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Much of the continuing competition among blockchain projects is pivoting toward simplifying user interactions, streamlining cross-chain connectivity, and enhancing the overall user experience (UX) of blockchains and applications — arguably the key to true mass adoption.

NEAR Protocol, a sharded, next-gen Layer-1 blockchain network, has recently introduced its new mechanism known as NEAR Intents. Intents represent a fundamental shift in how users, decentralized applications (dApps), protocols, and even AI-driven agents can interact with blockchain networks. Rather than dealing with the complexities of constructing, signing, and broadcasting raw transactions, users can now specify their desired outcomes (i.e., what they want to achieve) without dictating the exact sequence of steps required to get there.

This intent-based approach is part of NEAR’s larger vision of chain abstraction: the ability for end users and developers to interact across multiple blockchains and ecosystems seamlessly without the barriers traditionally associated with bridging, gas fees, or cross-chain liquidity management. With NEAR positioning itself as a leading network for hosting user-owned AI and chain abstraction improvements, Intents is the latest foundational building block NEAR offers. 

Intents enable easier onboarding, an improved UX, and even open the door for advanced use cases, such as AI agents executing complex transactions on behalf of users, connecting AI services to real-world financial infrastructures, and creating truly chain-agnostic trading experiences.

This report provides a comprehensive overview of NEAR Intents — what they are, how they differ from traditional transaction constructs, what benefits they offer, what challenges remain, and how they might shape the future of DeFi and blockchain-based applications.

Near-based Intents

NEAR Intents were launched at the end of Q3 2024, checking off another milestone for the greater NEAR ecosystem. Through embracing Intents, NEAR has continued to solidify its reputation as a platform focused on usability, efficiency, and broad interoperability. Intents allow developers and users to interact with NEAR’s sharded architecture and EVM-compatible environment (via Aurora) in a radically simplified way.

Unlike traditional blockchain transactions, where a user must craft and sign intricate instructions, including gas parameters, smart contract calls, and asset movements, NEAR Intents represent a higher-level request. For example, a user might say, “I want to exchange 1 ETH worth of stablecoins on any chain for BTC,” or “I want to stake my tokens in the most profitable way available.” The NEAR platform, along with trusted solvers and a maturing marketplace of liquidity and execution providers, will then find the best route to fulfill that intent.

At launch, NEAR provides a reference solver (initially more like a proof-of-authority mechanism) operated in-house by Aurora. Though currently limited in solver options, the roadmap envisions an ecosystem of third-party solvers and sophisticated liquidity aggregators, eventually allowing a thriving, competitive marketplace. In the long term, NEAR aims to make Intents the backbone of a universal trading and transaction experience, similar to how centralized exchanges (CEXs) work but within a decentralized and user-sovereign context.

What Are Intents?

Intents can be conceptualized as “goal statements” or “desired outcomes” that users provide to the network. Rather than specifying every contract interaction and parameter, the user simply states what they wish to achieve. A solver — an entity with the capability to access various liquidity sources, trading venues, and bridging solutions — then translates that goal into the best possible set of transactions.

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This differs drastically from the status quo. Traditionally, a user must manually select which DeFi protocols to interact with, set slippage tolerances, pay gas in a specific token, and ensure that transactions are structured correctly. Intents abstract away these complexities. The user remains in control of what they want, while the “how” is delegated to specialized services. As a result, complexity, execution risk, and user friction are reduced.

Additionally, Intents don’t need to be limited to just simple token swaps or trades. They can actually be used to express a huge range of on-chain goals, from staking and lending to complex cross-chain asset movements, NFT trades, or even non-financial actions. Intents can be combined with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, AI agents, and other advanced technologies to ensure privacy, efficiency, and compliance with every user’s on-chain actions.

This is a big deal as it drastically reduces the barriers to entry for “everyday people” who may not even know what a blockchain is. By abstracting away all of the manual inputs through Intents, NEAR is revolutionizing what it means to be “on-chain.”

Intents-Based Interoperability

Cross-chain interoperability has long been viewed as a key milestone in achieving a truly open blockchain ecosystem. Traditionally, moving assets and executing transactions across multiple networks can be a convoluted process. Users are forced to rely on complex bridging protocols, manually execute multi-step swaps, and assume trust in third-party intermediaries that may not be fully transparent or secure. These challenges have stifled adoption and hindered the broader vision of Web3, where users should be able to interact with assets and services from any blockchain as easily as if they were on a single, unified platform.

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NEAR aims to address these longstanding issues by advancing the concept of “chain abstraction” — a paradigm where the underlying chains, bridges, and liquidity sources become invisible to the user. Instead of being confronted with the complexities of choosing the right bridge, selecting the correct liquidity pool, or worrying about gas fees on multiple networks, users simply express what they want to do. NEAR’s infrastructure then intelligently handles the necessary steps behind the scenes. Central to this approach is the introduction of Intents, which provide an outcome-driven framework for cross-chain operations.

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All of NEAR’s existing chain abstraction components work together with Intents so that a user can, for example, deposit a few tokens into NEAR’s ecosystem and then submit a request with a specified result. By foregrounding the desired result rather than the technical steps to get there, Intents create a user experience that is as seamless and intuitive as interacting with a single blockchain. For users, the difference is huge. Cross-chain operations suddenly become as straightforward as a one-click action, eliminating the cognitive load of orchestrating multiple steps across disparate platforms.

So, Intents represent the culmination of NEAR’s chain abstraction vision. By merging existing interoperability infrastructure, sharded scalability, and intelligent execution strategies, NEAR is building an environment where multi-chain complexity all but melts away. Users gain the freedom to explore opportunities and services regardless of which chain they live on. Protocol developers benefit from broader liquidity access and simpler integrations, while solvers and liquidity providers compete in a more open and efficient marketplace.

Why Intent-based DEXs?

DEXs have long aspired to provide a level of UX, liquidity, and convenience comparable to centralized exchanges. However, traditional DEX designs often struggle with slower confirmations, fragmented liquidity, and user-facing complexities like nonces, gas settings, and slippage configurations.

Applications leveraging Intents on NEAR. Source

Intent-based DEXs solve these issues by enabling the DEX to understand what the user ultimately wants — such as buying a certain asset at the best available price — without requiring the user to navigate multiple liquidity sources or protocol intricacies. Solvers can route orders through various DEXs, off-chain order books, or even centralized exchanges if necessary, achieving superior price execution and lower slippage. Users benefit from an experience that is more in line with what they expect from Web2 financial services: simple, intuitive, and guided by their goals rather than technical details.

Over time, the result could be a new class of DEXs that combine the best attributes of CEXs:

• Deeper Liquidity
• Faster Execution
• Lower User Friction

These qualities will bolster the UX of DEXs and still continue to keep the inseparable values of trustlessness, composability, and innovation associated with DeFi. This is especially promising for futures and derivatives markets, where liquidity and efficiency are paramount and where CEXs currently dominate. Intents can level the playing field, allowing non-custodial platforms to offer more seamless futures and other complex financial instruments.

User-Owned AI

NEAR’s intent-based model aligns closely with its strategy to become the home of user-owned AI. Users can delegate complex tasks by connecting AI agents and services to the Intents infrastructure, like finding the best cross-chain yield opportunities, executing specific trades at ideal market conditions, or automating portfolio strategies.

Imagine this future scenario: 

A user’s AI assistant understands their risk tolerance, preferred assets, and investment horizon. The assistant crafts Intents to rebalance a portfolio across multiple chains, source optimal liquidity, or execute trades at optimal times. The user doesn’t interact directly with protocols. Instead, they provide high-level guidelines, and the AI agent, through the NEAR Intent-based system, handles execution seamlessly.

This vision of a machine-to-machine economy unlocks countless possibilities. AI agents can negotiate pricing, aggregate liquidity, and even handle tasks beyond finance, bridging on-chain and off-chain services. NEAR’s ongoing AI accelerator programs, partnerships (such as with Nillion for blind compute and storage), and the integration of services like Bitte (on-chain AI smart accounts) demonstrate how Intents and AI will converge.

As the technology matures, the synergy between Intents, account abstraction, secure data availability layers, and AI-driven agent frameworks may yield a new paradigm: a frictionless, intelligent, and user-centric DeFi universe powered by NEAR’s innovative infrastructure.

How Intents Work

The lifecycle of an intent begins with the user specifying a desired outcome. This “high-level request” might be as simple as: “Swap my stablecoins for BTC” or as complex as “Execute a cross-chain yield strategy, rebalancing every few days.” The difference between a traditional on-chain transaction and an Intent is that the Intent does not contain the step-by-step details of how to achieve that goal but rather declares the end state the user wants.

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An Intent may be formatted as a structured data message that can be signed by the user’s private keys or even by an AI agent authorized to act on the user’s behalf. This data structure includes:

• Desired outcome: Asset targets, final holdings, or any constraints on price or timing.
• Expiration or time constraints: The intent can be invalidated after a certain block number or timestamp if it is not executed.
• Permissions or spending limits: If the user only wants a certain amount of tokens used for execution.
• Optional privacy or cryptographic proofs: In advanced scenarios, zero-knowledge proofs or partial encryption might be utilized so that only the solver or a whitelisted group can view sensitive details.

Once signed, the user (or AI agent) broadcasts the intent to a discovery layer, where it becomes accessible to solvers. In some implementations, this could be akin to posting the intent to an off-chain order book or a private mempool. In others, it may simply be relayed through a decentralized messaging protocol. Some ecosystems even envision specialized “private mempools” where intents remain encrypted. Only authorized solvers can decrypt them and submit solutions on-chain. This can help reduce front-running risk and preserve user privacy.

As far as active participation and execution is concerned, there are several entities involved in the process:

• Users: They define their end goals (“intents”) without detailing every action required.
• Solvers: Acting as sophisticated liquidity aggregators and execution agents, solvers find the best possible route to achieve the user’s stated goal. Currently, there is only one in-house Solver (launched by Aurora)
• Block Builders and Validators: Once a solver identifies the best execution path, block builders and validators ensure that transactions settle on-chain.
• Protocol Developers and Liquidity Providers: By building on top of NEAR Intents, these stakeholders tap into a broader set of users and liquidity sources.
• AI Agents and Services: In NEAR’s forward-looking model, AI agents can interpret user requests and translate them into suitable Intents, handling complex tasks like portfolio rebalancing, bridging assets across chains, or executing trades based on parameters the user sets.

Solvers

Solvers are the backbone of an intent-driven system. They pick up user intents and figure out how to fulfill them optimally. In early-stage implementations (as with NEAR’s reference solver operated by Aurora), this functionality might be concentrated in a single or small set of solver nodes. Over time, NEAR’s goal is to open this up so that many independent solvers compete, creating a more diverse and competitive solver marketplace.

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Solvers analyze and fulfill user Intents through the following process:

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1. Parsing the Intent: Solvers begin by reading and understanding the user’s goals and constraints.
2. Sourcing Liquidity: Solvers search for liquidity across multiple venues, including DEXs, CEXs, OTC desks, aggregator pools, and even other blockchains, to identify the best available routes.
3. Constructing the Transaction Bundle: Solvers design the specific sequence of actions required to achieve the user's goals. This may involve steps like bridging tokens, swapping assets, or adding liquidity to pools.
4. Pricing and Execution Optimization: Solvers analyze factors like gas fees, bridging costs, slippage, and MEV risks to optimize the transaction.

Hypothetically, in the future, multiple solvers will be involved, and they will compete to offer the best net outcome for the user. The solver that provides the most cost-effective or favorable rates is typically selected to execute the transaction.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Intent Designs

Benefits

From a holistic standpoint, Intents unlock unprecedented UX improvements by collapsing multiple complex steps into a single user request. For individuals new to crypto, the absence of a need to manually set gas prices, select slippage settings, or figure out bridging is game-changing, effectively lowering barriers to entry. This also makes DeFi more accessible, as non-technical users can confidently execute sophisticated operations (think staking, yield aggregation, cross-chain swaps, etc.) without understanding the underlying mechanics. Over time, this approach could catalyze broader Web3 adoption, particularly if dApps leverage Intents to build streamlined experiences that feel as simple as Web2 financial applications.

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Technical infrastructure benefits largely stem from liquidity aggregation. By enabling solvers to tap into many different liquidity pools, order books, and even centralized markets, Intents have the potential to improve capital efficiency across the entire network. Liquidity fragmentation, arguably one of the biggest long-standing issues for DeFi, is minimized because a single user request can automatically route across any combination of on-chain and off-chain venues. For NEAR, this means not just better pricing for users but also potential synergy between its sharded architecture and external EVM ecosystems through Aurora or cross-chain bridges.

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On a broader strategic level, cross-chain abstraction becomes a smoother process. Intents synergize neatly with NEAR’s evolving chain abstraction vision, which aims to make inter-chain operations feel native and invisible to the user. Rather than worrying about which network you’re interacting with or which bridge is needed, you simply specify your goal, and the system handles all the routing and execution. This modular approach also meshes with NEAR’s investments in other infrastructure components, such as the NEAR Data Availability (DA) layer and Nightshade 2.0 sharding, ensuring that high transaction throughput and data integrity can keep pace with an expanding user base.

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NEAR’s account abstraction and gas flexibility further elevate the appeal of Intent-based designs. By decoupling the user’s need to hold NEAR tokens for gas, the ecosystem can introduce creative fee payment solutions — like gas sponsorship, multi-asset payment for gas, or AI-driven paymasters. This has implications for DeFi projects, which could partially subsidize user transactions to boost adoption or attract liquidity. Moreover, as user-owned AI becomes a bigger part of NEAR’s roadmap, AI integration into Intents is the logical next step. Automated AI agents can continuously monitor market conditions, sign Intents, and balance user portfolios across multiple DeFi protocols. The user experience leaps forward from proactive to entirely self-managing.

Drawbacks

On the flip side, the power of Intents hinges heavily on the solver model. In the short term, reliance on a single solver (specifically the Aurora-run solver at launch) represents a critical single point of failure. Users will have no immediate alternative if Aurora’s solver experiences downtime or malicious behavior. Moreover, it places outsized control and trust in one entity. The long-term vision is to support a competitive solver marketplace, but that requires time, incentives, and robust governance to evolve. Without robust third-party solver participation, the ecosystem risks centralization — undermining some of the trustless ethos of blockchain technology. Of course, this is only temporary.

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Another strategic concern arises around intellectual complexity and technical overhead. While Intents simplifies the front-end user experience, the back-end orchestration is sophisticated. Projects building or integrating solvers need advanced smart contract logic, ZK proofs (if privacy or verifiability is critical), cryptographic techniques for cross-chain message validation, and more. This can make the barrier to entry for new solver developers quite high, potentially limiting the pool of participants. Furthermore, if Intents become the default transaction model, the network needs to handle the possibility of spam, complex mempool dynamics, and potential vulnerabilities introduced by batched transactions.

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Lastly, governance and compliance frameworks pose non-trivial challenges. Regulatory considerations are evolving for aggregation services, liquidity routing, and cross-chain bridging. Questions remain as to how regulators will treat solver operations. NEAR and its ecosystem participants must be readily able to evolve through a shifting regulatory landscape, making sure that Intents can adapt to future requirements without sacrificing decentralization or user privacy.

Challenges to Full Intent Rollout

While expanding a competitive initial Solver landscape is arguably the biggest concern, scalability and performance are also challenges that need to be addressed as NEAR puts the infrastructure in place. A large influx of users leveraging Intent-based transactions could theoretically put stress on the network). NEAR’s sharding architecture (Nightshade 2.0) aims to handle high throughput, but the solver marketplace will need to scale in parallel — able to parse, price, and execute thousands of user Intents per second. This situation demands rigorous testing and optimization to avoid bottlenecks or front-running exploits.

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User education is another underrated challenge. Even though Intents are designed to shield users from technical jargon and complex steps, early adopters need enough clarity to trust the system. Without proper documentation, tutorials, or user-friendly interfaces, novices might remain confused and distrustful of the “black-box” solver approach. Balancing the convenience of Intents with transparency (i.e., allowing users to audit how solvers fulfilled their goals) is key to widespread acceptance.

Conclusion

NEAR Intents represent a bold step toward a more user-friendly, scalable, and interconnected Web3 ecosystem. By allowing users to express their goals rather than painstakingly construct every transaction detail, Intents simplify interactions with complex infrastructures, enable cross-chain functionality, and set the stage for AI-driven automation.

Though challenges remain — particularly in Solver diversity, trust, transparency, and scale — NEAR has laid out a compelling initial roadmap. Early adopters like Infinex plan to leverage Intents for unified liquidity and a CEX-like user experience in a decentralized setting. Over time, as more Solvers and integrators come online, the Intents marketplace will mature, driving innovation across liquidity provision, derivatives, lending, and beyond. Eventually, Intents could power a universal interface for all asset types across all chains, managed by AI agents and secured by NEAR’s cutting-edge infrastructure.

In short, Intents are a key building block in transforming NEAR Protocol into a universal, chain-abstracted ecosystem, bridging the gap between Web3’s technical complexities and the intuitive, goal-focused interactions users expect. The future is one where the user says what they want, and the network does the rest—securely, efficiently, and transparently.

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Disclaimer: This report was commissioned by the NEAR Foundation. This research report is exactly that — a research report. It is not intended to serve as financial advice, nor should you blindly assume that any of the information is accurate without confirming through your own research. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other digital assets are incredibly risky and nothing in this report should be considered an endorsement to buy or sell any asset. Never invest more than you are willing to lose and understand the risk that you are taking. Do your own research. All information in this report is for educational purposes only and should not be the basis for any investment decisions that you make.