# Exploring various approaches to achieve effective decentralization for Intent-Based ... | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 08:33
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Vy_-uON0FTg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy_-uON0FTg

## Description

Intents are emerging as the gold standard for transacting on-chain. However, they do come with decentralization trade-offs. In this talk, I'd like to present the status quo, various architectures, and new tradeoffs in terms of where they fit in the trilemma of fees, execution speed, and execution guarantees. The objective is to achieve maximum decentralization while maintaining a great UX and efficiency.

Speaker(s): Mounir Benchemled
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Usability
Keywords: TEE, Decentralization, Homomorphic Encryption, Intents, MPC, ZKP

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## Transcript

[Music] everyone okay glad to be here seems like this is a intense morning in a very intense one um some Monir from lat Labs we're known for building baras swap a 5-year-old protocol and recently portugus that allowed us to launch parasoft Delta so the first time Paras swap is now in the intent space and and it's a great thing um so I guess you heard a lot about intent I believe it's now uh something that is seg nature uh so I'm going to jump directly to what are intents in the context of trading onchain um so it's basically one way of expressing an outcome without describing the details of that outcome for in in simple terms so if you are a user um you want to swap a token a for a b well what you do you sign at a an order or an intent uh you send it to a backend API in general like 99.9 of the time but in behind the scenes there are what you call solvers resolvers market makers agents how we call them uh that will compete for user flow and will bid um on auction and the best bidder is going to be the winner um but so we have two um entities here uh we have the user who have a desire like I want to swap token a for B we have solvers agents you name it competing for user flow and as I said uh there is an API in between that uh does the whole work like I mean users still are mastering their key they the like the system is like work as any defi protocol but the thing is that API which acts as a central point of failure if it stops working the whole system is not useful is not working at all um so that's a problem and this is what we working on in in portugus in trying to uh create an alternative but the challenge is in what we are also proposing is a way so that we can still preserve um the user experience because if we introduce a fancy decentralized layer let's say an up chain well we won't ask users now to interact with yet and yet another chain uh that's not going to be great it's not going to be good for ux so the thing is we keep that backand API that centralized backand API but the thing is is now it's optional so you can use it you can run it yourself so the user and the relayer can be the same thing and that allows um us to still uh give the user exactly the same experience uh but still having a neutral Network that can run um this system like of intent interactions so the system look like this we have on the top left um uh the user interaction so it means user want to do action XYZ I talked about swap but it can be I want to provide liquidity to Unis swap I want to um do a cross chain liquidity providing on another amm or maybe I want to deposit my usdc on a and earn yield on another chain or maybe completely abstracting that chain um I use a relayer I can be my own relayer it can run literally on my on my laptop um so I publish the auction or the my intent uh on the network we have an auction manager this is the heart of the system that you're going to zoom into the rest of the process is the same we have a competition the winner is going to win get to execute the user trade rest is um not new so we have multiple ways for achieving that unfortunately we don't have a lot of time to get really deep but um there is the possibility of running the auction manager on an app chain um something that's not new we have like dydx who are running the whole order book and a matching engine on an app chain it's working well the big limitation here is privacy because we may be pre- leaking me on the user side but also on the agent side the solver side like all the bits would be public there are solutions yet but here we get into more complexity like a committing reveal schemes that can be a bit challenging as well but it's one of the approaches the other one uh is one I like a lot is the te maybe or MPC or a combination of both where we can have um bunch of nodes who are running on if we go with running on a trusted execution environment so it means like a Clos environment a private environment so we solve the the Privacy issue of like pre- leaking of MV and um issue is we rely on a specialized Hardware issue with MPC is a bit slower than than te so maybe a combination of both uh could could do the job it's something that's still work in progress or research in progress the other one is like the holy grail for uh competing on encrypted data that can be a perfect solution but unfortunately this is the FH a full homomorphic encryption uh where uh the nodes can compute on data fully blindly without having any idea of what's inside and getting to like select like in in this case select the winning agents based on the best bidder in terms of price gas you name it um but the problem is if it Shield latency is not acceptable yet it's way way too slow it can work like on a batch computations and not in real time where it's very important in the case of like trading on chain in many other use cases so that's maybe we still maybe a few years ahead there's some work on building some as6 like again specialized Hardware which would become a limitation but still yeah this could be the best solution at some point um but we're still few years ahead thank you guys that's all I had happy to answer any question thank you mon all right we have time for questions raise your hand if you want to ask ask one you've been amazing in terms of asking questions so far let's let's keep it up let's keep it going yes all right one two three is there a specific uh service we solve this intent problem usable by many U dexus cross chain swaps or each built their own um intent solers you mean on the product side or on the a side on the product side does it make sense kind of to have a uh scalable product here which is uh serving this uh intent uh services for many many cross Chain Solutions yeah for cross chain I think it's it's becoming more and more like a a normal thing between codes uh so we're seeing more and more protocols normalizing cross chain interactions so if that's the question I would say that's just matter of time we're not far away from having making cross chain is like the normal thing to do and Thinking Beyond Beyond cross chain if it's a question about having generalized purpose uh intense it's something I believe less that it's going to be the case because the complexity of each protocols makes it makes them so different to have a general purpose um solving mechanism so that's what if that's the question I hope I answered all right time for another question over we there yeah so as someone who has not explored intents yet uh I want to ask how to participate as a agent or a Soler in this network like what exactly a Sol is is it a piece of cord or like a market maker bidding for the prices what's that yeah it's uh definitely too broad uh it can be it's always a piece of code anyways like someone has to write a code that will um answer a user intent between code like user desire to do something the simplest simplest case is I want to swap token a for B and the one who provides the best price is going to be like coding uh and competing with others like you may run a fanasy algorithm and connected to many exchanges Texas by of course and running this algorithm that will answer the user inste but it can be other things like nobody has uh a integration of a that will let let any user uh put usdc cross chain or another chain and earn a better API that's also a use case that can be like fulfilled by an agent all right um