From Intent Trading to DeFAI: A New Trend in the Web3 Wave

In early 2025, the results of the Solana AI hackathon were announced, attracting over 400 projects to participate. After fierce competition, the DeFAI project The Hive (BUZZ) won the championship, with a prize of up to $60,000.

The Hive is a modular and interoperable DeFi Agent network built on Solana. It employs a Swarm architecture that can automatically handle complex DeFi operations such as trading, staking, and lending through users' chat commands. The developers of this project have achieved notable results in several artificial intelligence-related competitions.

The success of The Hive has sparked a boom in the DeFAI sector, with the sector's market value reaching as high as $2.7 billion before falling back to $800 million. The DeFAI concept aims to simplify the complex processes of DeFi through AI technology, allowing regular users to easily access DeFi services.

The Evolution from Intent Trading to DeFAI

As early as 2023, the combination of AI and "intent trading" has become a hot topic in the blockchain community. "Intent" is a set of declarative constraints that allows users to delegate the creation of transactions to a specialized network of third-party participants while retaining full control over the process.

Taking a cross-chain transaction as an example, users need to connect to multiple networks, select a cross-chain bridge, decide on the transaction assets, and compare the rates of different trading pools, among other things; this process is complex and time-consuming. With intent trading, users only need to express a simple intent, and the system can automatically complete all calculations and transactions.

However, building the intention layer faces many challenges, such as designing a suitable intention expression language and standardizing intention protocols. Multiple projects attempt to establish intention layers, but often require the introduction of specific domain languages, which impacts user experience.

The emergence of AI Agents provides a solution to this problem. AI Agents can understand users' natural language expressions, convert them into standard intent language, and communicate with solvers. As technology advances, AI Agents gradually replace traditional intent layers, giving rise 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. Among them, The Hive, as a free and open-source project, showcases the typical features of DeFAI.

The Hive provides a chat interface that supports multiple large language models. Users can express trading intentions in natural language, and the system will invoke the corresponding Agent to complete the operation. For example, users can easily conduct token swaps, analyze token trends, query DeFi knowledge, and more.

The architecture of The Hive includes several specialized Agents, such as Wallet Agent, Staking Agent, Market Agent, etc. The core logic is to analyze user input through LLM, select the appropriate Agent, and then organize the workflow through the AI Agent framework, ultimately returning the execution result to the user.

Summary

The emergence of DeFAI is expected to completely change the interaction paradigm of Web3. By providing a natural language interface, DeFAI greatly simplifies the complexity of DeFi operations and enhances the user experience. This innovation not only attracts blockchain professionals but also makes it easier for ordinary users to participate in the Web3 ecosystem.

With the continuous advancement of technology, DeFAI is expected to become a key factor in driving the large-scale adoption of Web3, creating real value for users and bringing tangible convenience. This trend indicates that Web3 is ushering in a new wave of development, which may fundamentally change the way we interact with decentralized financial systems.