The New Curator + Intent Stack
Intent standards are cool but most value will be captured in curation, not solving.
It’s ironic that our industry places so much emphasis on intents and intent standards when most of the value will be captured by curators and platforms that leverage them.
We hinted this in a post all the way back in June 2023 (!):
Since then things have only progressed.
Aera is now managing treasuries for protocols like Compound, Seamless, Morpho, Swell and Euler.
Morpho understand the Aera model well because they pioneered it and became a top tier lending protocol (peaking at $4B TVL).
Other protocols like Symbiotic are rapidly embracing the curator model too.
Heck, even AI trading agents are effectively DeFi super-curators
But before we explain why curators matter, lets recap the latest and greatest developments in intent markets.
WHY INTENTS
First of all, just to be clear, I love intents.
I love their mathematical simplicity and the user experience enabled by intents.
I enjoy it so much I spent my winter holidays in 2023 building a formalism for intent and programmatic order systems, but that’s a story for another time.
Intents solve a fundamental flaw in blockchains – the fact that users are forced to participate in auctions to transact.
There are other ways of mitigating this problem, one novel approach is pioneered by World Chain who are building guaranteed block space for humans, you can read more about it here.
If you've ever participated in eBay auctions, you’ll know that there’s ample opportunity for uninformed users to bleed value to the system.
Overbidding, falling prey to fake bids, rushing their evaluation of a product are a few of the ways this can occur.
Gas auctions are the same, while Flashbots made them more fairly accessible, they still favor sophisticated actors with the right technology and block building access.
Intents basically turn auctions into limit orders.
Instead of expressing a raw transaction, a user can describe their intended outcome and how much they are willing to pay for it, effectively a limit order.
When that intent is expressed, sophisticated off chain actors called “solvers” compete to fulfill that intent (read: limit order) by submitting actual raw transactions and participating in gas auction.
THE RISE OF INTENT STANDARDS
The problem with the solver model is that apps now have to build healthy solver networks that ensure that user intents are filled quickly, competitively and predictably.
Different apps started doing this in different ways leading to a lot of duplicated work and fragmentation.
The Open Intents Framework was recently announced as a joint effort with the Ethereum Foundation and several other participants to standardize intent systems.
The benefits are clear, standardizing intent systems reduces friction for solvers to participate increasing overall competition.
Creating reusable components allows more developers to enable intents for their users and tap into these networks.
However, by unifying solvers into a single network, we create a competitive single market that may resolve in a self-reinforcing power law distribution.
Tarun et al. already showed in An Analysis of Intent-based Markets how fully permissionless solver networks don't always lead to optimal outcomes for users.
That's where solutions like Khalani come in, allowing smaller solvers to collaborate and overcome issues such as liquidity fragmentation.
There's also a cross-chain unification benefit to intent standards spearheaded by ERC7683 but since this is an Ethereum problem, not a Solana problem it’s not essential for the argument.
I truly believe that intents are going to become the default way of transacting on blockchains.
They will be easy to integrate by developers, unified across chains and perform in well-understood ways.
But it doesn't matter.
Somebody has to figure out what the intent should be and that's where curators come in.
CURATORS > INTENTS
While intents offer ways to transfer certain finality risks from users to solvers, users ultimately have no clue what intent they want to fire off.
Vanguard manages $10T in capital. Do you think most Vanguard users care about how asset sales happen in their ETFs?
The only thing that matters to users is meeting their objectives: a trusted secure custodian, stable year-on-year yield, low fees and a transparent methodology.
In the same way, users in crypto are entrusting more and more of their financial lives to onchain curators who help develop fund-style experiences with traditional DeFi products like lending, restaking, liquidity provisioning, etc.
So it blows my mind how little we talk about curator-related concerns such as platform safety controls & upgradability; curator reputation, quality and performance measurement; curator standards, etc.
While Solana offers more opportunities for zero-sum traders, Ethereum currently has an advantage in curated platforms and has the potential of becoming the dominant asset management vehicle.
While Ethereum may well avoid competing with Solana over memecoin issuance, it cannot be less user-centric.
Low-level infrastructure (such as solver networks) is fun to think and talk about but that emphasis feels weird when most of the value will be created in another layer entirely.
At least someone gets it:
