Intents, abstract entities encapsulating a user’s desires, are a promising approach to designing modern,complex decentralized financial systems.

We consider intent machines abstractly as a coalgebra; a nondeterministic state transition function capturing the machine’s dynamics. This allows us to consider the most general notions of equivalence, composition, and interaction.

We also provide several examples of intent machines, including a toy example where states are natural numbers and intents are weighted relations, and more practical instantiations for creating barter systems, utilizing auction bids as intents to distribute resources within a network.

Our research lays the foundation for future investigations into the game-theoretic aspects of intent processing, where the abstract formulation is intended to serve as a minimal formulation required for such work.

Intent Machines (IMs) provide a theoretical framework for abstracting intent-processing systems, entities capable of processing user intents and transforming system state accordingly.