Most decentralized apps are just UIs stapled onto a mempool.

And the mempool is where good products go to die.

Not because users are dumb. Not because builders are lazy. Because the mempool is the wrong primitive for almost everything we pretend we’re building. It is a public inbox where everyone can read your intent, copy your intent, front-run your intent, and then call the outcome “market efficiency.” If you were designing a financial system from scratch, you would not pick “shout your trade into a public square and pray” as the base layer.

We did it anyway, because it was the simplest thing that worked early.

Now we are paying for it.

The most important shift in crypto over the next few years is not going to be another VM, another rollup, another “faster finality” graph. It’s going to be a separation of concerns. The chain stops being the brain. It becomes the court.

Search happens in a competitive market. Settlement happens under objective rules.

That one sentence sounds philosophical. It is actually a hard engineering constraint. Optimal routing is expensive to compute and impossible to prove cheaply on-chain. Validity is cheap to verify on-chain. If you force the chain to do the searching, you either burn gas until the product collapses under its own cost, or you centralize the search behind a routing server and pretend it’s still decentralized because the final transaction lands on-chain.

In other words, you either die from gas, or die from hypocrisy.

This is why solver systems keep reappearing under different names. MEV infrastructure, intent-based swaps, RFQ systems, cross-chain fillers. Everyone eventually rediscovers the same architecture because there are not many ways to build a market that survives adversaries. You outsource computation. You keep enforcement on-chain. You make theft mechanically hard. You use competition to push execution quality up. You use verification to keep the competition honest.

The chain as verifier and executor, not the search engine.

That is not “off-chain is better.” That is “the right boundary.”

Now bring in the metaphor that actually explains why this matters.

A city does not function because everyone cooks in one kitchen.

A city works because it has a thousand kitchens.

Some are tiny. Some are industrial. Some are specialized. Some are cheap. Some are premium. The point is not that there are many kitchens. The point is that the city provides the substrate that makes them safe and interoperable: courts, contracts, enforcement, standards, roads, payments. Kitchens compete inside constraints. They do not compete by stealing from each other’s customers.

Crypto has been trying to run a city with one shared stove.

Every app is forced into the same execution lane, the same public ordering environment, the same adversarial auction for inclusion. So “composability” becomes “everyone fighting over the same scarce blockspace,” and “decentralization” becomes “the privilege of being sandwiched by strangers.”

The right future looks like a thousand kitchens, and a court system that makes trade predictable.

This is where Avalanche’s direction is more interesting than most people admit. The real contribution is not that you can launch yet another chain. It is that you can launch specialized execution environments and still talk between them natively. That is how you get to a world where the “kitchens” are separate machines with separate rules, but the “city” still exists as a connected economy.

ICM is the highway system.

But highways are not enough. Highways move messages. They do not define the meaning of trade. You can connect a thousand chains and still have a thousand incompatible ways to express intents, a thousand incompatible settlement checks, a thousand incompatible assumptions about who is allowed to execute what.

So you end up with fragmentation disguised as modularity.

Commonware is the other half of the puzzle, and the critique is symmetric. Toolkits and primitives are the honest response to the fact that generic stacks force weird tradeoffs on specialized applications. The “anti-framework” instinct is correct. If you are building a serious matching engine, or a serious settlement system, you do not want to inherit a grab bag of assumptions from a general-purpose chain.

But toolkits do not create coordination.

Toolkits create options. Options create forks. Forks create a hundred near-identical systems that never converge on a standard, because everyone is “customizing” at the exact layer that users and wallets need to understand.

So Avalanche gives you highways and cities. Commonware gives you kitchen parts. The missing piece is the blueprint that turns “many kitchens” into an actual city with enforceable rules of trade.

That missing piece is an intent settlement grammar.

Not a router.

A settlement spec.

Most DEX routers are not valuable. They are math exercises that get forked in a weekend. If your product is “we search paths better,” someone will copy it, run it on a server, and win on distribution. What becomes valuable is the court system. The part that many actors can plug into without trusting you, because it enforces outcomes under constraints and makes theft impossible by construction.

That’s the difference between an app feature and infrastructure.

So what is an intentful VM, really, once you strip away the vibes.

An intentful VM is a system where the primary object is not “a transaction,” but “an outcome request under constraints.”

It is not “swap exact in along this path.”

It is “convert this amount to that token, at least this minimum, before this deadline, with these venue constraints.”

Then, crucially, the system does not ask the user to supply the steps. It asks the market to supply the steps.

Solvers compete to propose execution plans. The chain verifies the plans are valid. The chain executes the winning plan atomically.

That is it.

The whole thing reduces to one architectural confession: you do not put pathfinding inside the consensus-critical environment. You turn pathfinding into a competitive market. And you restrict that market with a verifier that enforces objective safety constraints.

If you want to be authentic and decentralized about this, you make two choices that most people avoid because they are uncomfortable.

First, you make solvers permissionless. Anyone can compute plans. Anyone can submit plans. In the extreme, the user’s own client can compute a plan and submit it. That is decentralization in the only sense that matters: no trusted routing server.

Second, you make verification brutally strict. The chain does not “trust the solver.” It trusts invariants. It trusts that if the plan violates constraints, it fails. It trusts that if a hop underdelivers, it reverts. It trusts that if the plan tries to touch a malicious pool, it is rejected. It trusts that token continuity holds, that the final token matches, that the minimum is met, that nothing leaks.

This is not hard to describe. It is hard to implement without sloppiness.

Here is the concrete sketch, without turning it into documentation.

You define an intent envelope: tokenIn, tokenOut, amountIn, minOut, deadline, recipient, and optional constraints like maximum hops or allowed venues.

You define an execution plan: a list of swap steps with exact pool addresses, token indices, exact amounts per hop, and per-step minimums.

Then settlement is a court proceeding with a checklist.

Does the plan match the intent envelope. Same tokens, same amount, same deadline, same recipient.

Are the pools canonical. Either whitelisted or provably created by a factory. No arbitrary external contracts.

Do the token indices actually correspond to the token chain. Step 1 outputs token X, step 2 must consume token X, and so on. No gaps. No ambiguity.

Does every step respect minimum outputs. Defense in depth. Not just a global minimum.

Does the final output meet the intent’s minimum. If not, revert.

If any swap fails, revert.

No partial fills unless explicitly allowed by the intent. No “best effort.” No hidden side effects. Atomic or nothing.

That’s Phase 1. User chooses a plan, chain verifies and executes. It is surprisingly decentralized, because anyone can compute the plan. The chain does not care who computed it.

Phase 2 is where it becomes credibly neutral at scale: you add a permissionless plan auction, typically commit-reveal.

Why commit-reveal. Because in a public auction, revealing your plan early invites copying. The point of solvers is competition. If copying is free, competition collapses into parasitism. So you let solvers commit a hash, then reveal after a window, then select the winner by an objective score.

The score can be blunt: maximize output net of solver fee and a gas penalty. You do not need to overthink it. You need it to be predictable and not gameable.

Then you settle.

If you add bonding and slashing later, you are not doing theater. You are pricing the privilege of participating at scale. You are raising the cost of spam, griefing, and repeated failure. You are building a market with rules, not a mempool with vibes.

That is the shape of an intentful execution machine.

Now, the “why should this exist” question, answered as if we were adults.

Because it changes the unit of product.

A router is a feature. A settlement spec is a primitive.

A router helps one venue execute trades. A settlement spec can become a shared court that multiple venues and wallets rely on, because it creates a safe interface between user outcomes and execution competition.

This has immediate effects.

Execution quality improves, because solvers compete.

On-chain cost decreases, because the chain verifies instead of searching.

UX improves, because users specify what they want, not how to do it.

The system becomes more decentralized, not less, because you remove the trusted routing API and replace it with a permissionless solver layer whose outputs are constrained by on-chain verification.

And specialization becomes tractable. You can have app-specific execution environments without losing connectivity, because the interface that matters is the intent envelope and the settlement grammar, not “everyone shares one mempool.”

There are real downsides, and you should say them explicitly because pretending they don’t exist is how crypto loses credibility.

Solver systems shift power toward solvers unless you design entry costs to be low and verification to be strict. Auctions add latency unless you let users bypass them for direct settlement. The system is adversarial by nature, because you are literally creating a marketplace for execution, which is also a marketplace for manipulation if you get the edges wrong.

If you do not want to think adversarially, do not build this.

But if you do, this is one of the few architectures that plausibly scales without turning into a centralized routing company.

Now, your stablecoin and FX question.

Stablecoinization is the accelerant, not the thesis.

Stablecoins give you a common unit of account and a set of deeply traded pairs. That reduces routing complexity and increases the value of best execution. If most value moves in stablecoins, then a standardized intent settlement layer begins to look like a universal liquidity fabric, because the dominant user request becomes “move value from A to B under constraints,” and the system can source liquidity across venues and domains.

That can resemble an FX layer.

But it will not magically become “universal forex” just because you wrote a good contract. Real FX is distribution, compliance, and issuer risk. Stablecoins are political objects. Your system can be the execution and routing layer on top of them, but it does not abolish the issuer. It gives the issuer and the market a better microstructure.

Which is still huge.

So what is missing in Avalanche and Commonware, in one sentence.

Avalanche has the highways. Commonware has the parts. Neither gives you the shared grammar of intent settlement that wallets and apps can adopt as a standard without trusting anyone.

That is the gap.

The gap is not “another DEX.”

The gap is a reference intent settlement spec that is simple enough to become boring.

A canonical intent envelope. A canonical execution plan format. A minimal settlement engine with ruthless verification. A permissionless solver template with commit-reveal. Optional bonding and slashing. A client-side solver reference so decentralization is not performative.

If you build that, you are not building a feature. You are carving out a new layer that others can depend on.

And that is why it can be “big enough.”

Not because it will get you likes. Because it is the kind of artifact that changes how people build: it turns “we need a router server” into “we can outsource execution to a market and trust the chain to enforce constraints.”

The prestige comes from making the boundary obvious in hindsight.

Most people in crypto can write philosophy. Very few can turn philosophy into a minimal spec that survives adversaries.

If you want the correct next move, it is not another manifesto and it is not a massive L1. It is one clean, auditable Phase 1 settlement engine that makes theft impossible, paired with one essay that states the thesis with no apologies, and then an incremental path to permissionless solver competition.

Not because the world needs more writing.

Because the writing becomes true only when the court exists.