During the initial phases of the digital ledger interaction itself was an action of extreme particularity; to effect value was to instruct the machine through a set of imperative, precise steps, telling it precisely how a transaction is supposed to take place. What we are currently experiencing is an ontological change of this terrain whereby the paradigm of execution is being replaced with a paradigm of intent where the user no longer writes the journey, but simply whispers the destination. This shift of what we call transactions to what we call intents is not merely an upgrade to a user experience, but a re-invention of the idea of digital agency in which we delegate the complicatedness of the how to a novel category of sophisticated agent called Solvers. These digital go-betweens, like algorithmic genies, are in an off-chain marketplace to satisfy our whims, be it trading a token at a particular price or bridging facilities across fragmented ecosystems, with efficiency, in exchange of the authority to execute the trade.
But as we peel the pebbles of execution away we unwittingly create a new, murky wilderness commonly called the dark forest that these Solvers work beyond immediate perspective of the societal ledger. The educational dimension, here, is to realize that though the intents make the interface of the user with the blockchain easier, the game theory of economics plays out here in a more complicated manner. Ideally in an intent-centric architecture, Solvers are engaged in perfect competition, which makes the prices suffer and the quality of execution improve. However, there is more disturbing recent scholarship that would propose a more troubling truth: the high cost and capital investment involved in taking part in these Dutch auctions poses natural entry barriers. The decline in the number of able Solvers would push the market out of the status of perfect competition, and maneuver it into a less perfect state of limited oligopoly, where only the few strong players control the movement of transactions.
This leads to the main issue of the problem, which is professionally and research-crucially important: the threat of Solver collusion. When the invisible hand of the market is made of few strong fingers, then it can be more profitable to shake hands in the dark than to compete in the light. The key problem of research in 2025 is to break down the game-theoretic behaviors of these off-chain actors, who hold private information, and that take milliseconds to execute. By colluding with Solvers, an artificial increase of the cost of a fulfillment intention, like in traditional cartels, can be extracted by extortionate means by the Solvers, but in an algorithmic fashion. A failure of cryptography therefore poses no threat to the philosophical ideal of a trustless system, but a failure of incentives does.
As a result, the future blockchain architecture is no longer treated as a code but more as a mechanism design. We are to build economic settings, namely latency-neutral order flow auctions, which render collusion irrationally. We need to create protocols such that the only winning strategy of a Solver is to be honest and efficient, to use Zero-Knowledge proofs to not only check data, but also check the veracity of the auction itself. The farther we move into this intent-driven future, the more we will be judged by the capability of ushering some light into this forest of darkness so that the agents we set to accomplish our digital desires are there to serve the intent of the user and not to rule the value of the user.
