WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Unless you’re an investment genius you probably don’t like today’s highly technical investor ecosystem, intent based investing will make it easy for everyone.
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The average crypto user still clicks through multiple screens to complete a basic swap. They choose tokens, pick chains, confirm prices, approve transactions one-by-one, and hope they get the best execution. That’s the state of crypto UX in 2025: transactional, mechanical, and full of friction. We’ve accepted too much friction as normal. We can do much better, and some already are.
Leading DeFi protocols are already moving toward a more intelligent model of interaction, one where users no longer execute steps; they express goals – or “intent.” Just as you ask ChatGPT a question and get a synthesised response similarly crypto interfaces will evolve into intelligent agents that act on your behalf. These agents will interpret your intent, manage the complexity under the hood, and optimise for your desired outcome. And, this isn’t a distant future, the infrastructure is already here.
The Future of Banking and Payments, by Futurist Matthew Griffin
Intent-based protocols represent the most important UX shift in crypto since smart contracts. They remove the requirement for users to understand or execute individual transactions. Instead, users sign intents, which are declarations of what they want to accomplish, and delegate execution to agents competing to fulfil those intents securely and optimally.
Today, most DeFi users still swap tokens manually, deposit their funds into lending markets, and rebalance their portfolios themselves. This works great for experts and degenerates, but it doesn’t scale to everyone else.
Now consider a different interface: one where you say, “Optimise my stablecoin yield,” and your AI assistant handles the rest, selecting the protocol, rebalancing positions, minimising gas, and responding to market changes. You care about the result. Not how many approvals it took to get there.
Today, most people with a crypto wallet don’t use DeFi. Out of 659 million estimated wallet holders worldwide, only about 83 million have ever interacted with a DeFi app, that’s just 12 to 15%, depending on the estimate. Globally, DeFi usage barely touches 0.7% of the population.
That’s the gap that these new intent based AI agents are built to close.
