Intents

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

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

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.

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.