Apps, Markets and a Full Intent-Driven Stack

Intent engineering is more than an interaction pattern; it offers a way to think about system architecture. This section traces the shift from point‑to‑point, execution‑centric integrations to brokered, market‑mediated coordination and details the components required for a fully intent‑driven stack.

_{1. From Direct to Brokered Integration}

Execution‑driven apps couple directly to downstream programs and infrastructure in a tightly coupled call chain: one component invokes another and then integrates the result. The pattern scales linearly with integrations and bakes domain knowledge into each call site.

Intent‑driven systems shift to brokered integration: applications submit desired outcomes, and solver markets broker counterparties, optimize routes, and finalize settlement. Event streams rather than synchronous calls link each step, giving every participant greater agency:

• Users can express superlatives: “lowest fee”, “fastest finality”, “highest yield”, and let competition determine the concrete path.

• Wallets and UI integrators translate human goals into machine readable intents and propagate to aligned downstream market operators.

• Solvers focus on narrow competency, participate in any intent market without bespoke integrations and cooperate in real time, covering each other’s skill gaps.

• Infrastructure vendors offer promises over future settlement as service intents, earn reputation and fees.

_{2. Intent Markets and Solver Markets}

Within an intent‑driven system, a market is an on‑chain venue defined by three pillars:

• Intent standard – the schema every intent must follow.

• Market structure – how intent publishers and solvers discover each other, how solutions are matched with intents, and ranked to be cleared.

• Settlement conditions – the verification requirements that release funds once an intent is fulfilled.

A market may expose multiple entry points: on‑chain, off‑chain, or a combination, depending on its structure. Simple, first‑come‑first‑served or fixed‑price venues can operate entirely on‑chain, whereas more sophisticated formats such as auctions or RFQs blend on‑chain settlement with off‑chain negotiation to balance order‑flow visibility, fairness, censorship resistance and cost.

Terminology is vantage‑point dependent. Intent publishers experience a solver market: a network of specialized agents competing to satisfy their request. Solvers observe an intent market: a live order book of opportunities priced by attached incentives. Economically and technically, they are two faces of the same protocol primitive.

_{3. Automatons and Intent Applications}

Markets themselves can become composable primitives for intent-driven applications. Khalani implements intent-driven applications as automatons: on‑chain state machines that:

1. Monitor external signals (on‑chain events, oracle feeds, off‑chain service hooks).

2. Publish intents when trigger conditions fire.

3. Verify settlement transactions before accepting the resulting state transition.

Example – Multi‑chain borrow optimizer. An automaton ingests rate feeds from lending protocols on three chains, publishes a refinance intent when a cheaper venue appears, and atomically rolls debt using solver‑supplied bridges and proofs. Risk limits and LTV caps remain invariant throughout.

Because each sub‑intent clears in its respective market, the automaton inherits best‑available execution without embedding any bridge, DEX, or proof logic. Markets coordinate; the automaton orchestrates.

_{4. Toward a Full Intent-driven Stack}

A full intent-driven stack generalizes the coordination pattern: every layer of the application pipeline - user interaction, capital deployment, interoperability, and automation - is mediated by markets where intents meet specialized solvers.

Intent markets replace hard-coded call-graphs with brokered exchange. Users declare desired outcomes; solvers compete to satisfy them; settlement contracts release value only when the declared invariants hold. Long-running controllers (“automatons”) watch on-chain and off-chain events, publish intents, and verify solver solutions before committing state transitions.

Developers compose these automatons into policy graphs: if risk > x then refinance, if spread opens then rebalance, creating self-adjusting strategies that inherit market-priced execution and trust. Each market formalizes three pillars: intent expressions, market structure, settlement conditions, making it a pluggable primitive. A liquidity automaton can send order-flow to multiple execution markets; an interoperability automaton can auction the same proof obligation across competing trust vendors.

Khalani is building infrastructure to unlock the full spectrum of intent-driven architecture. The long-term vision is a permissionless ecosystem of composable markets where

• Users receive execution that is continuously optimized to the most competitive liquidity sources.

• Capital reallocates itself in real time, reacting to on-chain and off-chain signals without manual intervention.

• Interoperability extends across chains and off-chain domains through intent-level settlement rather than bespoke bridges.

• Solver networks self organize around declared specializations, with collaboration and fee-splitting emerging organically from market incentives

The result is an adaptive ecosystem in which optimization, coordination, and automation are properties of the market itself, not bespoke integrations.