Intention

Figure 1: Concept of Intention

Intention is currently defined as a desired transaction outcome - users simply input the outcome they want and sign the transaction. Verifiers then follow a particular computational path to execute and are incentivized by gas fees to complete the processing. The path is not fixed in an Intent, any path that satisfies the Outcome can be used, subject to the constraints of the signature.

One popular solution, Anoma, raised $25 million this year with participants like CMCC Global and Electric Capital. They are a unified architecture for full-stack decentralized applications，which is deigned following the principles of intent-centricity and homogeneous architecture, together constituting a declarative paradigm for building decentralized applications.

Anoma allows users to express their intents, which are the state changes they want to achieve, without needing to specify the full transaction path. Users can submit these intents to Anoma's intent gossip network. The intent network is a sparse overlay network for disseminating intents, discovering counterparties, and solving intents. In the network, intents get further propagated. Nodes propagating intents can earn a fraction of the fee attached to the intent as incentives. This provides economic incentives for the network to propagate intents.

At the same time, some nodes choose to act as solvers, observing intents and running solver algorithms to try to find solutions that combine multiple intents into valid transactions. When a solver finds such a solution, it can generate a transaction that satisfies the conditions of those intents. The transaction is then submitted to Anoma's settlement layer.

The settlement layer verifies the validity of the transaction and changes state as specified in the intents. At this point, if conditional fees were specified in the intents, those fees are paid to the nodes participating in propagating and solving the intents. In this way, the Anoma network can automatically discover transaction paths that satisfy user intents, while users just need to express intents without specifying execution paths. This provides Anoma with a declarative programming paradigm. Intents and incentivized solvers together enable Anoma to achieve decentralized counterparty discovery and multiparty computation.