Behind the Explosive Popularity of TG Bot: The Intent to Trade is Opening the Door to Intelligent Interaction in Web3

Summary

(1) Understanding Intent: Top-Down Anoma and Bottom-Up TG Bot

( Deep Intent: AI is the new UI: Complex Commands VS Simple Intent

)3( Navigation Intent: The evolution of the concept of Intent, interaction paradigms, current status, and trends.

) Guiding Intent: Challenges and Prospects of Intelligent Web3 Interaction

In June, the Paradigm official website published an article titled "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks," introducing the concept of Intent to the public for the first time. The development of protocols and infrastructure related to Intent has been rapid, and it became an unavoidable topic in the crypto world during the ETHCC conference in July.

Intent is not a new concept. The trend in the crypto space has always been to abstract and automate operations to the extreme. Aggregators, centralized exchanges, contract wallets, and cross-chain DeFi are all doing this work, as well as Chainlink and the recent automated middleware, as well as the recent Telegram bot.

Intentions bring new changes; in the past, the focus was on product interaction, while in the AGI era, the focus is on human-machine interaction. AI/LLM (Large Language Models) hold greater potential for enhancing Crypto interactions.

01, Top-Down Anoma and Bottom-Up Unibot

In the past six months, agreements, projects, and infrastructures related to intentions have been booming one after another. Here, I do not intend to explain the concepts in a formulaic way, but rather bring two excellent examples to provide a glimpse into the situation.

Among the many projects related to intentions, the most prominent is the Anoma Foundation, which completed its third round of financing of $25 million at the end of May 2023. In the context of severe homogenization in Layer 1, the Anoma Foundation has received a total of $57.8 million in support from investors through its intent-centric architecture Anoma (Dapp full-stack architecture) and Namada (privacy Layer 1), ranking 7th in terms of financing amount for Layer 1/Layer 2 that have not yet issued tokens.

Reflecting on 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. Users express their intent, which is processed through the Black-box Architecture (Anoma's black box architecture, also known as Magic Happens), and this magic box implements the core transaction process based on intent-driven interactions:

• User Interaction: Users can send transparent, private, or protected intents to Anoma's Anoma Black Box architecture (intent gossip Layer).
• Intent Collection and Matching: The solver (parser) of the Anoma black box architecture collects intents and performs balance state transitions to achieve counterparty matching.
• Transaction Processing: The matched transactions are submitted to the encrypted mempool, where the validator sends the block packaged by the proposer to the execution layer, completing execution and verifying validity, ultimately updating the state root.

Behind the brand new interactive form, the Anoma team has identified the underlying pain points of blockchain protocols and reviewed how the architectural limitations of the first generation Bitcoin scriptable settlement and the second generation Ethereum programmable settlement have led to current application protocols having at least one Web2 component, unable to achieve counterparty discovery and resolution. They state that the intent-centric Anoma architecture represents the third generation Dapp architecture in the evolution of blockchain protocols, allowing users to define the outcome state they desire, achieving efficient and customizable privacy transactions at the intent level. The intent-centric Dapp architecture is set to usher in a new era.

Anoma, with high financing and a new technological architecture, is currently being built by a team of 37 multidisciplinary members from Heliax. Although the Heliax development team has made slow progress over 2 years, a complete innovative ecosystem has been formed.

• Anoma: A general Dapp architecture centered around intentions, which can be modularly deployed to L1, L1.5, and L2, and embedded into various EVM frameworks using modular components.
• Namada: A privacy settlement Layer 1 of the Anoma ecosystem, utilizing a PoS mechanism for asset-agnostic interchain privacy, and will be compatible with Ethereum and IBC chains in the future;
• AnomaVM: Simplifies DApp application development on Anoma, using Juvix (an intent-centric programming language) and VampIR (a circuit programming language);
• Typhon: The Typhon consensus, an improvement of Tendermint based on Cosmos;
• Taiga: Provides a unified execution environment for composable privacy. Taiga defines three types of intents: transparent intent, masked intent, and privacy intent.

Although many institutions are enthusiastic about Anoma and express that its intent-centric architecture has limitless potential for the future, the current top-down Anoma has only laid a solid technical foundation without any exciting real-world applications in sight; on the other hand, the TG Bot has opened up the imagination of real-world applications in intent segmentation scenarios using on-chain automated trading tools.

Unibot is a Telegram-based trading bot (TG Bot) that allows users to conduct 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 certain DEXs based on Intent, providing a convenient DeFi interaction experience. Unibot has also spawned a number of TG Bot clones, with the current total market cap of the TG Bot sector approaching $200 million.

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

The two paths that lead to the same goal have a common purpose---to simplify user interaction experiences and introduce a new programmable, customizable user interaction interface---User Intent Layer, which allows users to bypass complex on-chain interactions and define transaction statuses based on user intent.

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

The two use cases above have provided a basic understanding of intent. It is now time to explore the changes brought about by AI at the most fundamental level of the crypto world – changes in the user interaction interface.

The AI paradigm is introducing a third user interface paradigm in the history of computers, 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: Intention-based Result Specification.

Every revolution in interactive modes throughout history has generated entirely new business models. Generative AI based on LLM has brought disruptive changes to human-computer interaction, directly transforming the traditional interactions with various software UIs into interactions with ChatGPT chat windows. This is an unprecedented interactive experience. Furthermore, LLM + crypto introduces a new proposition based on intent interaction in the crypto world. LLM will also enhance blockchain interactions by discovering and describing user intentions, making them potentially smarter.

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

After deeply understanding the trend of AI intelligence behind intentions, we further explore the evolution of the concept of intention. Intention is not a new concept; it has existed since the Web2 era. With the rise of search engines, users can input their intentions, and search engines provide relevant search results to meet those intentions.

With the rise of e-commerce platforms, there has been a significant shift in intent-based architecture, allowing users to express their intention to purchase products, while the platform handles logistics. In early 2017, Gartner released a report officially introducing the concept of Intent-based Networking. The key to intent-based networking is to present users with an interface where they only need to express what they want, and the platform will handle the business details.

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

The evolution from Web2 to Web3 has led to the concept of intent in Web3 being somewhat unclear, but there are some common understandings:

• Definition provided by 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.
• The definition of the intent-based underlying Dapp architecture given by Anoma: Intent is a message sent by the user to express custom preferences, and intent is a constraint that defines what the user-defined system can do, rather than a specific execution path.
• Definition of intention-based trading infrastructure by Propellerheads: Intention is the part of the transaction that requires assistance from others, and it simplifies complex transactions by outsourcing the difficult parts to third parties.

In real use cases of intent-based transactions in Web3, users create intents off-chain, outsource them to Slover (the resolver) off-chain, encapsulating the complexity of blockchain interactions for the resolver while retaining full control of the process on-chain for the user, thereby lowering the barrier to on-chain interactions.

The intent also brings the concept of LLM architecture---intent centric---a user intent-centered architecture. 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 introduces a new paradigm of human-computer interaction, allowing users' intentions to be directly converted into smart contract calls. Users only need to express their intentions as they would with a voice assistant, while robots/Ai Agents/third-party parsers assist in completing complex on-chain operations. In the future, intention-based Web3 interactions are expected to greatly reduce the complexity of user interactions on the blockchain.

AI is the New UI. More and more Web3 projects are exploring the power of intent. Whether it is intent-based Dapps or intent-based underlying architectures, they are releasing the potential of intent from different angles. We attempt to organize this rapidly developing field and categorize it into four major categories from an interaction perspective, while tracking the latest status and trends:

Infrastructure: (Intent-Centric Intent Architecture Layer)

• DappOS: The first intention-centric Web3 operating protocol that builds a middle layer between users and public chains, cross-chain bridges, and other crypto infrastructures, allowing Web3 users to interact with products seamlessly and effortlessly. Recently, DappOS released version V2;
• Flash 2.0 SUAVE: SUAVE is an independent plug-and-play modular MEV full-chain ordering layer. Preferences (the core concept of SUAVE) are similar to the Intent concept, 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 intentions, which can be modularly deployed to L1, L1.5, and L2, and can be embedded into various EVM frameworks through modular components. The latest update in the Anoma ecosystem is that the Anoma privacy settlement Layer 1---Namada is about to launch the v0.22.0 testnet.
• Cow Protocol: CoW Protocol builds an underlying settlement network for traders and solvers, and released a new intent system called Cow Hooks in July to enable custom DeFi operations. CoW Protocol's latest data in August processed a total trading volume of 1.05B and generated a profit of 5.3M.

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

• ERC 4337: The User Operation of ERC 4337 captures the user's intent, including the tokens for paying gas, payment options, and login methods, replacing the current transaction memory pool, thereby achieving account abstraction and improving wallet interaction experience.
• Supporting facilities related to account abstraction: bundler infrastructure (StackUp, Blocknative, Alchemy Rundler, AA-Bundler, infinitism Bundler), wallet SDK (Safe, ZeroDev, Biconomy);
• Supporting facilities related to intent: Juvix (intent-based programming language), Seaport (open-source NFT trading protocol), Gelato (Web3 automation execution layer providing automated services for smart contracts), okcontract (low-level intent automation tool), Delegatable (smart contract authorization proxy tool), Hyper Oracle (off-chain automation service), symmio (intent-based on-chain derivatives