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In 2024, we saw a significant surge of on-chain activity, indicating an impressive growth in user interest. However, blockchain technology continues to face challenges like congestion, fragmentation, and the centralization of layer-2 solutions. With the prospect of favorable regulations and increased institutional interest following Donald Trump’s inauguration, it’s imperative to address these challenges to be ready for the upcoming wave of adoption.

Recently highlighted in the 2025 Annual Crypto Theses by Messari, intent-centric approaches are emerging as a significant evolutionary shift that will play a pivotal role in improving accessibility and efficiency for users.

Understanding intent-centric infrastructure

Intents are a declarative tool that works with a decentralized peer-to-peer network to find and fulfill counterparties. They allow users to state their desired results without needing to explain how to get those results. This simplifies interactions, offering an experience similar to web2 applications like Uber and providing the automation benefits of AI without the associated centralization and privacy concerns. Intents are, in fact, a crucial primitive for unlocking AI’s true potential, and are already seeing strong adoption in various AI use cases.

With intent-centric DeFi, users can define complex goals, such as trading one Ethereum (ETH) for USD Coin (USDC) at the best rate over a specified timeframe, without manually setting parameters like routing or gas fees. The system handles the complex details, such as identifying optimal liquidity pools, securing the best rates, and determining the most efficient execution path. This goal-oriented, automated approach is a massive upgrade to the user experience.

Intent-centric infrastructure also enhances scalability by allowing most computation and data storage to occur on users’ edge devices, reducing congestion on networks like Ethereum. In 2024, rising transaction fees led many users to abandon on-chain operations, highlighting the need for scalable solutions that lower costs and improve interactions with the blockchain. Additionally, generalized intents can address fragmentation in the multichain landscape, enabling applications to work seamlessly across different networks. Users can simply state their desired outcomes without needing to navigate the complexities of various chains and protocols.

Intents will unlock the next wave of dApp innovation

Users today interact with a wide range of applications, from social media platforms to online marketplaces. Web3 applications that are fully built on decentralized infrastructure represent a tiny fraction of these. This is largely due to the limitations of current generation blockchain infrastructure, with dApps built on virtual machines requiring step-by-step instructions. Virtual machines are not capable of running complex applications like Uber, Discord, or Tinder, so a new approach is needed if we want to compete with web2 innovation.

Generalized intents provide a solution. They enable a new wave of dApps that can match and even exceed the sophistication and UX of web2 while staying true to the ethos of web3. Imagine a fully decentralized Discord with complex permissioning, privacy, and interoperability across various security domains and UIs. In the example of Uber, generalized intents can be used to create a single app that aggregates all service providers into one UI, so users don’t need to switch between different ride-hailing apps to find the fastest or cheapest way between point A and point B. Builders are already using generalized intents to create alternative dating apps with zero swiping, where users can be automatically matched with others who share their interests or meet any criteria they specify. 

In the case of DeFi, generalized intents are a powerful new primitive that can help the industry develop novel applications and eliminate the reliance on centralized infrastructure. Fully decentralized, multi-dimensional order book DEXs are just one promising example. Traditional order book DEXs rely on centralized infrastructure for counterparty discovery and only allow trading based on one dimension: price. With generalized intents, you can trade based on additional dimensions like time preferences or yield opportunities, opening the door to much more complex possibilities. Best of all, you can do it in a completely decentralized way.

The industry’s next steps

If we really want to onboard web2 users into web3, we need to match the intuitiveness and ease of use that people are accustomed to. Indeed, users shouldn’t even need to know they’re using a web3 application or understand the blockchain tech under the hood. By enabling simple, automated experiences, built-in crypto rails, privacy, and user control over data, full decentralization, and interoperability, web3 can not only match but exceed the promise of web2.

Generalized intents are uniquely equipped to achieve this future. By blurring the lines between web2 and web3 and enabling users to focus on the outcomes they want to achieve, intents provide a promising path forward. Most importantly, they enable the space to compete with the usability of web2 without sacrificing the core tenets of decentralization, resilience, verifiability, and user sovereignty.