy, and anti-MEV. Unibot replaces the cumbersome interactions of Uniswap based on Intent, providing users with a convenient DeFi experience. Unibot has also spawned a batch of TG Bot imitations, with the current total market value of the TG Bot sector approaching $200 million.

Top-down Anoma is innovation, while bottom-up TG Bot is transformation. Anoma starts from an intent-based underlying architecture, but the team's progress is slow; although TG Bot brings users a brand new on-chain interaction interface, it is not intelligent and has many security risks.

The common goal of these two different paths is to simplify the user interaction experience and introduce a new programmable, customizable user interaction interface - User Intent Layer ). This allows users to bypass complex on-chain interactions and define transaction statuses based on intent.

02, AI is the New UI: Command Interaction VS Intent Interaction

The above two use cases give us a basic understanding of intention. Next, we will explore the changes behind the intention, specifically the transformation of user interfaces in the underlying layer of the AI in the crypto world.

The AI paradigm is introducing a third user interface paradigm in the history of computing, shifting towards a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, rather than how to do it.

• Paradigm One: Batch Processing
• Paradigm Two: Command-Based Interaction Design
• Paradigm Three: Intent-Based Result Specification

Every revolution in interaction modes throughout history has produced entirely new business models. LLM-based generative AI has brought disruptive changes to human-computer interaction, directly transforming the original interaction with various software UIs into interaction through the ChatGPT chat window, which is an unprecedented experience. LLM + crypto introduces a new proposition of intent-based interaction to the crypto world, and LLM will also make blockchain interaction potentially smarter by discovering and describing user intentions.

03, The Evolution of the Concept of Intent, Interaction Paradigms, Current Status and Trends

After gaining a deep understanding of the AI intelligence trends behind intentions, we further explore the evolution of the concept of intention. Intention is not a new concept; it has existed since the Web 2.0 era. With the rise of search engines like Google, users can input their intentions, and the search engines provide relevant results to satisfy those intentions.

With the rise of e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay, there has been a significant shift in intent-based architecture. Users can now express their intent to purchase products, while the platform takes care of logistics. In early 2017, Gartner published the report "Innovation Insight: Intent-Based Networking Systems" which formally introduced the concept of Intent-based Networking(. The key is to present users with an interface where they only need to express what they want, while the platform handles the business details.

Intent-based networking is the trend of network automation and intelligence in the Web2 era. Gartner's Research Vice President Andrew Lerner pointed out in 2017 that intent-based networking will be the next milestone in the field of networking.

In the evolution from Web2 to Web3, the concept of intent in Web3 is not clear, but there are some common understandings:

• Definition of Paradigm: Intent is a set of declarative constraints that allows users to delegate the creation of transactions to a specialized network of third-party participants while retaining full control over the process.

• Definition of Anoma: Intent is a message sent by the user to express custom preferences. Intent is a constraint defined by the user on what the system can do, rather than a specific execution path.

• Definition of Propellerheads: Intent is the part of the transaction that requires assistance from others. Intent simplifies complex transactions by outsourcing the difficult parts to third parties.

In the practical application of intent-based transactions in Web3, users create intents off-chain, outsource to parsers off-chain, encapsulate the complexity of blockchain interactions to the parsers, while retaining full control of the process on-chain, thereby lowering the threshold for on-chain interactions.

The intention also brings the LLM architecture concept - intent centric ) an architecture centered around user intent (. Currently, the crypto protocols and infrastructure related to intent centric are embedded in the interaction layer between users and Crypto, leveraging LLM to provide a better on-chain interaction experience.

LLM+Crypto brings a new human-computer interaction paradigm, allowing users' intentions to be directly converted into smart contract calls. Users only need to express their intentions like using Apple's Siri, while robots/AI agents/third-party parsers help to complete complex on-chain operations. In the future, intention-based Web3 interactions will become smarter, significantly reducing the complexity of user on-chain interactions.

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AI is the New UI, more and more Web3 projects are exploring the magic of intent. Whether it's intent-based Dapps or intent-based underlying architecture, they release the potential of intent from different perspectives. We attempt to organize this rapidly evolving field and categorize it into four main categories from an interaction perspective, tracking the latest status and trends:

Infrastructure: ) intention-centric intention architecture layer (

• DappOS: The first intent-centric Web3 operating protocol, building an intermediary layer between users and public chains, cross-chain bridges, and other crypto infrastructure, allowing Web3 users to interact with products seamlessly and without awareness. Recently, DappOS released version V2.

• Flash 2.0 SUAVE: SUAVE is an independent plug-and-play modular MEV full-chain sorting layer. Preferences) The core concept of SUAVE( is similar to that of Intent, both providing ordinary users with a way to customize their trades, ultimately helping users achieve the best execution. Flashbots plans to launch SUAVE Centauri in Q4 2023.

• Anoma: A general Dapp architecture centered around intention, which can be modularly deployed to L1, L1.5, and L2, allowing modular components to be embedded and called within various EVM frameworks. The latest update in the Anoma ecosystem is the upcoming launch of the Anoma privacy settlement Layer 1 - Namada v0.22.0 testnet.

• Cow Protocol: CoW Protocol builds an underlying settlement network for traders and solvers, and launched the new Cow Hooks intent system in July to enable custom DeFi operations. In August, CoW Protocol processed a total trading volume of $1.05 billion and generated a profit of $5.3 million.

Supporting facilities: ) related to intent and supporting infrastructure related to account abstraction wallets (

• ERC 4337: The User Operation of ERC 4337 represents the user's intent, including the token for paying gas, payment options, and login methods, replacing the current transaction mempool, thereby achieving account abstraction and improving wallet interaction experience.

• Supporting facilities related to account abstraction: Packager infrastructure ) StackUp, Blocknative, Alchemy Rundler, AA-Bundler, infinitism Bundler (, Wallet SDK ) Safe, ZeroDev, Biconomy (.

• Supporting facilities related to intent: Juvix), an intent-based programming language(; Seaport), an open-source NFT trading protocol(; Gelato), a Web3 automated execution layer providing automation services for smart contracts(; okcontract), a low-level intent automation tool(; Delegatable), a smart contract authorization proxy tool(; Hyper Oracle), off-chain automation services(; symmio), an intent-based on-chain derivatives trading framework(.

Enterprise Applications: ) Integrated Dapp Intent Infrastructure, API, Modular Intent Layer, Domain-Specific Parsers (

• Trading Parser API: PropelleHeads
• Intent API: EnsoFinance
• Intent Trading Infrastructure: Bob the Solver, Brink
• Composable Intent Tool: Essential

Consumer applications: ) an intelligent interface for user interaction such as wallets, DEX, Web3 AI Agents, smart search engines (

• Wallets: Safe, Bitconomy, Argent, Ambire, Sequence, Versa, A3SProtocol
• DEX:CowSwap, Paraswap, Uniswap, 1inch, BananaHq, basedmarkets
• Intelligent Frontend: Unibot, Dora, Web3 Analytics, kaito.ai

The intent-based architecture, supporting facilities, and enterprise applications attempt to address the underlying challenges of intent realization, but infrastructure cannot be established overnight. The trend of intent consumer application layers is what truly excites, as the evolution of interaction gateways like wallets and DEX demonstrates the potential for intelligent interaction.

Smart Wallets: ERC-4337 introduces a new user intent layer )UserOps(, where users express their intentions, and then the bundler )Bundler( converts these intentions into executable signed transactions. In recent months, the number of ERC4337 users has increased significantly, with ZeroDev, Bi