# Agentic Intents: Redesigning DeFi Markets and Global Commerce | George Zeng - Near Protocol - Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver) - Date: 2026-03-09 - Duration: 10:23 - Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-SFltGDcOjsI - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFltGDcOjsI ## Description πŸš€ Get Ready for ETHDenver 2026! πŸš€ We're already hard at work preparing for next year's biggest Web3 event! Keep your eyes peeled for more info on ETHDenver 2026β€”it’s going to be epic! 🌟 ## Transcript Hello. Hello. Are you guys ready for the next talk? So, we will have George Zen from Near. He's going to talk about uh how intense system ecosystem and the future vision far beyond DeFi. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you. So I want to start off talking about DeFi. Defi is automated but DeFi is not autonomous right now. So every transaction in DeFi still requires a human. A human signs, a human decides, and a human monitors. We built automated contracts, but we didn't automate decision-m. What happens when the market participant is no longer human? What happens when capital is controlled by AI agents that monitor markets 24/7, compete continuously, allocate capital dynamically, execute crosschains, and optimize for goals instead of transactions. That's not a feature upgrade anymore, guys. That's a redesign of market structure and allows crypto to break beyond finance into other real world use cases like commerce. Like was mentioned before, I'm George. I'm the chief product officer of Near, also GM for Near AI. And I want to talk to you guys about how we can use Agentic intents to redefine DeFi in global commerce. So sometimes I think about DeFi as having occurred in multiple waves. Defi 1.0 know was really about automating execution. Smart contracts replace intermediaries. You had AMMs replace order books, but you still had humans to decide and sign and manage risk. D5 2.0 was about automating liquidity. LP incentives, you had LP incentives, dynamic liquidity, and crosschain bridges, but humans still rebalance and humans still chase after yield. What I will posit is in the future, we'll have a world where we can have a D5 3.0 know that completely automates decision-m AI agents manage capital their goals replace transactions and we'll have continuous autom optimization without really any human involvement even though that's a future right now we're still pretty much stuck in D5 1.0 and 2.0 so if you're on unis swap you're swapping anytime you're swapping manually but there's an architecture that we've been playing around with for deep DI 3.0 know called intents. So intents in the way that near has implemented it or natural language requests for anything. I can request to swap Bitcoin for Zcash or for Ether. I can ask an agent to manage money for me. I can ask an agent to help me buy a pizza. Once that natural language intent is requested to a decentralized network of solvers, they can actually take this action for me and an agent can confirm that an action has happened. So let me show you what this looks like for DeFi. Near has a product called Near Intense, which some of you may or may not have heard of. It enables a decentralized network of market makers to take a request like swap Bitcoin for Zcash and they compete with the best quotes for that specific request. Once that request has been submitted, an agent confirms it. The intent is executed by a smart contract on Near and I get Zcash for my for my BTC. This has been explosive in terms of the product market fit and adoption for Near. Near basically went from no adoption for this product to $200 million plus a day. Um 15 billion cumulative volume all in the last few months. Now let's run that back but do it with pizza instead. So let's say instead of wanting to swap BTC for Ether, I wanted a Supreme Pizza pie. I can pull open an intensriven app, food ordering app, order some pizza. A bunch of pizzeras can compete for my order. The best pizza orders confirmed by an agent and I can have it delivered to my apartment. Sounds like a stretch, huh? It's not a stretch when you start adding agents to the mix. So, there's crypto Twitter, but there's also AI Twitter. If you're on AI Twitter, you've definitely seen the evolution of OpenClaw and a bunch of bunch of AI agents recently. This may seem like a lot of hot air to many outside of the AI space, but it's actually really really applicable. You can use AI agents for DeFi, having it do things like maxim maximize my yield on say 10K USDC. The a agent can actually go through documents, governance forums, check APYs, assess risks, as well as actually execute on the swap through, let's say, a decentralized network of solvers or market makers. Very doable. And outside of crypto, these agents are hitting strong product market fit. In just the last few weeks, OpenClaw has outclassed um Kubernetes as well as Verscell in terms of GitHub stars in just a matter of weeks. It's coming for Linux as well as Verscell. That is what strong product market fit looks like. I'll also put out some predictions in terms of what this can mean for DeFi going forward. One prediction is that retail trading becomes a legacy interface. There can be a world where basically the human usage of apps to do trading disappears as we know it. This might sound like a stretch, but it's already happening in coding. Anthropic and Open AI are shipping products with 100% of the code shipped by agents instead of humans. Humans are just doing the review. Agents are doing actually all of the execution and the transactions. In that world, all the protocols that we know and love here in crypto stop competing for humans, but start competing for agents. You already see actually competing for um best agent experience to start to matter. Execution guarantees, skills, even in openclaw, they spun up a uh a site called Clawhub that already has 8 to 9,000 skills in a matter of weeks. Defi starts becoming the coordination layer for a lot of agent capital. So humans coordinate today in slack, Twitter, etc. One of the things we shipped in near as well is giving agents the ability to coordinate work with each other. And already we're seeing thousands of jobs pop up on this marketplace where agents are working directly with each other to accomplish jobs that humans never touch. So we started off with DeFi, but I think it's really interesting to think beyond DeFi and into the real real world, how this can impact commerce and other real world transactions. So if agents can allocate capital, if they can sign transactions, if they can escrow payments, and if they can negotiate across protocols, they can also source goods, optimize shipping, hedge FX, manage working capital, and coordinate and work with suppliers. Now, this isn't just a pie in the sky sort of idea. For fun, one or two nights ago, I ended up spinning up a new AI agent and asking this agent to order a pizza for me for my apartment. So, you can see here, I essentially gave that agent that request, put my hands behind my back, behind my head, and then everything here from here on on onwards is actually executed by the agent. You can see the agent take control of my browser, go to Door Dash, go to my top favorite pizza place, Joe's, order my favorite pie, in this case, a Supreme Pizza. You can see it's even navigating the UI of the site and noticing where where there are quirks in the UI. So you see here it detected an error in the Door Dash site because it's actually pulling up a pizza from the order page and it's noticing that there's like a uh a UI bug that doesn't allow it go directly to the checkout container, right? But it detected that it course corrected. It pulled up the order section. All of this time, my hands are behind my head and it's going directly to the checkout page here. All without any human intervention. Obviously, I ran this bot from my computer, but I can also spin up a CVM a call container in the cloud and have this these agents do work for me 247 without any human interaction at all. You can see here it's pulling up the order page and the um the delivery address and it automatically placed the order end to end without any human involvement at all. I want to show you guys that because I feel sometimes there's a disconnect between what's happened in crypto and what's happened in AI and I think we're stronger if we're able to combine the two pieces together. So the required infrastructure for this future from our perspective we think that you need secure execution environments with verifiable outcomes that is what Near is building at Near AI confidential inference confidential verifiable attestable inference secure agents so Near built actually a secure version of ironclaw and rust instead of in JavaScript with prompt injection protection and with a whole bunch of other protections with escrow and settlement routes. This is what Near Intense is. And with decentralized compute, Near's also spinning up a near decentralized GPU compute marketplace. And if you combine the two together, you can get pizza delivered to your apartment without any human involvement at all. Okay guys, that's my talk. Thank you.