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What are intents?

Intents are expressions of desired outcomes that sophisticated third-party actors fulfil. These third-party actors are often referred to as Solvers or Relayers. A helpful metaphor is that an intent is to purchase a good on Amazon with next-day delivery, and a transaction is a detailed description of the SKU, warehouse, and delivery routes.

Intents are chain-agnostic, but with the proper settlement infrastructure and solver marketplace, intents enable fast, cheap, and generalized executions to happen across chains. At Rhinestone, we combine intents with a self-custodial resource locking and permissioning framework that unifies a user’s balance across chains to be spent instantly on any supported chain.

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How does Rhinestone use intents?

When a user wishes to transact, the wallet or application sends a “meta intent” to Rhinestone’s Omni Account service. We then construct the instruction set for the solver to fulfil the intent, which is called the “order bundle”. This order bundle is returned to the user in the form of a human-readable signature envelope, which encodes the instruction set for the intent into a single signature. The order bundle is then propagated to the solver market to be executed.