Can ERC-7683 solve the inter-chain intent collaboration problem on Ethereum?

With the rise of various L2 and DeFi projects, Ethereum is facing an increasingly severe liquidity fragmentation problem. Assets and transactions are scattered across multiple platforms and protocols, lacking effective connections and interoperability, causing liquidity on each chain to operate only within isolated "small circles", exacerbating the overall fragmentation cost issue.

In 2024, over 100 new Ethereum chains will go live, which is like seeing a dazzling array of products in a shopping mall, but needing to settle in different currencies from various countries. To address this challenge, the Ethereum Foundation announced the Open Intents Framework on February 20, aimed at providing a "single-chain-like" seamless trading experience for Ethereum. The framework quickly gained support from over 50 protocols.

The Open Intents Framework consists of three core components:

1. Open-source solver: Written in TypeScript, it can monitor on-chain events and handle intents. It has protocol independence and supports features such as indexing, transaction submission, and rebalancing, allowing developers to customize it according to their needs.

2. Composable Smart Contracts: Based on the ERC-7683 standard, it defines the logic for interpreting, executing, and settling intents. It supports limit order trading and Hyperlane ISM settlement by default.

3. UI Templates: Provide pre-built, customizable user interface templates to make the intent products more accessible to end users.

ERC-7683 is a universal standard for cross-chain intentions on Ethereum, co-developed by Across and Uniswap Labs. It provides a unified, standardized framework for expressing and executing cross-chain operations, particularly between multiple L2 solutions and sidechains.

The core content of ERC-7683 includes:

1. Cross-chain order structure: Defines the format of cross-chain orders, ensuring consistency between different blockchains and platforms.

2. The ISettlementContract interface: standardizes the handling of the settlement process, allowing cross-chain transactions to flexibly execute settlements between different platforms.

3. Fulfil mechanism: Allows participants to compete in a shared network to complete cross-chain intentions, improving transaction efficiency.

4. Fill in the deadline: Mark the expiration time of the cross-chain intent to avoid long periods of invalid transaction waiting.

5. Order Data Types and Order Data: Use EIP-712 type hash to specify the structure and format of intent data, ensuring that transaction participants can accurately understand and execute cross-chain operations.

The main advantages of ERC-7683 lie in achieving seamless cross-chain interaction and enhanced governance capabilities. It simplifies the cross-chain operation process, lowers the technical threshold, and optimizes DAO governance in a multi-chain environment.

Whether it's Intent or DeFAI, they are essentially derivatives of the financial attributes of DeFi. The core issues that DeFi needs to address are scalability and liquidity. Intent aggregates liquidity through UNI and ERC-7683, while DeFAI achieves automated trading with the help of AI technology.

The core goal of Intent is to simplify user interaction through the "intention-driven transaction" mechanism, enhancing the usability of DeFi and trading efficiency. DeFAI utilizes AI technology to analyze market trends, optimize risk control, and provide decision support.

Although the increase in abstraction levels helps to address the issue of liquidity fragmentation, it is more important to optimize existing protocols and achieve ecosystem integration.

Uniswap plays a key role in the development of ERC-7683 for the following reasons:

1. Liquidity Advantages of Uniswap V4: The V4 version makes liquidity pool management more flexible and efficient, optimizing capital efficiency and reducing deployment and exchange costs.

2. The potential of Uniswap X: It is expected to further enhance cross-chain interoperability and may provide more efficient cross-chain asset exchange channels.

3. The implementation of the cross-chain protocol depends on: ERC-7683 may rely on the liquidity pools, automated market-making, and cross-chain trading capabilities provided by Uniswap, especially the support from Uniswap X and Unichain.

The actual significance of the intention is to inject new vitality into Uniswap, which is expected to trigger a new wave of DeFi frenzy. Through ERC-7683, Uniswap can achieve more efficient trading, create richer functions, and stronger cross-chain interoperability, and even introduce new incentive mechanisms or trading models to attract more users and liquidity.

If Uniswap V4 or Uniswap X introduces new smart contract logic or trading models at the protocol level, combined with ERC-7683, it will help improve cross-chain liquidity, reduce transaction costs, and increase more trading pairs and liquidity pools. These improvements will make Uniswap no longer just a liquidity-distributed AMM but an important practitioner of the "intention" concept.