Different platforms adopt different phrasing for the concept of "intents," but the overarching premise remains the same.

Today, most intent-based protocols begin with some sort of "intent discovery" system, a place where "users broadcast what they want," Bhuptani explained. In blockchain parlance, these discovery venues can be thought of as "mempools"—waiting areas for unprocessed transactions.

Buhptani said an intent "could be something like, ‘I have USDC, and I want to figure out how to turn it into XYZ asset, and I want to do it on another chain or in some specific way.’" "The complexity of intents that one can express is unbounded."

"Then you have a solver market," Buhptani continued. Solvers "listen" to intents and, if the price is right, fulfill them. "These intent solvers are automated executors that basically say, ‘Oh, the user wants to do XYZ? Okay, let me do it on their behalf because I can earn some fees for it.’"

At a high level, this might sound familiar. When we ask Coinbase to swap Ethereum (ETH) for Bitcoin (BTC), or if we instruct a trading aggregator like 1inch to sell our Solana tokens to whichever market offers the highest price, aren’t we expressing an intent? Well, yes. "Intents," like so many other things in crypto, are a fancy way to describe a phenomenon that already exists.

Intents in 2023—and the reason the term has grown increasingly popular over the past year—are about many services, both new and old, trying to squeeze user-friendly intents into boxes that align with crypto’s decentralized ethos and can be dragged into nearly any use case.

Most new intent-based protocols "decentralize" their systems by outsourcing to a network of solvers that compete to fulfill user requests at the best possible price. This competitive system is designed to ensure no central third party takes on the task of fulfilling all user demands.