Unpacking NEAR Intents: A Deep Dive

For the past year-plus, the NEAR ecosystem has worked to advance Chain Abstraction across all of Web3: eliminating the barriers for users to use applications and liquidity on different chains. A major step towards realizing this vision is NEAR Intents, a new primitive in the NEAR Protocol introduced in November 2024 that builds upon NEAR Chain Signatures. 

The general idea of “intents” is a way for a user to specify the outcome they want without needing to specify exactly how it will be achieved. This applies to states on different chains or offchain (buy a bike or build a house). 

Intents are an incredibly powerful primitive that not only unlock a range of new use cases that haven’t been possible before, but also bring our space closer to serving as a global market. Another way to think about it is a unified liquidity layer. This post, the first in a series on intents, will unpack how NEAR Intents work and offer some examples. 

What are NEAR Intents? 

Intents are a new type of transaction on NEAR. Traditionally, transactions prescribe exact actions to be taken: call this smart contract, send this asset. Instead, intents provide a way to agree on a result and let some other actor figure out how to achieve this result.

Often in Web3, intents are only used in the context of simple swaps, which is an easy use case. In the case of NEAR Intents, use cases span from onchain trading to ordering something online from an e-commerce store to getting an AI agent to run a marketing campaign to getting a person to do something in the real world.  The participants on both sides of an intent could be a person or an AI agent. 

NEAR Intents are part of the core NEAR Protocol, building upon both Chain Signatures for multichain functionality and sharding for scalability. Any application can integrate intents to enable easy interactions for users . The user puts out an intent, their app frontend gets some options to fulfill it and chooses the best option for the user, and the intent commitment gets settled onchain. This intent commitment is functionally a legal agreement that is enforceable on the blockchain, which ensures that the commitment and all parties’ obligations are fulfilled, and if something goes wrong, a pre-agreed dispute process will help to resolve it. The Intents system connects requests with fulfillment via solvers––by human or agent, fiat or crypto. 

How do NEAR Intents work?

NEAR Intents is an interactive sub-protocol that consists of the following steps:

• Advertising intent
• Collecting quotes/options
• Committing to a specific option
• Settlement of the commitment onchain
• Finalization
• (optionally) dispute & resolution

Advertising intent. An intent starts with the user or another actor defining the outcome they want to achieve and advertising it to the solvers. There are different ways to advertise: everything from broadcasting to the whole network, using a specific intent orderbook, or sending their intent directly to specific parties. Examples of an intent advertisement would be, “swap 100k USDC to BTC” or “buy a pepperoni pizza.”

Collecting quotes/options. Counter-parties that received the intent can respond with their options on how they would fulfill it. This fulfillment can be the final outcome (you get 1BTC) or just a fee for executing a set of actions (run a marketing campaign for $10k). The user’s application collects these options and can either directly decide on the best one or can surface it to the user to choose (i.e. here are different restaurants that make pizza).

Committing to a specific option. When an option gets selected, the user’s wallet signs this option, creating a commitment. This commitment can be multi-party if the option contains a number of parties working together to deliver the outcome.

Settlement of the commitment onchain. After the commitment is made, it settles onchain. This is when solvers can start executing on the proposed plan.

Finalization. This step happens when the counterparty/ies have finished executing. For example, the pizza was delivered, tokens were swapped, or multi-hop onchain actions were executed.

Dispute. If the user is not satisfied with the outcome, they can initiate a dispute. For example, the pizza hasn’t really arrived even though the solver indicated that it’s finalized. The type of dispute mechanism is defined by the option & commitment created by the solver and user in the first place. If the parties agreed ahead of time, the intent commitment can be considered a legal contract (terms of service) and interpreted by AI or a traditional legal system in order to decide on disputes.

There are a number of mechanisms by which intents can be advertised to solvers:

• Broadcast to all solvers: best price discovery
• Centralized order book: inserting intent into an order book to which solvers subscribe
• Individual trade exchange: directly communicating with another party to ask for interest in the trade (can be done via email or messenger)
• Onchain: post intent directly onchain

Solvers can decide to participate or not in any individual intent. This means they can check the source of funds, KYC / KYB of the intent initiator, or any other property they think is relevant before offering their option. This is especially important when dealing with fiat currencies to ensure compliance.

This process essentially models the majority of economic activity that is currently happening onchain and in the real world. The fact that intent advertising and collecting options are offchain removes the majority of traditional issues creating complexity in blockchains such as MEV, trading latency, and others. Solvers can be arbitrarily scaled with demand in order to respond to a bombardment of requests, which also solves the scalability challenges of trading popular assets onchain. Then intent commitments can be settled on the sharded NEAR blockchain, allowing for a highly scalable global market experience that seamlessly works across crypto, fiat, and real world use cases.

Start Using NEAR Intents

Intents as a new type of transaction on NEAR open a way to transition traffic from CEXs and more traditional real world markets to leverage highly efficient blockchain trading. Intents address existing challenges with the scalability of asset trading inside AMM pools as well, opening up a much broader programming model when combined with AI. Stay tuned for the next post in this series, which will expand on how Intents are used by AI agents.

To get started on building with NEAR Intents, head to the documentation page and join the NEAR Intents support TG.