Application developers today face considerations orthogonal to the value of their application. Building and using decentralized applications requires carefully reasoning about the security of underlying infrastructure and incentives present in emergent market structures. What are the security and trust assumptions of the chain? How much liquidity is available? What is the finalization time and how will it impact users? What types of applications can it support? While these considerations are important to the overall value of an application today, they aren’t intrinsic to it’s value (e.g., lending application’s value is in loan fees, irrespective of the consideration).

The challenges deepen when developers inevitably broaden the scope of their application to multiple chains chasing revenue from access to deeper liquidity. For example, consider the following naive cross-chain dApp topology: a developer deploys independent AMM contract replicas to each of two chains. Because there is a lack of coordination, LPs of both AMMs lose revenue to cross-chain arbitragers—threatening their participation and therefore the long-term sustainability of the dApp, by introducing misaligned incentives. Such limitations have hindered efforts in building real-world decentralized applications that are competitive with centralized systems.

Intent systems offer one potential solution: they provide the ability for a principal to delegate orchestration of their desired global state transitions to sophisticated agents, known as solvers. Solvers compete in a market for the right to service an intent in exchange for payment, optimizing the principal’s utility function. In principle, applications & their users are therefore afforded cost savings, convenience and access to deep liquidity. However, this isn’t entirely the reality today—in practice, we observe that applications are yet to fully realize this access.

We attribute this fact largely to the complex and dynamically-evolving intent supply-chain that has emerged from the broader environment of profit-seeking actors. Over time, incentives & roles have shifted, trusted relationships have emerged and new capabilities have been developed. Unfortunately, however, how we fundamentally think about dApp development paradigms has remained largely the same.

To better understand how we can enable applications to adapt to shifting market structures, it’s informative to examine the relevant observed trends currently playing out. We outline some of these below.

• Markets & Incentives. Markets and incentives have shifted at all layers of the stack. We expect that markets will continue to form between actors wherever possible.
  • Custody-level. User and LP capital has shifted—and will continue to shift—not just across L1 & L2 chains, but also between banks, centralized exchanges and other centralized custody services—due to both endogenous and exogenous incentives.
  • DEX-level. Market makers, that are capable of managing risk, have stepped into intent systems to serve cross-chain swap requests. Meanwhile, solvers have taken on an active role in designing and executing strategies, but are not always equipped with the capital to execute them.
  • Consensus-level. Validators, sequencers, block builders and relayers have powerful roles that ultimately determine transaction ordering and inclusion. In Ethereum, block builders currently have significant monopoly power and provide trusted services to other parties, such as searchers. They also have unique advantages in participating as market makers and searchers. However, this may change as the community continues to focus on strengthening censorship resistance and MEV mitigation.
• Technologies. Recent research and engineering progress in PETs has demonstrated that different cryptographic and hardware tools will be competitive in different domains across all layers of the stack. This includes account & escrow management, intent solving, auctioneering, oracle participation and block-building. SNARK proof systems, for example, have continued to improve in proving latency, reducing settlement time and providing efficient on-ramps & off-ramps. Meanwhile, Oasis Sapphire and SUAVE have demonstrated practicality of TEEs. We expect to see markets emerge between the users and infrastructure providers of all such technologies.

Such trends will undoubtedly continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. Therefore, while there’s broad agreement that the complexities of the blockchain ecosystem should be hidden from users and dApps, it’s less clear how to do so in a way that balances the needs of applications & users with the realities of the underlying market. Applications must be able to securely and effectively take advantage of emerging technologies and access liquidity wherever it is—while limiting their exposure to the shifting underlying market structures.

The diverse roles, capabilities, and incentives within the intent supply chain must be carefully considered and aligned to ensure that both users and dApps can fully realize the benefits of decentralized technology. Failure to do so will leave the ecosystem fragmented, unusable and insecure. Over a series of future blog posts, we will (1) examine the market structures underlying the intent supply chain more closely; (2) discuss how our observations have motivated our ongoing work in designing *Fabriq—*a general trust commoditization framework and system; and (3) explain how we can move forward to build high-level intent-centric applications, and ultimately achieve our mission of universal fungibility.