A Beginner’s Guide to Intents & the Open Intents Framework

Transcript

Okay, perfect. Hi everyone. Uh, good morning. My name is Eda and I'll be talking about the open intense framework today. Um, it will be a very introduction. So if you have heard about intents that's great but if you're not that's no problem at all. Uh, I know the previous presentation was about solvers. So if you were there, this that's actually like very helpful information to understand the open intense framework more. Um but yeah, hopefully this will be like a short intro to the open intense framework. And what we're going to be talking about today is we're going to talk about what are intents in the first place, why you should pay attention. Uh and then we're going to kind of introduce the open intents framework, also like referred to as the OAF. And then we're going to be

talking more about like the theme of the talk is more around like open frameworks and why they're very important especially in the blockchain ecosystem where everything is open source and you want all these like different networks to collaborate. So that's kind of like where I'm going to be leading to. This was like a short preview of what the ending is going to be. Uh but that's the premise of the talk today. And a bit about me. My name is Eda and I am part of the team at Hyperlane. Um, I'm a developer advocate at Avocus Works, which is the team building Hyperlane. Uh, I'm also part of a developer community called BuildG Guild and I come from a very traditional software developer background and then got into crypto, got into like blogging

and writing about this stuff and it's been three years since. So I go by like a software developer turned educator kind of u introduction and yeah, you can find me online on all the different platforms. I'm terminally online. So that's not great. Uh but yeah. Okay. So what are intents? Uh before I even answer this question, uh how many people have heard about intents before? How many people know like what intents mean or what they do? Okay, I think that's a very big crowd. And this is the first time I've given this presentation live. Like I've given this a few times before, but it was all online, so I never got the feel of the room. Um but I think in general like everyone has heard about intents, but no

one really know what intents do. It's just kind of like a buzz word you hear around but not really like any meaning to it. And basically even before like to explain intense I think we need to go back and understand like how we got to where we are today. Um and because I'm like very limited time I'm talking about fast so I hope it's like not too fast. Um but yeah I want to make sure I can cover all the basics. So just to kind of think about like how we got to like talking about intense today is when we look at scaling Ethereum. So we first started about like with Ethereum well Bitcoin and then Ethereum came around Ethereum is like okay like there's a thing called smart contracts it's really cool let's introduce that let let's make blockchains programmable uh and then Vitalik introduced the rollup scaling

roadmap which was which um which was introduced like I think five years ago at this point and then with that we saw a rise of different layer 2 networks like you know arbitum zksync starknet all these different layer 2 networks uh that came to actually solve the problem which ethereum was facing at the time which was it was not scalable because when Ethereum first started not many people were interested so you know you could do a small transaction you didn't have like high gas fees but then especially with the NFT boom and I believe it was like cryptokitties which kicked it off uh it just became like unusable it was like too much high costs um too much gas fees so then the Vitalic introduced the roll-up scaling road map um it was great it scaled Ethereum great

progress uh but now what we have is we have this landscape where we have way too many L2s which are not directly talking to each other. And even though we solved like the initial problem of like how do we scale Ethereum, we now have a new problem that is like how do we make like Ethereum feel like a single chain again. Uh because the reality today is Ethereum is very fragmented. All the different layer 2s do have their own like different approaches to scaling their own networks like the superchain approach or the arbitum approach etc. Uh but again like it's a full ecosystem and we kind of want everything to talk to each other not just within their own ecosystems.

And yeah today transacting on Ethereum kind of is very clunky. You have to change even as someone who's been in the ecosystem for three four years. It's quite hard. It's like okay which network am I on? Like you constantly need to switch. That's just like extra costs. Well not cost but like uh extra pressure to make sure like am I on the right network? Am I using my right wallets? um how do I bridge my funds from one to another? There's just a lot of like different um steps involved. So, it's definitely not like the same experience as you go to your PayPal or your Venmo where you send like $5 to a friend.

That's just like a one second thing. Whereas this is, you know, maybe like a five minute thing. Okay, maybe like a one minute thing. So, this is kind of like what it feels like to be a user on Ethereum today. And yeah, so the goal is to make Ethereum feel like a single chain again. So what we do is we do have like different approaches to interoperability. Like you might have used like traditional bridges. So it's like okay like you know you can transfer your funds from one to another and that does kind of work but it's again like not the user experience you want.

There's like additional costs. There's like uh when you transact with different networks there's like different components involved like one um yeah it might not it might take you like way longer to transfer one funds to another chain. Um so it definitely does not feel like a single chain at the moment. uh and that's exactly where intents come in. This was a very long introduction to come to intents but I hope it makes like sense on why we are even talking about intents and to understand intents the way like we should look at how transactions on Ethereum work today. Uh and basically when you send and I will like actually um so the way intents work is they actually change the way transactions work. So usually when you submit a transaction you have to declare

all the details on like how it should go where it should go like let's say you're swapping you know five USDC on um like from USDC to you want to go to ETH uh and when you submit that transaction you need to specify all the details you need to have the call data you need to specify uh the exact details and when you look at at a user the user doesn't really care what the user wants is the user wants like their funds on one um on one token and they want it just on another. So it doesn't really matter on those details for the user at all. And that's exactly where intents come in. So intents say instead of like specifying exactly what this transaction should do, you should basically specify the intent of hey like this is the tokens I have.

This is the tokens I want and I'm going to leave this job to offchain specialized agents to do it for me instead of me having to specify exactly how it should go through. And yeah, so it basically moves from imperative uh imperative declaration to like more a declarative one where you just specify what you want it to do rather than specifying the exact details and you leave kind of the like the hard work to the off-chain agents called solvers. Uh because if you actually do like specify the exact details, you need to have like a broad understanding of all the solver networks like every like all the different agents involved. and most users don't like unless you're

running a big lay like layer two and you have all the details in front of you that's easy for you to kind of specify but otherwise if you're like a new chain and you kind of want to get involved and you're like okay like I want to actually like have my chain talk to these other networks it's really hard to do so because you don't have uh that solver implementation and you also don't have that information to give you the right like steps to do so um and yeah we kind of talked about this I'm not going to get more into details as I mentioned mentioned there's like now these specialized agents called solvers and I do kind of want to I didn't mention that before but there are like different protocols who are working on intent based interpability like across for example and we'll actually

talk about them in a bit because they were also contributors to the open intense framework but yeah I should have mentioned that there are like some protocols which are already working on intentbased approaches um but the thing is today building with intents are hard so like when you want to build an intentbased application and let's say you're a bigger chain well that you have more advantage if you're a bigger chain because the steps today you can basically go two approaches and I have the slides too so um well I will already tell them so you don't need to read but basically uh if you're like building an intentbased application today you kind of have two approaches uh let's say you're a big layer 2 network so you can you can kind of um work together with intentbased protocols and

you can say hey like I'm arbitum or like I'm you know I'm optimism and I want to like um I want to like have my pro like have my network integrated into intents and you can work with them and then like it's kind of hard when you're like a smaller network because then they need to work specially with you. They need to like uh make sure your protocol is appropriate to their layers. Um so if you're like a smaller network, you don't really have that cost or that BD efforts to go ahead and integrate with an intentbased protocol. Um so if you're big protocol, that's great. That's not really a problem. Um, if you're a smaller protocol, what you have to do is you have to build all those settlement layers, like all those solver implementations yourself. So, that's

kind of like a really hard work. Um, because you need to kind of redefine all the steps and it's going to be very costly too. Um, and it's not really going to Yeah, you have to like redefine all the steps from start instead of having to go to and work with an intentbased bridge already because they probably would ask for like well, it it would take like a lot of efforts to integrate. I'm not saying that it's not possible, but it would be very high costly and high business development efforts involved in order to integrate with an intentbased bridge today. And um yeah, so as with most things in crypto, I personally do believe that if intents are going to like be adopted and be used, there need to be common standards. And there are actually like common ERC's that specify how intents

like how an order should be specified if you're going to like make an intent. um and we will talk about that but there are like a few standards but there's not really like a framework which allows you to be like hey I'm going to take this framework out of this box and use it there are like the ERC's which we're going to be talking about but that's kind of like the how can I say like the the states of building intense today I sometimes my English limits me but that's kind of so building with intense today you do have like those standards that are defined but you don't currently have like a framework um before the open intents framework to easily be like take it out of the box and be like hey like I have all the pieces ready for me to build like an intentbased application rather

than just like specifying a standard. Um so enter open intense framework the open intense framework I believe it was launched in March and it's a collaborative collaborative effort. It was started by the Ethereum foundation and hyperlane and bootnode uh which kickstarted the like the development of it. However, it was adopted by the broader industry. So today you'll see like all sorts of different contributors such as arbitrum um Kahani and like all the different contributors which I believe like yeah I'll provide the QR code so you can check it out as well. Uh but it's more like um it kind of did start with those like three uh people boot like uh Bootnote, Hyperlane and Ethereum Foundation kickstarting it.

However, I wouldn't say that it's part of their um like their portfolio. It's more like a general standard that the industry has adopted and has been working towards. So yeah, you probably saw this if you heard about intents, you definitely saw this image on like Twitter or like on I don't know shared in your company Slack or something like that. And um okay, I should have added like a few more introductions here, but basically I'm going to talk about the key components. Um yeah, this was like you can see like the different um people who have contributed as well like Tao, Nosis, etc. Espresso. Uh you'll have like all these different companies. I even know that Espresso like ran a huge hackathon afterwards to kind of get people to like start building with

intents and stuff like that. Um Polygon, etc. So you see like there's actually more people that have contributed, not just the people here. Um but it's like intense for everyone with everyone. That's like the marketing slag line used. Um, so again like the goal here is to provide like a standard framework. So then it's not hard to build these intentbased applications because okay like we have like intents, they're very cool, they kind of work. They do have problems like the solver economics like the person before me was mentioning. Uh, so I wouldn't say like they're like 100% ready to be used. Uh, but again like I think it's an important development and it does make Ethereum like feel a lot more like a single chain. Uh, some pieces like are yet to be defined. Um

and yeah so kind of just want to say like it's a very collaborative effort with different companies involved and so the key components so I keep mentioning like hey like this is a framework this is not like a standard defined so what do I mean by that uh what I mean by that is that it doesn't just involve like the ERC which you know when you usually be like hey like there's this ERC which defines like how this um you know order flow is implemented or something like that. uh but instead what the f framework consists of is like it has basically three building blocks. One of them is the composible smart contracts piece. It uses a base uh 7683 that was like the ERC that I mentioned that was developed by unis swap and across which kind of like defines how intents are like um

defined. Uh but the problem there is like you can have like your ERC but when it's just defined but when you don't have like easy ways to build with it, it's kind of hard to get adoption. Uh but just like shout out to them for like building the ERC that's pretty cool. Um and then the second step is uh the open source solver implementation and the third is the UI template. So basically the framework is again like not a single uh smart contract that defines how intents are defined but instead it gives you like all these building blocks. So you can kind of um mix and match like add extra components as you wish but you already have these out of the box when you start using it.

And yeah, you can scan the QR codes. You can go to ww.opens.xyz to start building with intents. Um, check out the website. You'll have all the links over there. Um, so that will hopefully be helpful for you. I think this is okay. So, um, open I think it's important to mention that open intense framework is one approach to standardization in the intense tapes in the intense space. Uh there is definitely like more people working on like you know better user interf interfa user interfaces like superbridge or different standards like the ERC7683 which we mentioned that was developed by unis swap and across and then there's like another R um RC 7755

uh like solver coordination efforts like a lot of people working on solvers um especially because there's they're I guess they're kind of like the missing piece on how you can like create like sustainable solver economics and then like liquidity solutions like Everclear. Um and yeah, so it the open intense framework is like one step for common standards around making interpability easy for users and this is specifically in the intense space. Um, and yeah, I think the main thing here is that the open intense framework has been out for I guess like four months at this point and especially with an industry when you have like such a fragmented ecosystem and all these different teams working on different unique solutions. I do think it presents like a good use

case on how you can kickstart an application and you can get adoption through different like um different companies um and create like these kind of standards rather than just defining like an ERC today and yeah so again like just to call out like what I mean by open frameworks it's usually protocol agnostic so yes like you can have like a base layer implementation for example even the ERC you might be like hey I want to like switch the CRC for something else that comes as a base smart contract, but you can actually change it. You don't need to use the like user interface that comes out of the box. Uh it comes with like a default hyperlane ISM, which is basically our kind of implementation of security modules that allows you to like

uh verify that the message was actually sent from someone. Uh but you can be like, hey, like I want to like change this part of the stack. So, um it's yeah, it's generally protocol agnostic, no vendor lock in. So it's open source and it allows you to collaborate and customize according to your needs and I was actually working on open framework called staff scaffold before starting as well. Well I still kind of do but it kind of gives you the base template on building depths. But then what we saw is that once we create that framework everyone started adapting it because it's super easier to use than just being like hey like this is like a blog post on how you can create a smart contract.

But when you actually like a fra have a framework that allows you to create dos that kind of increases like the the cycle on building products and yeah so as I mentioned I'm part of hyperlane and what we're building is uh we are building interperability solutions for different ecosystems to communicate um currently like not only on ethereum but I think the whole like both layer ones and layer twos um should talk to each other uh I know that we're mostly like this is an Ethereum community event Uh however there are like different other layer 1 networks which are gaining a lot of adoption and what we do is we build like solutions for these different protocols to communicate and I don't want to say like a bridge because that is not the default

solution but you have like different frameworks to allow them to communicate. So uh simply put it is like a general message passing protocol and you have all these like you can build intents with it you can build interchain accounts and you can have all these different communications with different protocols. Um yeah, I think bridging is not used any like well the word is not like that common anymore. Uh but basically the goal again is to make Ethereum or like different blockchain environments feel like a single chain again. And it is an open framework. So basically what this allows is that you can kind of use the base implementation but you have opportunities to switch and swap like your security modules. For example, you might be like hey like when I send a message from chain A to chain B like from arbitrip to base I want to use

like a certain like zk verification. So this is what we call like the modular building blocks of the security which allows you to switch the default implementation to suit your needs and yeah I think it's yeah the the flexible and modular components is one thing which I keep calling out because I think it's one of the bigger pieces. Um and that's quite similar with the open intense framework where you can switch and spot like the default implementations. Yeah. So good and is invisible inrop whether you're building like intents or any kind of application. Uh that's kind of like as I mentioned the yeah what we are trying to achieve with building these kind of applications and I do think I'm almost on time.

Okay, perfect. Well, you can scan here. I think this takes you to the open intents or maybe the hyperlane documentation. I'm not exactly sure. I don't remember. I did. Yeah, I I should have checked this before, but yeah, you can find my details. I'm happy to answer any questions you might you might have. I think we have a couple of more minutes. Yeah, thank you. Um, I did uh open up the open intents real quick, but there's a lot of stuff on it. So, I just want to ask, is there like a reference implementation for the solvers and the smart contracts? I think there's the GitHub repo over there, which you can find it. So, all the pieces have their GitHub repos included.

Um, I don't remember his Twitter, but Josh from the EF is also like he publishes like notes on the open intense framework, especially when they work on it on the like the monthly uh interrupt calls. Uh, he's a great person to follow, Josh Rudolph. Okay. Um, but when you go there, it should provide you all the links. Okay. Well, I hope. Thank you. Any more question? Cool. Well, thanks for coming everyone.

Hope you enjoy con. [Applause]