Advantages and Challenges of Intentional Design, with Relevant Infrastructure Still a Long Way to Go

The Khalani Network project aims to address intent-centric design in order to improve the user experience of smart contract interactions, as mentioned here. However, the current implementation architecture still faces many challenges that need to be overcome.

Challenges in Current Smart Contract Interaction Experience

The current standard method of interacting with blockchain is by signing transactions, essentially authorizing a specific execution path guided by smart contracts. However, this method poses several challenges for users:

• Lack of Interest in Understanding Implementation Details: The technical details involved are often complex and not of interest to the average user, who just wants to achieve their goal.
• Inability to Guarantee User's Understanding of Execution Results: When users sign transactions, they should be able to trust that the execution path defined by the smart contract will yield the expected results. However, with the current user experience design, users may find themselves uncertain about what they are agreeing to and what the outcome of their actions will be. The seriousness of this issue is evident in the number of people who have said, "If you can't understand the transaction content, your wallet should refuse to sign," highlighting the gap between user understanding and actual results.

This disparity between user understanding and actual outcomes may cause many users to feel fear and aversion when interacting with blockchain DApps.

Intent-Centric Design Offers Solutions

Fortunately, intent-centric design has emerged as an alternative solution to improve the blockchain interaction experience mentioned above.

Users no longer need to directly authorize blockchain transactions but rather authorize the expected results and constraints, known as "intent." The responsibility for generating and executing transactions is then entrusted to solvers, with users' interests maximized through competitive quoting among solvers.

Intent-centric design not only allows users to specify the desired interaction results but also enables them to express customizations and optimizations, providing a more intuitive and personalized user experience.

• Elimination of Complexity in Direct Blockchain Interaction: Intent allows users to declare the outcomes of their actions rather than specifying a particular execution path, offering more customization options while reducing operational complexity.
• MEV Protection: Intent-centric design provides a design centered around settling final results, enforcing the expected outcomes to minimize MEV losses.
• Outcome Optimization: By leveraging competition among solvers, users can easily choose the best path forward.

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Challenges to Overcome in Current Intent-Centric Design

However, there are still many challenges in the current design framework that need to be overcome before widespread adoption:

• Centralization Due to Solver Competition: Nearly all current mechanisms involve solvers engaging in PVP, competing in a zero-sum game for transactions. The primary means of gaining a competitive advantage in this environment is through vertical integration or control of private information flows, indirectly leading to the concentration of various roles such as Builder, Proposer, Searcher, ultimately excluding participants with insufficient resources and capabilities, resulting in greater centralization of stakeholders' power.
• High Barrier to Entry for Operating Solvers: New solvers entering the space need to be proficient in multiple areas, such as state on indexing chains, liquidity finding and management, monitoring execution performance, and complex DevOps infrastructure. Achieving this in today's competitive landscape is extremely challenging, achievable only by the top developers, leading to centralization issues.
• Fragility of Intent Infrastructure: When intent aligns with users, transcending protocols and blockchain technology, utility theoretically maximizes. Ideally, users should be able to freely express intent across multiple applications and blockchains, customizing preferences. However, current solver-related infrastructure falls short of this vision. The more explicit users' intent expressions are, the more fragile the infrastructure becomes, as the complexity requires highly integrated solvers, potentially leading to monopolies, MEV, and worse outcomes.

Evolution of Intent-Centric Design Requires Time

While concepts like enhancing user experience, Account Abstraction (AA), and intent-centric design have become focal points in the industry's recent developments, even Ethereum has incorporated these into its roadmap.

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However, from conceptualization to actual implementation and refinement, there is still a long way to go, especially in the underlying infrastructure, which presents many challenges. It is certain that intent-centric design will be a marathon rather than a short-term speculative field, as robust infrastructure is essential to achieve the envisioned improvements.

Looking forward to a future where confirmation windows in wallets no longer contain incomprehensible content for signing but instead present intent information in plain language that can be customized. This will only be achievable with robust infrastructure.