If we’re honest, the dream of a real, totally inter-operable, permissionless financial system seemed, at least for a moment, attainable. Somewhere along the way, that vision ran into a wall. We welcomed in the multichain world with open arms — pursuing scaling solutions and cheaper gas prices, while unintentionally paving the way for a fragmented, multichain nightmare. Think of building Dubai on a standard grid. Then, lo and behold, you find each neighborhood speaks in a different tongue and willfully defies any attempt to interlink its streets. This all raises a question — are we actually doomed to a DeFi Tower of Babel? I don't think so.
One Unified Layer?
The core problem? Liquidity. But it’s all over the place … a dozen different chains, rollups, appchains. Imagine this scenario though, you’re coming up with the next great restaurant concept. Each site depends on a totally unique vendor to get its ingredients, dealing with wildly fluctuating pricing and supply chains. It's a recipe for disaster.
Others would argue that the user experience is the largest obstacle – all that wallet-switching and gas token juggling. That’s preventing the disease, not just the symptom. It’s akin to grumbling that you get a headache rather than addressing the broken leg. The real issue is no one can agree on a single shared execution layer. We need a simpler way to interact seamlessly across chains without needing to turn ourselves into a cross-chain expert in the process.
Consider the internet’s early days. Way before the advent of the World Wide Web, the same problem existed—information was literally siloed and hard to get to. The web gave us this beautiful single interface, this single way to navigate the entire internet—no matter where we were going. DeFi needs its own "web" moment.
Solvers: Silent Heroes?
Today’s “fixes” usually resort to bridges and underpasses, which are just a means to keep building ugly, circuitous highways between our now-separated communities. They need to be replicated, duplicated incentives, restrict routing, and consume a vast amount of capital. It’s as if you had to pay a toll every time you wanted to cross the street.
Enter the solvers. But these are the real unsung heroes of the multichain future. They're like sophisticated travel agents who take your desired destination ("I want to buy this NFT on Arbitrum") and figure out the most efficient route, handling all the complexities of bridges, swaps, and gas fees behind the scenes. They take their own political capital and political logic and risk to make things happen. They are, in effect, attempting to mimic synchrony on the asynchronous blockchains.
Because it abstracts away the complexity. You shouldn’t have to understand how the sausage is made, you should just know that it’s delicious.
Intents As The Guiding Star?
This is where intents come in. Standardized by ERC-7683, intents are a game-changer. They allow you to define the desired outcome – "I want to exchange 1 ETH for USDC on Polygon" – without specifying how it should be done. The solver then interprets your intent and carries it out in the most optimized way.
Picture how you’d describe your trip to your future, self-driving car… “Take me to the airport.” Then using deep learning, it predicts traffic, tolls, and weather conditions to find the optimal route. In other words, you shouldn’t have to know anything at all about how the engine works or how the navigation system works.
Intents are the key to liquidity flowing smoothly between chains, unlocking a more connected and efficient DeFi ecosystem. Picture going from your Solana wallet to creating on a protocol deployed on Arbitrum! It would allow for seamless movement of assets across BNB Chain and Ethereum. Strategies become portable, protocols become interoperable. It is the bedrock on which we can build a truly global, unified financial system.
- Benefits of Intents:
- Seamless cross-chain interaction
- Increased liquidity and efficiency
- Simplified user experience
- Portable strategies and interoperable protocols
Intents don't erase complexity. They route around it. They provide the flexibility for various chains to preserve their distinct qualities and advantages, while providing the capability for smooth interactions across different chains. It's like having a universal translator that allows people from different cultures to communicate effectively, without forcing them to abandon their own languages and customs.
We need to embrace this approach. Moving forward, we should be investing in developing strong, open solver infrastructure, and standards based protocols going forward that are already moving towards intents-based architectures. If we fail to transform ourselves, we will find ourselves on a slide toward obsolescence. No terra-esque crash, but perhaps more of an acute cascading liquidity crisis, de-risked motivation structures, and less multi-chain compatibility …
The future of DeFi is not an ideological cause, it’s an infrastructural imperative. It’s about creating the arms and legs of the system that will allow for a real interoperable and performant financial ecosystem to emerge. It's about embracing innovation and outpacing fragmentation. The question isn’t if we can fix this problem, but will we? I have faith in the problem-solving ingenuity of the DeFi community. It’s that determination that will lead us to an even brighter and more connected future. Let's get building.
