Unlocking the Power of Intents | Nam Chu Hoai, Hyperlane | ETHTaipei 2025

[Music] Hello. All right. Um, so we're going to be talking about intents. I guess I didn't realize uh when I prepared my slides that uh I will be preceded by Goki mostly already talking about some of the basics. So um yeah, I'll go over that very briefly.

But honestly like whenever you guys feel at any point like you have questions just interrupt me. I generally feel that those kind of presentations are just more engaging anyways. But yeah to introduce myself. My name is Nam. Uh I'm one of the co-founders of Hyperlane and yeah I've been spending a lot of time in the last couple months talking about um intense but especially open infrastructure.

Um and so the agenda for today, the need for unification like why does this all matter. Uh I want to go a bit over the current efforts that are happening uh in the space that um I've been luckily part of. Um talking about uh the open intense framework which is one of those efforts that Goki also already mentioned. Uh and then last not least I think some of the challenges that I think he also mentioned about um yeah like solver decentralization and whatnot like intents probably don't solve everything and so I want to give a little bit of like a sneak peek of what we personally believe um the kind of steps beyond intents are but to start with kind of like the motivating problem so to speak. Um, so I've only been around since like 2017, 2018.

So like I can't actually talk about what it was like to be in that stages, but right like one of the early things that like Ethereum had to figure out was very much fragmentation as well with respect to like token standards, right? Like I think ERC20 is very well known and I think at the time it was just actually like when smart contracts came out like people built like token contracts actually in very different ways which made things like wallets super hard to build, right? Right. And so I think Ethereum has a long history of basically figuring out, hey, how can we unify Ethereum to kind of like make applications and associated infrastructure uh work better? Um, and so I think ERC20 is a great example of like how that can work well, right?

Because ERC20 kind of like uh unleashed I think the like power of like composing uh value transfers. Um but then I think ever since then we've kind of like had like a lot of like different efforts when it comes to like fragmentation. Like I think in the beginning uh once we realized oh this doesn't scale we right like talked about like oh how do we scale Ethereum? Maybe we do shorts. Um and really it was around 2020 when I think uh the broader uh research community came together and said like hey we should probably do rollups.

Um, and so I think one thing that I think people sometimes underappreciate is just like how successful that actually was, right? Like I think in 2020 like in DeFi summer like we all complained about like super high gas fees and I'm pretty sure nobody like maybe nobody but like very few people today complain about um gas prices but what they do complain about is fragmentation, right? Like I think from this rollup ccentric road map again written in like 2020 now we're in a point where like honestly most transactions on right like the leading L2s only take uh subsense effectively. Um but I think it's no denying that um uh the interoperability experience that users face today is like pretty rough like um not only I guess here's a bit more like between developers but like uh you as a developer like on L1 right like what kind of like power defy summer was this ability for developers to just like compose with each other and I think we've kind of lost that right like now today if like you have an app on base and you have an app on Arbitum, like you as a user now have to figure out how do you move your funds from Bass to Arbitum and vice versa or like maybe you have like yeah like most of your kind of base funds on Ethereum. Uh and so I think the like user experience for like kind of like dealing with like going between chains has definitely become like a clear like loss of UX compared to like Ethereum uh in 202 uh 2020 21.

Um, and so for users, what it really means is that like right like if you use MetaMask, you have just like an insanely long like list of chain lists probably. Um, and right like honestly like last couple months has gotten better, right? Like MetaMask is now able to keep like a different active network on like different uh on different uh tabs and like is able to kind of like automatically switch chains. But like I think again we're like very far from the experience that we've had which was like oh just connect MetaMask and that's all you got to do. Um, and so I think the last couple months have seen like a lot of um, let's call it like negativity uh, towards like Ethereum because compared to like right Salana and like maybe some of the meme coins that were launched on Salana, everybody just got really upset like everyone's really upset of like hey like I have eve bags and they're not going up and partly because of interoperability, right?

Like this is like the most important problem and like uh, how come like how come Ethereum does not feel like one chain anymore? And I think uh as somebody who spent a lot of time with people um let's say at DF and I think Josh Rudolph from DF is kind of like the best person there. It's like sometimes it's like very hard to see what's actually going under the hood and that's what this presentation is for. Um this is all fine like people are working on this right now and like just everybody be a bit of patient. Um the goal that um I think if you were there in Bangkok like uh at Defcon, right?

Like there was this like uh interrupt forum uh where it was like Vitalik and a bunch of L2 uh founders on stage and like Vitalic basically told him like oh you cannot leave the room until we accomplish this goal and I think the goal is for Ethereum to feel like one chain again. Um that's really the kind of like the overarching I would say thesis behind what um kind of like people have been trying to work on. And honestly since Bangkok there's been a few um efforts that I kind of want to like highlight. Um and so they roughly fall in these three categories. Chain specific addresses, message passing and intents.

Um I'm just going to briefly go over them but mostly focus on intents afterwards. Um so chain specific addresses is basically this idea of hey right like if you want to send funds from one address to another like again on Ethereum L1 by itself it was very easy right you just give an address and even that was complicated like some people use ENS but now with L2s you actually have to always specify which chain this address is on right um there was like this famous example of like I think winter mute like having a safe on Ethereum and then they just gave the address and thought that like they would have the same address on arbitum or I think on base I forget which one. Uh but it turns out right like safe addresses aren't guaranteed to be the same on every chain. And so chain specific addresses are basically meant to yeah standardize how we specify addresses across chains so that like you can you can go back to this idea of just giving a string to a counterparty and then they can figure out how to send you the funds not just on that address but also on that chain. uh message passing I'm not going to go too much into it um actually more towards the end uh it will be kind of an important primitive but what I want to focus on today is primarily uh intents and so why do I care about intents intents are um actually I guess let's clarify quickly what are intents because I think a lot of people might feel embarrassed to ask um this is a great diagram from the UNISO page um uh right like a user basically submits the funds on the settlement contract.

Uh any filler can observe that that uh that those tokens were put into settlement contract and it can fill on the destination chain. And then the hard part is basically like how does the settlement contract know that the filler actually did the thing that's supposed to to kind of like unlock uh the funds to the filler. And I think getting ahead of ourselves. So the reason why I think it's very interesting for all the reasons that Goki mentioned is that intents have this ability to provide a much nicer user experience, right? Like as a user, you just say like, oh, I have token X, I want token Y on chain A or B.

Um, and solvers basically do the job for you. And I think like what we saw like on the um on the statistics that he showed, right? Like I think actually the solver like decentralization is getting pretty good on things like across like I think even just a year ago solvers were fairly centralized. Um but it's getting pretty good. However, right like the rollup ccentric road map didn't get created to have like four different L2s on which like most activity kind of like exists.

The rollup center roadmap was created to allow developers and projects to spin up all kinds of different rollups with different execution environments of different trust assumptions. And I think we as Hyperlane, one of the things that we focus on a lot is what we call like longtail chains, longtail roll-ups, right? Like basically if you are like two dudes here in Taipei and you want to launch a rollup, like actually it was surprisingly hard to basically get this intent experience. Um, and so what we found is as as we were talking to these roll-ups is that hey like I want intents but I have to beg hard from across to kind of get this intent experience and that was just not something that we think is uh useful for our space because it like limits the reach of rollups and so therefore Ethereum and so we spent a bunch of time trying to like help all of these different teams like build common infrastructure to have these intent experiences and that's what ultimately culminates ated in uh the open intense framework. Um and so basically think of the open intense framework as just like this recognition as an engineer of like hey it's bad if we all building basically the same thing.

Why don't we work together on building shared abstractions um that allow us still to have right like take have our own take on it but not have to build everything from scratch. Um and so yeah hopefully we basically we can write like uh this kind of graph of like oh uh bridging over time being intent based versus not like we kind of keep that going as we expand to more and more rollups. Um and so what is what exactly you know is I guess in open intense framework um there's I think mainly like I would say four pieces. Um, basically one I think honestly the most important is probably an open source solver implementation, right? Like most intent protocols come with a reference solver.

But if you today, right, like have um if you basically build a new intent protocol because you're like, "Oh, resource locks are super great." Oh, oh, like I want to right like support like crosschain uh Dutch auctions like the honestly the hardest part is building this reference solver. Like I think people sometimes underestimate just like transaction indexing like uh transaction inclusion like gas pricing like those are all the kind of like hard parts and actually rebalancing as well. And so I think what I we found over the last couple months as we've been working with um different kind of intent protocols that actually this is the most interesting thing to them right um like we're working for example with like zero from unis swap he's work building the compact um and so yeah so I think just being able to have open source solver implementations that like make solving more accessible to people is one of the honestly very exciting parts of the open tense framework um other parts are just like basic the smart contracts right like intense in the in the essence are like super simple like it's basically like take tokens and then based on some other contract which tells you whether it was filled or not release the tokens and so there's some basic composable smart contracts in there as a basic UI template so basically uh if you right like again launch your own rollup like ultimately what you care about is for your users to be able to uh to like have this intent experience to go to and from your rollup. Um and last but not least, I guess like uh 7 7683 is the most like successful um interop standard that we have today.

And so the smart contracts are written with that interface in mind. And so all in all, this basically like is the goal to have all of these things is to allow against uh like a longtail rollup to basically get this interop experience without having to build everything from scratch. like kind of the explicit goal for us as we were building this was hey uh it okay uh it should allow a team of uh like right now if you want to get do this it probably takes a team of like two or three engineers to um work like on this from scratch in like four five months and the goal of the open tense framework is to basically get that down from like one engineer working on it for like one week to basically like deploy and customize it for your own chain Um, and so we at Hiberane are big fans of open frameworks. Like I think the reason why is because right like if you have 10 different teams having the exact same problem, they can kind of like work together and build these abstractions together. Um, they are also permissionless and protocol agnostic, right?

Like I think the thing about um a lot of interrupt today is that it basically requires you to talk with a interrupt team to convince them, hey my chain is important enough for your business. Um and I think that's just not what we've built crypto for in my opinion, right? Like I think the super cool idea was and I think I usually like quote unis swap in this context is that uh back in the day when you wanted to list your token you had to like convince Binance to like list your token right and there's like a lot of like kind of like uh kind of like strings attached that come with it but like UNISO allowed anybody to just like spin up a V2 pool on Ethereum and list your token. Um and so this kind of like permissionless aspect is something that we have to truly treasure as we are um you know building this kind of like infrastructure for financial rails and so uh yeah frameworks are great because they kind of maintain that permissionlessness. Um so do intents and solve Ethereum interoperability?

I think one thing that um Goki did a good job at is kind of like recognize that right like solvers are ultimately the thing that powers intents and uh while I mean I just spent a bunch of time talking about why intents are so great and like how I can make them more accessible to people but I think we should also recognize that like ultimately what you're doing is you're really paying a solver to give you a loan for some extent of time right like they are basically giving you the the the money on a destination chain and they have to wait some amount of time before they can get their money back either on that chain or on some other chain and so ultimately this is a cost that has to be born by somebody and that's ultimately the user um like I think in a cross um right like the repayment period is basically uh typically 90 minutes but could be even worse and so really like what yeah what you're doing as a solver is you're basically just parting away with your money and like planning on having it come back um in 90 minutes and so I saw saw a calculation that a uh Hart gave to me the other day and right like at 1 cent u at the current pervading cost of capital like I think uh 1 cent really covers really only an intent for uh I think like 5k it was or something like that um and so it means that like if right like it works well for like intents for like normal users who let's say like send 50 100 $500 around but like we're very far from uh we're very far from this uh world where we again had on L1 where like right like you can build composable protocols just like moving like millions and billions of dollars at basically like no slippage. Um if Vitalik wrote this uh Eve magicians research post I think like four days ago or five days ago and I think multi-prover architectures are like just a mustave because you need to be able to write like drive down the like drive down finalization window of rollups because right now it takes like 7 days and I think you know there was a lot of like um uh what do you call it like excitement about like ZK roll-ups by like solving all of that but I Even like Vitalik who I would say has been a ZK Maxi I think is recognizing that uh like current ZK technology is still pretty opaque and there are still like quite amount of bugs to be found like I think succinct just like um disclosed a bug uh just the other day and so multi-rover architectures are like super important for us to like pragmatically actually drive down the finalization window and even with that right like we will only get the finalization window down to let's say 12 And so that is like still a loan that the market like a solver has to give to you for like 12 minutes to cover that cost. And so it is inevitable to us that like intense will only cover some amount of activity, but to really get I think again for Ethereum to feel like one chain again, we ultimately need like native like rollup interoperability. Um, and so I'm gonna like maybe speedrun this a bit more, but uh like today if you ask most developers, very few people will actually implement the native rollup bridge, right? Very very people do, right?

Like technically there's like storage there's like commitments to storage routes on L1, but even those are very very rarely used. And what you see is people kind of like um taking so to speak shortcuts because uh because you as a developer you just have no time to basically think about like hey what is the best interoperability available for me to use right I think there's like things like super chain elastic chains a layer that kind of like promise basically this kind of like oh better uh native trust assumptions for cross interoperability but like let's be real like you as a developer you have absolely absolutely no time to think about this, right? Like you have to build an application that uh that works well and uh that kind of like has a good user experience and that has like good onboarding. And so interoperability is generally going to be like I think you recognize as an important problem but not one that you can spend like that much time on. And so what is the solution?

I'm a onetrick pony. The solution is uh open frameworks, right? The idea is again like don't like don't waste your time building everything from scratch like it's just like impossible. Not just because there's different again these different verification mechanisms uh given to particular roll-ups whether they're part of the same cluster where they're part of not the same cluster but even if you were let's say in the super chain right like I think um we were talking to the base team for example and like it's great if you have interoperability within the super chain but what do you do about a meme token on like arbitum what do you do about a meme token on like salana right like you ultimately need interoperability that kind of like covers our industry And um that's what we've built like hyperlane for right like hyperlane is kind of if you think of the OAF as an interoperability framework for intents hyperlane is a more general interoperability framework for like hey how do you know that something happened on an origin chain and so again that's uh the main point I want you to get away with is that open frameworks work they are permissionless and protocol agnostic right so like hyperlane is fully fully open source people can deploy hyperlane to their chain without ever talking to us, right? Like the goal for us really is to kind like maintain this like uh this this pretty much honestly the only differentiation that crypto has against web 2, which is that like nobody can stop you, right?

Like you can build an application and put it on chain and nobody can stop you from it. You can like a user can use it without any permission. And so I really want people to kind of recognize that like infrastructure like this has to be permissionless. Um and because it's open source and collaborative, right? Like people can work on different parts independently and kind of like improve the thing together.

Um so yeah, tagline friends don't let friends build bridges because that's kind of hard. Um and so yeah, so don't settle for open frameworks. Uh sorry, don't settle for less than open frameworks for interoperability. Um here are some examples of folks who have recognized that and I guess I have a few more minutes so maybe I can quickly go into it. So, Eco is actually one of these intent protocols that have recognized like they first tried to build um kind of like their own abstraction for like different proving systems like I think they actually originally started with a storage proof system and then they realized like this is kind of hard right like we're kind of like again reinventing a lot of the wheels here and so like by building on top of hyperlane they were able to right like have an interrupt system that covers most of the chains they care about but within that they are able to use different verification systems as time goes on.

So basically you could imagine like oh right like uh lower value intents actually use like just let's say a validator based settlement system but then if you have intents exceeding like millions of dollars they actually would go use the storage proof system. Um right like if you are like a RAS provider like Caldera or Gelato they've kind of recognized hey my customers right who deploy chains they have the same problem every time like those chains need interoperability and like I can't build a business around like hoping that my customers are big enough customers for other interoperability projects and so they are now deploying hyperlane out of the box um on these rollups because they can do that right they don't have to ask us it's all fully open source Um, and so yeah, so again, the the takeaway for you guys is if you need interoperability, like don't settle for anything less than open frameworks. Um, I know I have a few minutes left, so maybe I'll just like leave it open for questions. Any questions? We got seven minutes.

Uh, sorry. How are you guys funded? I mean, if you're competing against these other interop solutions that they've got, you know, big bucks and VCs and marketing budget and stuff, how does that work? Great question. Um, yeah, we are very well aware that there's hundreds of millions of dollars in um our competitors.

Um, you know, I think the our choice of the framework strategy is not coincidental, right? Like and it is our view that again similar to let's say exchanges, right? is that there's going always going to be Coinbase, Binance, right? Like always going to be these very wellresourced like projects um that I think it's just impossible to compete head-on with unless you have some other kind of distribution mechanism. And so what you do if you're unis swap, right?

You just open permissionless thing, right? Like I think uh Binance will never be able to compete with like a project that doesn't have the reach or doesn't have the connections to get to Binance. Um and so for us it's kind of the same thing, right? like let's say a Caldero or Gelato, they had actually no alternative other than to use an open framework, right? Because it's just like a very different strategy.

Um, one of my favorite kind of analogies is like Kubernetes in the like web two world, right? Like um I would say roughly I guess what 10 years ago when um the cloud became a super hot thing, right? Like it was like Amazon was like running away with it, right? like everybody who wanted to move to the cloud was using AWS and I think Google basically recognized that like hey what we should do is build a open framework that allows anybody to kind of be vendor independent right but hey if you still need something um and so you might as well take the service offered by these framework developers uh and so that's kind of like I would say our view of like how we see this industry evolve is that just like we we can't all use AWS we can't use all insert our like interop competitors like it has to be like open source frameworks to allow people to build these kind of businesses and not get squeezed by kind of their service provider. Good question.

Any questions? Okay. Could you walk through how unis swap crosschain uses this? So um there's a few like so it depends a bit who you asking at unis swap I would say um right so like uh right now I believe the current way unis swap uses crosschain is via across right so like I think in the unis swap wallet you can like I think they're called crosschain sends um and that primarily basically just uses like across and then across which are intense and then across intents are settled via um uh one of the things that uh unisop is working on right now uh specifically particularly zero age at unis swap is the compact which is basically this kind of like I guess maybe called next generation like uh intent system based on resource locks and so in this resource lock system there are arbiters which you think of them as like 7683 settlement contracts um and so one of these uh one of these arbittors is based on hyperlane um like you can look up in the GitHub repo and so basically in that arbittor again it just basically says like hey like what happened on the destination chain which is like the fill by the solver and then that uh like allows the solver to claim from the origin chain resource lock. Um and so it's not a belief not yet in production but um that's kind of like one of the ways in which unis swap could use such an open framework because right like what the ultimate goal is to like right as unis swap your goal is to be like the venue for all swaps any asset any chain.

Um and so by having a arbiter that is very flexible to like yeah different like uh chains, different assets, different trust assumptions um you are able to kind of gain most of the coverage without having to like reinvent like the settlement system yourself. Um, one thing that again I think is a very nice benefit of like an open source framework is that right like if you as unis swap let's say care really about like I don't know I don't know what like the latest hot execution environment is that people really into but because hyperlane is fully open source anybody can actually like implement hyperlane in that other execution environment right like uh we originally as a core team we started implementing the EVM uh side because that's what we knew but it was actually other teams who implemented hyperlane and Salana in like Cosmos, I think the fuel team is very close to like like uh putting their hyperlink implementation to production there. Um and so again like from our perspective like allowing these different teams to work together on the same like uh abstractions means that we're all winning together, right? Because like once somebody implemented hyperlane in like a new VM, all the other VMs are now able to communicate with that. Thank you.

Any last minute question? If not, let's give Namchu a round of applause and thank thank you for sharing all the insightful sharing. [Music]