Ethereal Ventures
Today, users face opaque, complex, and inflexible ways of operating with most public blockchains. They must navigate multiple websites and wallets to conduct basic transactions, adding more potential for human error, more fees incurred, and more wait times with each step.
What if the user could, instead, express a desired outcome - however complex - from a single interface? What if that user was also able to express something more powerful such as a multi-step conditional request to an AI agent, and not worry at all about how it's completed - such as this scenario involving a trade:
In these cases, the user’s creativity could be leveraged instead of hampered, and we think Khalani is the key to unlocking this future.
Over the last few years, there has been a movement toward “intent-based architectures” to improve the on-chain transacting experience. With intents, users can express exactly what they wish to do across one or more hops without necessarily giving preference to a particular method of execution or source of liquidity.
The nomenclature of an intent has taken many shapes over time, such as an RFQ or limit order, but we believe the difference is the evolution toward much more general-purpose intents beyond buying/selling an asset at a particular price.
When you call a taxi from a rideshare service, you aren’t specifying the make and model of the car along with a specific route – you’re instead specifying your destination and selecting your most desired rate. With intents, instead of authorizing smart contracts, users instead authorize an expressed outcome as they typically do on traditional platform, and give this to a “solver” to do it for them. A “solver” is a stakeholder that competes to receive the intent, fulfill it, and charge a small fee. We can think of drivers in this rideshare example as the “solver.” Intents act as a way to remove any specificity requirements when transacting, and instead pass on the work to solve any form of request in more flexible and efficient ways, across any domain, to a specialist.
Currently, we face two emerging challenges in this new mode of operation:
Users can’t create generalized and expressive intents, and
Solvers face significant frictions such as capital inefficiency when serving multi-chain orders, a limited ability to service multiple intents simultaneously, and more.
What if there was a marketplace where anyone could be a “solver” by fulfilling incoming orders and get paid for it (similar to how DeFi and AMMs democratized liquidity provisioning)? What if there was a marketplace where anyone could participate in verifying these orders are correctly matched with the algorithm, and share in the fee outcome?
We think Khalani is critical in solving these problems and unlocking the next phase of intents.
Khalani is creating the building blocks for unifying solvers, solver networks, and intent applications
Users of dapps can better express intents.
For users, Khalani’s goal is to make the intents experience seamless. Users that wish to declare as expressive of an intent as they wish can now do so, and know that there is an efficient network of solvers ready and able to handle their requests. Instead of previously trying to stitch together complex transactions, users can now outsource this effort in a much more seamless way.
Dapps can send user’s intents to Khalani to be fulfilled.
Dapps can now enable users to have less of a flat transaction experience and give them preference in defining their desired outcomes. These applications can also easily plug into Khalani’s platform for solver networks to help users leverage the most ideal transaction routing and execution with minimized MEV issues. This also saves them the immense effort of building and maintaining in-house specialized and custom solver offerings, and avoiding centralization pressures by signing deals with one solver at a time.
Solvers can coordinate to maximize matching efficiency and rewards for all parties involved.
Anyone can participate in the network and become a solver. These entities collaborate with others in the network to share in the fees, decentralize the economy and add increased resiliency, and increase the ability to handle more expressive intents. Khalani removes the barriers to creating new solvers, and does so in a way that decreases the potential for monopolizing groups to commandeer the solver landscape. Centralization becomes less of a concern, and solvers in the network share more in the financial return provided for solving an ever-increasing amount of expressed intents.
Developers can become algorithm-writers to solve intents and be rewarded.
Solvers will have access to a much bigger pool of intents to fill, maximizing the opportunity for all. This will create a more efficient market that is simultaneously better for the user (via lower fees) and empower algorithm writers who can earn more against this consolidated order flow.
Solver networks must be collaborative instead of competitive, leaving little room for the erosion of trust in the transaction supply chain and allowing information to flow freely to the right parties to be acted upon. Any user seeking to express intents across the space across multiple dapps and multiple domains should be able to be as expressive as they wish and not encounter issues with resolution. These users should be able to tap into a collective source of solvers within any application, with all parties seeking to maximize efficiency, and with open participation at its core.
To achieve this, Khalani is building the full stack of necessary components to power a new intents-driven world.
The first thing to address is ensuring that any application seeking to enable intent-driven interactions can package these requests in a standard format that solvers can interpret and process. For onboarded solvers and intent-centric platforms and applications, Khalani is building an intent compatibility layer to enable applications to formally specify/platforms to bridge their intended user experience and intent formats in a manner that solvers in Khalani’s network can process and collaboratively handle.
To both represent these intents as their own type expression and formally specify them, Khalani is also working on Axi and an associated virtual machine called the Common Knowledge Machine (CKM). Axi is a new language and runtime meant to create these modular intents that solvers in the network can handle. The CKM will not just be for hosting specifications for intents, but also will facilitate the orchestration of solutions and verify the completion of expressed intent requirements. More interestingly, this can also help create a new set of financial primitives and wrappers representing fulfilled and unfulfilled user intents, optimization problems as well as solver configurations.
Finally, Khalani’s settlement layer will enable atomic and multi-domain settlements, completing the chain from expression to resolution.
Intents are one of the largest unlocks in the space for all parties across the transaction supply chain; where transactions simply become requests with user-defined conditions, and outcome efficiency is maximized for all involved.
Expressing, solving, and validating intents will continue to grow significantly as an important cornerstone of transacting, and we’re excited to support Kevin and Tannr and join them on this journey to build Khalani. They have the right combination of drive and experience to truly change how we transact and build a more collaborative foundation for an intent-driven future.
***
Certain information contained in here may have been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by EV. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, EV has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by EV. (An offering to invest in an EV fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by EV, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Ethereal Ventures (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for EV to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://etherealventures.com/portfolio/.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://etherealventures.com/disclosures for additional important information.
