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Introducing the Open Intents Framework, the framework that aims to achieve a simple goal: Intents for Everyone, with Everyone.
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As cross-chain intents are becoming central to the future of Ethereum interoperability, the need for ready-to-use, protocol-agnostic features for solvers, interop providers, and cross-chain builders becomes more critical.
Today, the Ethereum ecosystem is inherently multichain. Users can access blue-chip DeFi protocols on Arbitrum, try new decentralized social networks on Base, or experiment with AI agents on Mode. Tech giants like Sony are now building L2s on the OP Stack, and ZK rollups are rapidly evolving. Ethereum has successfully scaled, but the need to move between different L2s, has led to fragmentation and inefficiencies in the user experience, which in turn, has led to the rise of intents.
The great thing about intents —and the reason their adoption is growing— is the seamless user experience they provide. For Ethereum to truly feel like a single chain, users need to be able to transfer assets across chains in two seconds or less. Intents enable just that: fast, frictionless cross-chain asset transfers. Users simply express an intent (e.g “swap 100 USDC on Base for 100 USDT on Arbitrum”), and a specialized agent —commonly known as a solver— completes it for them. Solvers handle the difficult parts, such as finding the best execution route, settling the transactions, and taking on finality risk.
However, as a new chain, integrating intents is not easy. You have to convince an existing protocol that your chain is interesting enough for them, which can require lengthy BD processes. If you want to run a solver for your own chain, you have to build this infrastructure and manage the associated costs, like settlement and rebalancing, yourself. Generally, solver liquidity management and sourcing is a challenge.
Builders are constantly innovating and exploring new ways to improve intents, but getting from idea to production is difficult. You have to build the whole intent stack –from smart contracts, settlement, solver integrations to UIs– all by yourself.
The Ethereum ecosystem thrives on shared innovation. What if there were ways to collaborate on intent infrastructure, making it easier for all participants to adopt and scale?
The Open Intents Framework is a modular, open-source framework for building and deploying intent product experiences. Instead of building intents infrastructure from scratch, developers can leverage a suite of modular abstractions - including a solver and composable smart contracts - to customize and deploy intent-based protocols with ease.
By modularizing key components of the intents stack, such as solving and settlement, the Open Intents Framework gives developers the flexibility to mix-and-match parts that are best suited to their specific needs, without being locked into a single vendor.
<aside> 🔑 Production-Ready ERC-7683
ERC-7683 standardizes how intents are created, executed, and settled to improve the cross-chain user experience across Ethereum. This standard has widespread support from the Ethereum community including ecosystem leaders like Vitalik Buterin.
Open Intents Framework contains an open ERC-7683 Reference Implementation anyone can adapt and start building with today. This complements Across Protocol’s recent release of their mainnet ERC-7683 contracts. Both implementations demonstrate that standardized intents are ready for users in production - with the diversity a decentralized ecosystem like Ethereum demands.
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The Open Intents Framework is made up of several key components, with initial implementations available in the Github repo:
<aside> 📖 Open-Source Solver Implementation: A TypeScript application designed to monitor onchain events and process intents accordingly. While most solvers today rely on custom infrastructure tailored to specific intent systems, this shared reference solver provides protocol-independent features—such as indexing, transaction submission, and rebalancing—which anyone can adapt and customize to their specific implementation’s needs. This implementation complements Across Protocol’s existing reference relayer, bringing client diversity to solver codebases.
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