The Era of "Smart Agents": Can Intent Trading and AI Assistants Spark Innovation?

In today's rapidly developing landscape of blockchain and artificial intelligence, intent-based trading and AI assistants are becoming the focus of industry attention. Many experts believe that the combination of these two technologies will bring new development opportunities for blockchain applications. This article will explore the concept of intent-based trading and its potential, analyzing how it simplifies user experience, enhances trading security, and creates more innovative possibilities for decentralized applications. At the same time, we will discuss the role that AI assistants may play in this process, exploring how they can integrate with intent-based trading to promote the automation and intelligence of smart contracts, providing users with a smarter and more personalized blockchain interaction experience.

Definition and Characteristics of Intent Trading

Intent trading refers to users executing blockchain operations in a goal-oriented manner. In this model, users only need to express their final objectives (such as time, transaction price, and other conditions) without worrying about the specific execution steps. Users sign a contract allowing the transaction to be "outsourced" to third parties. These third-party solvers (which could be individuals or programs) are responsible for handling the intermediate steps, as long as the final output falls within the scope defined by the user's intent. Users typically need to pay a certain fee to the solvers to complete the transaction.

Intentional trading has two core characteristics:

1. Use a "declarative programming approach" to directly declare the expected outcomes of transactions, rather than specifying the exact execution steps.

2. Delegate the actual transaction construction process to a third-party resolver, which will generate the traditional blockchain transactions necessary to achieve the expected results.

It is worth noting that intention trading is particularly suitable for virtual currencies with the "identity" attribute, such as Bitcoin. This characteristic allows users not to worry that the quality of goods purchased at a lower price will be inferior to those purchased at a higher price.

Potential Advantages of Intentional Trading

The most significant advantage of intent trading is that it simplifies the trading process. It can:

• Reduce trading details and enhance the user experience of decentralized applications (dApps)
• Supports repeated transactions to avoid frequent manual operations by users.
• Implement time-based or condition-based trading, such as automatic balance recharge.
• Eliminate the hassle of regularly purchasing tokens with simple commands.

This method helps new users to use cryptocurrencies more easily, without having to deal with complicated steps.

Since intent trading focuses solely on the output results, orders do not need to be executed immediately. This time flexibility allows the system to execute orders when market conditions are most favorable, thereby reducing slippage during price volatility. Solvers will look for the best trading paths and may even aggregate larger trades to further reduce slippage. Users can also specify the maximum slippage fee they are willing to accept in their intent, ensuring that each transaction meets their expectations.

Application Scenarios for Intent Trading

Intent trading can be applied to various on-chain operations, such as:

• Set limit orders to buy tokens at the target price
• Set the acceptable slippage range
• Regularly scheduled token purchases
• Automatic transfer when balance is insufficient
• Buy or sell tokens in a timely manner based on significant events reported by the oracle.

You can even set more complex conditions, such as automatically executing an operation when specific economic or political events occur.

How Intent Trading Addresses the Challenges of Current Trading Models

Traditional trading models have issues of opacity and centralized risk. Users have limited understanding of the actual execution process of trades and are easily affected by factors such as network congestion, miner or validator behavior, and the overall state of the blockchain. This lack of transparency makes users susceptible to various attacks, such as front-running and back-running.

Taking sandwich attacks as an example, malicious traders may place orders simultaneously before and after user transactions to manipulate asset prices. To address this situation, some platforms have introduced new trading types, such as "flash bot trading", which only become visible after being mined, thereby protecting trades from being maliciously exploited.

Random time trading strategies are also a form of prevention, making the trading time unpredictable and increasing the difficulty of market manipulation. However, the effectiveness of this strategy also depends on whether the cost of the attack exceeds the potential gains.

UniswapX: Practical Cases of Intentional Trading

UniswapX is an innovative decentralized trading protocol that employs a permissionless, open-source auction mechanism, allowing users to trade between different automated market makers (AMMs) and other sources of liquidity. Its core concept is intent trading—users only need to express their trading intentions without worrying about the specific execution process.

UniswapX includes three types of reactors: limit order reactor, Dutch auction reactor, and exclusive Dutch auction reactor. After placing an order, users enter into a contract with Permit2, allowing token transfers. Once an order is signed, it can be picked up and completed by anyone.

"Fillers" have the motivation to complete transactions quickly in order to profit from higher prices and higher fees. Reactors will verify the contracts to ensure that the token output meets expectations.

UniswapX provides users with a more efficient, transparent, and user-friendly trading environment through its innovative auction mechanism and intent-based trading concept, while also addressing some of the issues faced by traditional AMMs, such as trading costs, MEV attacks, and slippage losses.

The Combination of AI Assistants and Intent Trading

AI assistants are computer programs that can make autonomous decisions and execute tasks based on the environment, inputs, and predefined goals. Their core components include large language models (LLMs) as the "brain," as well as mechanisms for observation, reasoning, execution, and memory.

In intention trading, AI assistants can serve as intelligent personal assistants, understanding users' natural language input and helping to complete various tasks. They can interact with solvers, automatically execute trading strategies, and optimize the price and timing of trade execution.

The AI assistant can quickly interpret user intentions, communicate with the solver, and generate results. The solver can connect to multiple liquidity sources to find the optimal trading exchange rate while reducing gas fees for cross-chain transactions.

Future Outlook

Some companies have already begun exploring the possibility of combining AI assistants with intent-based trading. For example, Circle created the TXT2TXN prototype, which allows users to exchange and transfer funds on certain EVM chains. Users simply log in and connect their wallets, then enter their intent, and the system will automatically complete the transaction.

In the future, we look forward to seeing the following improvements:

• The AI assistant poses questions to ensure correct understanding of user intent.
• Expand AI assistant features, such as purchasing NFTs or tokens through dApps
• Integrate personal address book to enhance user experience

However, we also need to be vigilant about potential risks. The large amount of user intent information collected by solvers may be used for market manipulation, leading to MEV issues. Balancing efficiency and fairness while protecting user privacy will be an important challenge to address in the future.

Overall, the combination of intent trading and AI assistants brings new possibilities to blockchain trading. They have the potential to significantly simplify user operations, enhance trading efficiency, and inject new vitality into the decentralized financial ecosystem. As technology continues to evolve, we have reason to expect that more innovative applications will emerge in this field, driving blockchain technology towards a smarter and more user-friendly direction.