AI Agents Need Intent-Based Blockchain Infrastructure

Opinion by: Adrian Brink, co-founder of Anoma

Web3 was founded on decentralization, sovereignty, verifiability and resilience. Now, those values are under threat. The rise of AI agents is beneficial and inevitable. Unless agents are built on sovereign intent-centric infrastructure, they are a threat to the core values of crypto. 

The integration of intents is no longer just about improving UX; it’s about enabling agents to reach their full potential without sacrificing the soul of Web3. 

AI agents can help make blockchain interactions seamless and intuitive, but agents as they exist today bring serious security concerns and do not align with Web3 values. Today’s agents are based on black box large-language models (LLMs) that are unverifiable and prone to hallucinations. This is a dangerous combination when it comes to managing sensitive financial data. 

Privacy is non-negotiable

Agents are being built on centralized infrastructure with opaque execution systems, with no control over user privacy or data sovereignty. They are run on closed-source algorithms from the likes of IBM and OpenAI. This trend is poised to replicate Web2 power dynamics across the crypto ecosystem. 

By integrating agents with intent-centric systems, however, we can ensure users fully control their data and assets.

Intents are a type of building block for decentralized applications that give users complete control over the outcome of their transactions. Powered by a decentralized network of solvers, agentic nodes that compete to solve user transactions, these systems eliminate the complexity of the blockchain experience while maintaining user sovereignty and privacy throughout the process. 

Related: Intents fix crypto’s UX crisis and pave the way for agentic DeFi

Intent-based systems enable all the UX benefits of AI agents while keeping user sovereignty in place and guaranteeing their desired outcomes. 

The centralization trap

Without intents, AI agents also present serious centralization concerns. As agent-based solutions increase in popularity, the risk of centralization and market consolidation is high. 

Without a competitive, decentralized marketplace of agents, where individual agents compete for user activity, we’re in danger of specific LLMs becoming centralized monopolies that take over all the order flow.

Intent-based infrastructure can enable decentralized, interoperable marketplaces of agents that prevent one mega-agent from taking over. In these systems, agents can communicate, specialize in certain types of transactions, share order flow, compete to meet user needs and, most importantly, be held accountable for outcomes. 

Realizing the full potential of AI agents

Beyond ensuring privacy, decentralization and verifiability, intents will also help agents reach their full potential. While current-generation agents are largely siloed, intents can serve as the language for agents to communicate and interoperate. Agent-to-agent communication via intents will be necessary for agents to trade with each other and conduct more complex, multi-step operations for users. 

In particular, with generalized intents, agents become even more powerful, capable of solving any user request, including complicated multi-step operations and crosschain transactions. This opens the door to new types of applications that can take decentralized finance (DeFi) beyond the services that exist today, with UX benefits that enable Web3 to rival the experience of Web2.

A match made in DeFi heaven

Combining AI agents and intents will redefine the Web3 experience while keeping the space true to its core values. Intents bridge users and agents, ensuring the UX benefits users expect from AI while maintaining decentralization, sovereignty and verifiability. Intent-based systems will play a crucial role in the next phase of Web3’s evolution by ensuring agents act in users’ best interests.

As AI adoption grows, so does the risk of replicating the problems of Web2 within Web3. Intent-centric infrastructure is the key to addressing both the challenges and opportunities that AI agents bring and is necessary to unlock their full potential. Intents will be an essential infrastructure component and a fundamental requirement for anyone integrating or considering integrating AI into DeFi. 

Intents are not merely a type of UX upgrade or optional enhancement. They are critical infrastructure for ensuring that AI serves users, not the existing powers that be. The sooner the industry adopts them, the better its chance of preserving a decentralized, open future.

Opinion by: Adrian Brink, co-founder of Anoma.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.