From Intent Trading to DeFAI: A Major Breakthrough in Web3 User Experience

In January 2025, the results of the Solana AI hackathon were announced, with over 400 projects competing. The DeFAI project The Hive stood out, winning the championship and a prize of $60,000.

The Hive is a modular and interoperable DeFi Agent network built on Solana. It utilizes a Swarm architecture to automatically handle complex DeFi operations through chat commands. The success of The Hive has reignited the craze for the DeFAI sector, which at one point reached a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, currently falling back to around $800 million.

The concept of DeFAI originates from the combination of decentralized finance ( DeFi ) and artificial intelligence ( AI ), aiming to simplify the complex processes of DeFi and enhance the user experience for ordinary users.

The Evolution from Intent Trading to DeFAI

As early as 2023, discussions around AI and "intended trading" have become a hot topic in the blockchain community. "Intention" is a set of declarative constraints that allows users to delegate the creation of transactions to a specialized network of third-party participants while maintaining complete control over the process.

Taking a cross-chain trading scenario as an example: A user wants to buy a certain token on Solana using USDC on Ethereum. In the traditional way, the user needs to perform multiple complex operations, including connecting to different networks, selecting cross-chain bridges, comparing transaction pool fees, and so on. With intent trading, the user only needs to express an intention like "use 1,000 USDC to buy as many of a certain token as possible, at least 30,000." The system can automatically complete all complex calculations and trading steps.

However, building the intention layer faces many challenges, such as the design of the intention expression language and protocol specifications. Multiple projects attempt to build the intention layer, but often require the introduction of specific domain languages, which affects user experience.

The rise of AI Agents provides a new approach to solving this problem. AI Agents can understand users' natural language expressions, convert them into standard intent language, and communicate with solvers. With the development of technology, AI Agents have even begun to replace traditional intent layers, directly acting as solvers, which has led to the concept of DeFAI.

Functions and Implementation of DeFAI

Currently, there are several DeFAI applications on the market, such as Griffain, Hey Anon, Orbit, The Hive, and Neur. Taking The Hive as an example, it offers a chat interface that supports multiple LLMs and integrates features such as token trends, staking, trading, and knowledge.

Users can express trading intentions through natural language, such as "Swap 1000 USDC to a certain token on Solana." The system will call the corresponding Agent to complete wallet connection, transaction signing, and other operations. In addition, The Hive also supports functions such as token analysis, market trend prediction, and DeFi knowledge inquiry.

From a technical implementation perspective, The Hive defines multiple specialized Agents, such as Wallet Agent, Staking Agent, Market Agent, etc. The core logic of the system analyzes user input through LLM, selects the appropriate Agent, and organizes the workflow through the AI Agent framework, ultimately returning the result to the user.

Summary

Web3 has long faced the problem of poor user experience, hindering the widespread adoption of innovative applications such as DeFi. The introduction of "intent-based trading" provides a solution to improve user experience, and the emergence of DeFAI has further elevated this solution to new heights.

DeFAI utilizes AI technology to provide a natural language interface, greatly simplifying the complexity of DeFi operations and enhancing the user's on-chain experience. It is expected to fundamentally change the interaction paradigm of Web3, allowing users who are not very familiar with blockchain and DeFi to easily participate in the Web3 ecosystem.

With the continuous development and improvement of DeFAI technology, we can expect a qualitative leap in the Web3 user experience, paving the way for the widespread adoption of blockchain technology and decentralized applications.