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Brink Intents: Intent-based narrative goes beyond limit orders.

Joyce

2023-09-08 11:00

Read this article in 19 Minutes

In the early models of limit orders, there were already rudimentary intentions. Brink Intents has outlined a broader narrative blueprint for an intent-centric approach.

Author: Joyce, BlockBeats

Editor: Jaleel, BlockBeats

After the rise of Telegram Bots, some in the community have pointed out that Bots may be the biggest driving force in turning the "Intent-centric" concept into a visible trend. Top venture capital firm Paradigm released an article in July of this year, which mentioned the ten potential trends it is currently focusing on in the Crypto field. The first item is "Intent-centric protocols and infrastructure", which has brought the narrative of intent into the public eye and sparked a heated discussion.

Source: Collaborate with Paradigm

Community discovery, intent can help simplify processes and be more user-friendly, and projects centered around intent have also received more attention. In fact, intent is not a new concept. In the past, its use cases were often associated with limit orders. Before Uniswap and AMM appeared, the order book design of Ethereum projects EtherDelta and 0x had the embryonic form of intent, based on conditional intent practice.

Paradigm's research director Dan Robinson believes that "intent models provide greater flexibility and expressive power" compared to traditional trading methods. With the development of more advanced Intents tools, there will be more common architectures to achieve wider use cases in the Web3 world.

Due to the concept of Intent-centric being more in the narrative stage, the projects in the current track are in the early stages, covering projects such as public chains, MEV, DEX, Wallet, etc.

Among these rich ideas, the community has also been looking for potential projects and Alpha opportunities. Currently, the narrative related to intent has its broad potential applications and unclear risks, with Brink Intents being one of the more representative ones.

Related reading: "What business opportunities might Intent-centric bring?"

可组合意图落地的可能性

"The possibility of implementing combinable intents."

The Brink team has launched Brink trade, an intent-driven automated intent order matching system that covers high-frequency trading scenarios such as limit orders and stop-loss orders. Brink claims that users can easily use any ERC20 token (not just ETH or WETH) to create NFT limit orders that can be used across markets through the Intent protocol. Users can also create collection orders to purchase any NFT in a collection using limit orders to exchange ERC20 tokens for other ERC20 tokens.

"If Anoma is a completely abstract intent, Brink's Trading intent may have a higher level of practicality," said Twitter user Haotian. Brink claims to allow users and developers to build, sign, and solve intents on multiple EVM-compatible networks, enabling intent solutions to go beyond limit orders and instead leverage the composability of smart contracts in more use cases.

Related reading: "Why is Web3 Intents the next new narrative?"

Combine Intentions in a "Lego-style" Manner

Specifically, the process from declaring intent to implementing operations is the process of users delegating signatures to solvers. The signature carries the combined primitives that express the user's expectations, and the solver understands the primitives and processes them, seeking the optimal solution and obtaining rewards from it.

You can understand the intent that Brink Intents hopes to build from three aspects: composability, conditionality, and continuity. "Composability" can be understood as a single signature information that can be combined by multiple operations such as transactions, transfers, and cross-chains, so as to achieve the expected results of infinite combinations; "conditionality" means that the intent can be enabled or disabled by state conditions, such as market spot prices and increments, changes in wallet balances, governance voting results, or off-chain analysis brought by oracles. In addition, a single intent signature can allow for "continuous" resolution of results over a period of time, such as a user declaring an intent to "exchange 1 ETH for DAI at market price every 50,000 blocks/in a specified time interval".

Brink Intents claims that its provided composable primitives can combine, sign, and delegate to solve infinite workflow sets. The tasks that users need to complete can be decomposed and defined as different primitives, combined together, signed, and then handed over to Brink Intents' solver for processing and implementation. Brink Intents supports "result primitives" and "condition primitives" and their combinations. The operations that the solver can perform include but are not limited to selecting the position for trading, transferring practices, or using cross-chain bridges.

For example, if a user wants to exchange DAI for ETH at a lower market price and then exchange ETH back to DAI at a slightly higher market price, the user can use two limit order transaction primitives to achieve this intention, and can also use a conditional primitive to confirm whether the first limit order transaction has been completed. The solver can understand how these primitives operate and then independently monitor and complete the transactions. Generally, the two transaction operations in the entire task may need to be separated by several hours. With Brink Intents, users only need to sign once, and the rest is handled by the solver. Even if the solver has never seen this particular combination of primitives, it only needs to understand how to interpret and solve each primitive separately to operate.

State Condition Primitives and Continuous Authorization

State Condition Primitive: Supports complex inspection scenarios

Condition primitives can check the on-chain state and parse the result as True or False. Users can build condition primitives around any state check that parses to a boolean value. Brink Intents supported state condition primitives include market price and increment, mined/unmined blocks, block/interval time, gas fees, address balance, intent results (such as transaction completion status), etc.

Perhaps more complex state conditions can be integrated to support more powerful scenarios. For example, account operations (such as transactions and transfers), DAO proposal voting results, DeFi data (such as liquidity or yield), and any off-chain data brought onto the chain.

Continuous Authorization: Continuously Executed, Long-term Validity

Continuous delegation refers to a workflow where a single signature can delegate any number of results over any period of time. For example, if a user intends to buy or sell regularly, they may want to exchange 3 ETH for DAI but do not want to complete all the work at once. Instead, they want to average the exchange over 150,000 blocks and are willing to pay a 1% fee for each exchange. This can be combined into a single signature with Brink Intents primitives. The solver can use the same signature multiple times to solve the user's expected results.

This specific exchange intent will end in approximately 3 weeks (assuming a block time of 12 seconds), but the intent can remain valid until the user cancels or sets an explicit expiration block. In addition, as long as market conditions allow, it will be continuously executed by the solver in a loop and using the same initial signature. For example, the workflow of a market maker intent trading between 1,800 DAI and 2,000 DAI on the ETH/DAI market may be as follows:

Brink Intents Protocol Architecture

On-chain and off-chain components working across EVM networks

In the current architecture design, Brink Intent API is used for front-end interaction to build, sign, store, and read intents. The front-end uses the API to construct intent data that needs to be signed by the user and submits the signed intent to the intent pool (storing off-chain intent data). Brink Intents support EOA and smart contracts as signers, allowing the use of EIP-712 or EIP-1271 to sign intents.

MEV incentivized solvers use APIs to query the intent pool to discover the intent to be solved. Brink smart contracts verify intent signatures, verify intent conditions, control the execution of condition and result primitives, and check whether the solver transaction result meets the expected result signed by the user to ensure that the solver can only perform authorized operations. As part of the smart contract layer, there is an extremely lightweight abstract proxy account that can be deposited or approved by EOAs and smart contract wallets.

求解器激励：Gas 费延迟支付

Solver Incentive: Gas Fee Delayed Payment

The solver itself is part of the MEV ecosystem, and it tries to seek the best solution from every intention it solves. In all intention-based systems, a motivated solver is needed to pay for its operating costs and earn profits. Therefore, the working principle of the best solver incentive design is to make the solver incentive consistent with the most ideal user results. In order to obtain incentives, the solver needs to compete with other solvers and general MEV robots that run sandwich attack and other front-running trading strategies. In fact, the incentive solver also brings faster and better execution to users.

Brink Intents' solver incentivizes design using two common incentive structures, namely implicit incentive structures and explicit incentive structures. Implicit incentives are used in restricted transaction primitives. For example, for a limit order transaction where a user is willing to pay 1 ETH and requests to receive 2,000 DAI, the solver will try to find a route that returns more than 2,000 DAI. If the solver finds a route from 1 ETH to 2,050 DAI, it can take an additional 50 DAI to pay for transaction gas costs and earn profits. Therefore, the solver strives to find the best route that covers its costs, and the user only needs to specify the desired input and output without signing explicit fees.

Explicit incentives are used for market transactions and transfer primitives. Users need to sign an explicit fee they are willing to pay to the solver, which can be a fixed amount or include some state-based dynamic calculations, such as the current gas cost plus a fee percentage. For example, for regular transfers, if a user wants to transfer 7,000 USDC every 100,000 blocks to another account, they can sign an explicit "Gas fee + 2%" fee, paid to the solver in USDC at the ETH/USDC market rate.

Brink Intents states that in both cases, the fees are collected from the tokens involved in the intent, and users do not need to hold ETH or pay gas fees directly. After successful execution, the gas fees will be deducted from the assets involved in the order and provide profit incentives for the executor.

User-friendly Narrative Blueprint

Brink is currently in the testing phase, and early access applications are now open.

From the hot competition in the Telegram Bot track, it may be seen that as Web3 projects thrive, providing a user experience that guides and helps users seamlessly interact with decentralized systems is becoming increasingly important. Perhaps, user-friendly and powerful intent-centric features may be the key to attracting users for various DApps and protocols in the future.

Source: Awasunyin, co-founder of Anoma and Namada

It seems that Brink Intents depicts a relaxed and friendly blueprint, where users can define their desired results on the chain and outsource the work of achieving these results to third-party solvers, who will then interact with the network and protocols on behalf of the users. However, BlockBeats reminds us that the current intent projects are still in the early stages and there are potential risks such as centralization, trust crisis, and transparency issues brought by delegation. Users should conduct sufficient research and analysis and carefully assess the risks before conducting formal transactions on the mainnet based on the Intent project.