dappOS: An Intention Execution Network Backed by Top Institutions

By Lawrence Lee, Mint Ventures

Since the development of the crypto economy, the infrastructure on the chain has been gradually improved, but the user experience is still in its early stages. After the user operation experience is improved, it is expected to attract more users to enter the chain ecosystem, which in turn promotes the further development of infrastructure and the enrichment of business forms, forming a ladder cloud effect of stepping on the left foot and the right foot. The "1995 moment" of crypto may depend on the emergence of a user-oriented killer application or operating system.

The Intention Track is working on this, changing the current on-chain operation logic of "assuming that users are experts" to "assuming that users are novices", hiding the complex operations and logic, and providing users with a simpler, more convenient,Safetyexperience. AI It can also help users achieve their intentions more easily.

This article focuses on the intention execution network dappOS that is backed by top institutions.

1. Intention: From usable to easy to use - Upgrading the encrypted on-chain experience

1.1 Encryption experience upgrade

In the DeFi Summer of 2020, people started toBlockchainLarge-scale commercial activities were carried out on the blockchain. Subsequently, commercial activities on the blockchain flourished. In addition to financial-related businesses, pan-entertainment NFT, games, and social networking were also developing vigorously. Currently, there are still more than 90 billion US dollars of various assets (excluding NFT assets) active in several mainstreamBlockchainAt the peak of the last bull market, the total assets were close to US$200 billion. The recent average daily trading volume has exceeded US$5 billion, and the average daily trading volume in March once exceeded US$10 billion, which is close to half of the daily trading volume of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Source: Deflama

Market participants vote with their own money, with "greater freedom and cheaper trust" (see "What is the underlying value of Web3 and how to use it for investment?")ofBlockchain, its potential to carry more commercial activity infrastructure is continuously being verified.

Despite the rapid development, this is still an emerging market that has been in existence for less than 7 years and has been in business for less than 4 years. We can still see many signs of "industry development in its early stages", such as the industry leaderBlockchain Solana still had a 30-hour downtime in February this year.BlockchainwalletUsers are still required to back up lengthy mnemonics or private keys. For example, currently, applications with truly sustainable business models on the chain still revolve around native assets on the chain. We have not seen an organic combination of pure off-chain business and blockchain.

Looking back at the development of the industry in the past few years, Ethereum or Solana are intended to carry more intelligent human business activities.contractPublic chains have made great progress in the past few years, and their market value has continued to rise.AvailabilityThere is a clear direction and achievable path to solve the problem: Ethereum’s path is to the left, choosing the Rollup path and gradually deriving the modular concept, and mainstream blockchains such as Arbitrum and Base. L2 Flourishing development, various L2 There are also many dedicated application chains for L3 and L4. Solana is on the right side, optimizing performance on a single chain, with an average TPS (transactions per second) exceeded 2,000, and new users and new assets on the network continued to emerge.

However, inEase of useAt the blockchain level, we must admit that the overall experience is still relatively poor. The current experience may be acceptable for current users on the blockchain, who only have a few million daily active addresses (even fewer active users), but if we want to introduce hundreds of millions or even billions of people to achieve "massive adoption" of the blockchain, the current experience is far from enough.

The "intent-centric" concept proposed by Paradigm in July 2023 web3 The experience upgrade has been promoted to a separate track, the intention track.

Simply put, "intent" refers to the user's real needs. For example, "buy $1,000 worth of Meme Coin $BRETT" is an intention.intention, may require multipletradeIn addition to the complexity of the requirements themselves, if there are more constraints, there will be more transactions corresponding to one intention.

In the above example, if I don’t have enough stablecoins on the Base chain, but only on the Ethereum network, then I need to have:

1. On the Ethereum mainnet, exchange 1005 USDC for ETH (because the Base chain does not support the use of USDC as gas)

2. Cross-chain ETH to Base network.

3. Use 1000U worth of ETH to buy $BRETT

There are three transactions. And there is a lot of knowledge behind this series of operations. For example, I need to know which cross-chain bridges are available for Ethereum->Base, and which bridge can get the best rate and speed for my current cross-chain assets; I need to understand the RPC information of the Base chain and how to use it in mywalletI need to know whether there is a good enough transaction aggregator on the Base chain to help me get the best price, and if not, which Dex is the main liquidity of BRETT, etc. For a veteran in on-chain operations, the above operations may not be complicated, because a lot of knowledge has been internalized through repeated repetitions, but the whole process is indeed difficult for newcomers. They may have to refer to a tutorial to complete the above process step by step.

To some extent, the current on-chain experience is similar to the experience of people interacting with computers before the advent of Windows 95. At that time, computers had already demonstrated powerful computing and file processing capabilities, but the interaction with computers was mainly carried out through the CMD command prompt. For technicians who are familiar with the underlying logic of computers and have sufficient experience and knowledge, this way of interaction is simple, direct and efficient. Even today, there are still many technical geeks who like to interact with computers in this way. But for ordinary users who are new to it, the difficulty of the whole process is at the "nightmare" level. At that time, personal computers needed to be accompanied by a thick operating manual to guide users to complete various operations.

However, after the release of Windows 95 operating system in 1995, the above situation changed completely. After the computer was turned on, it directly entered the graphical operating system (GUI), and users could complete various operations by clicking the mouse. At the same time, the emergence of browsers greatly reduced the threshold for users to enter the Internet. From command character operation to graphical operating system, in the eyes of some people, it is only a slight improvement in experience. The graphical operating system only packages the underlying command character operation to a certain extent, turning it into a method suitable for ordinary users to understand. Compared with the improvement of hardware performance such as processors, it may not seem to be such a technological advancement. But in fact, it was Windows 95 that lowered the threshold for ordinary users to use computers, which promoted the rapid popularization of personal computers among the general public. The increasing number of computer shipments in turn reduced the cost of Intel CPUs, further improving the performance and experience of personal computers. Finally, the left foot stepped on the right foot and the ladder cloud vertical effect appeared. The penetration rate of computers and the Internet increased rapidly around the world, bringing about the subsequent Internet wave.

Global Internet usage rate Source: World Bank

Looking back, it was this "tiny improvement in experience" that profoundly changed the life experience of the general public and created most of the great companies on our planet in the past three decades, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and NVIDIA. This is also known as the "1995 moment" in the development of the Internet and personal computers, and is used by later generations to figuratively describe the beginning of the explosion.

Although the BTC ETF has been successfully approved, the entire crypto industry has received positive recognition from the government, and has attracted many users to enter the crypto industry. However, the vast majority of users are still only in the centralizedexchangeholdcryptocurrency, the blockchain they use is still just a simple transfer. Judging from the popularity of on-chain applications, the "1995 moment" of encryption has not yet arrived, and we may need to wait for a killer user-oriented application or operating system to appear.Projects within the intended track will most likely facilitate the arrival of this moment.

1.2 Intent:AIOne of the best use cases for +Crypto

AI has developed rapidly in the past few years. Many people believe that 2023 is the "1995 moment" of AI. ChatGPT and other chatbots based on large language models have begun to enter the lives of ordinary people. The capital market and the general public have paid unprecedented attention to AI. At present, the improvement of the capabilities of large language models is far from a bottleneck. We don’t know to what extent we can improve the capabilities of AI, and we don’t know how AI will reshape our industries. With the release of GPT-4o, the time for AI to fully come into our lives seems to have been quickly moved forward.

The combination with AI is one of the important topics in the crypto space in the past year.TokenThe increase is amazing. The author believes that if we start from business logic, blockchain AI agents will be one of the best use cases for the combination of AI and encryption, which will also make it easier for people to achieve their intentions.

This is because the rules on the chain are determined manually, the boundaries of the rules are clear, and there is no black box.

Source: Mint Ventrues

In this case, as long as there is enough information input, AI will "always be able to find the optimal solution faster than humans" in solving specific problems, which can help people achieve their intentions more conveniently and quickly.

2. Project Details

2.1 Business Introduction

dappOS is an intent execution network. For users, they only need to provide their intent to dappOS, and dappOS is responsible for the interaction with each dAPP and each public chain behind the scenes to complete the transactions required by the user's intent. In the example we mentioned above, the user only needs to publish the intention of "buying $1,000 worth of Meme Coin $BRETT", and all transactions involved are completed by dappOS driving the relevant parties. In other words, users only need to connect to dappOS, and the connection of all public chains and dAPPs is carried out by dappOS.

It is not difficult to see the ambition of dappOS from the name. They want to become the OS (Operation System) of dAPP, just like Windows 95 became the OS of computers.

Within dappOS, they built an open two-sided market with the developer side (demand side) facing users on one end and the service node (supply side) providing intent execution services on the other end. dappOS uses the OMS (Optimistic Minimum Staking) mechanism to ensure service quality.

dappOS architecture source

The main roles and functions within the dappOS system are as follows:

1. User: Publish intent. User publishes intent based on the intent framework provided by dappOS.

2. Service providers: perform various services. They stake a certain amount of dappOS TokenAfter using it as collateral, you can start to receive user intentions and earn income.

3. Execution validator: Responsible for verifying the execution of the service node. If the service node fails to complete the task as required, the validator has the right to vote to punish the service node.

4. Matcher: Responsible for matching user intent with service providers.

During the specific execution process, the user will send the intention to the matcher through front-end interaction, and the matcher will then ask the associated service providers for their quotes for this intention and return the quotes to the user. If the user thinks the quotes are reasonable, he or she can choose the service provider who wants to perform the task, then sign the intention and transfer all the resources needed to realize the intention to the service provider, who will then execute the user's intention.

After the specified time of the task, many validators will verify whether the task was successfully executed. If someone finds that the task was not successfully executed, they can challenge the network, and then the validators will reach a consensus through POS voting. If the consensus result is that the task failed, the service provider will need to use the collateral to compensate the user.

In addition to the above functions, dappOS uses an optimistic minimum staking (OMS) mechanism, which allows service nodes to provide services to users by staking funds slightly higher than the total value of unfinished intended tasks (minimum), while allowing service nodes to continue to perform tasks before performing result verification (optimistic). When the verifier successfully verifies the service result of the service node, the service node can successfully obtain the task income; if the verifier finds that the task has failed, the system will punish the service node, and the user can also get pre-specified compensation.

The OMS mechanism hopes to improve user task efficiency, service provider funding efficiency and the overall system efficiency.SafetyA good balance is achieved between operations, while ensuring the successful completion of user tasks, the capital cost of service providers is reduced as much as possible. At the same time, through the intention execution network, ordinary users can also enjoy the execution cost and efficiency of professional service agencies. On the one hand, professional service providers have many execution channels that ordinary users do not have: for example, extremely low handling feesexchange VIP accounts, aggregation of multiple transactions to save gas, better on-chain anti-MEV capabilities, etc. In addition, competition among service providers will reduce service prices to the optimal level so that users can profit. The dappOS intention execution network can empower the operation channels of institutions and large users to ordinary users, allowing ordinary users to obtain institutional-level costs and speeds.

DappOS currently has 3 intent frameworks:

1. Intentional trading: helping users achieve optimal spot trading costs

2. Intent assets: Universal assets within the dappOS system, which can homogenize a series of equivalent assets within the system while taking into account both the interest-bearing and transaction properties of assets.

3. Intentional dAPP interaction: Our previous example of "purchasing $1,000 worth of Meme Coin $BRETT" can be achieved through this framework. This framework can help users connect to dAPP more easily and quickly help users bridge assets.

Intent assets largely smooth out the differences between different chains and between homogeneous assets, thus eliminating a lot of cross-chain or homogeneous asset exchange work, thereby greatly improving user experience. Let's take stablecoins and ETH, the two most common assets in the crypto world, as examples:

• For stablecoins, users can deposit USDT and USDC from any chain into their dappOS accounts to obtain intentUSD. intentUSD can be deposited into various stablecoin projects to automatically generate interest, and the underlying flow is clearly visible to users, ensuring transparency while obtaining benefits; at the same time, it ensures convenience in use: when a user needs to withdraw USDT to recharge into a centralized exchange, he can directly withdraw intentUSD; when a user needs to recharge USDC to GMX as a margin, he can also directly withdraw intentUSD.

• 对于 ETH 而言，用户存入的 ETH 变为 intentETH 后同样可以自动生息。同时 intentETH 可以在任何一条链上购入资产，比如用户可以随时使用 intentETH 来购买 Polygon 链上的 $QUICK，或者购买 Avalanche 链上的 $JOE。同样，intentETH 也可以随时依据用户需求，存入 Arbitrum 链上的 Aave 进行借贷服务，或者作为以太坊及 L2 网络的 gas。

Source: OKX Ventures, rwa.xyz, Statista, 21.co

As can be seen, the intent asset:

• Taking into account both profitability and convenience, sDAI can obtain stable RWA income but liquidity is difficult to support large-scale transactions, while USDT, USDC, etc. have a wide range of use cases but cannot generate income. IntentUSD can take both points into account.

• Solving the conversion friction problem of similar assets, intentETH can switch between ETH (mainnet), ETH (Arbitrum), stETH, and aETH without any loss, without paying any cost.

Compared with other typical income-generating assets, intention assets also have obvious relative advantages:

• LST or LRT assets: intentETH does not require lock-up and has better liquidity

• sDAI and other RWA stablecoins: intentUSD can be used for transactions at any time

• Current financial products of centralized exchanges such as Binance: Intended assets can be easily used in various dApps

• Lending platforms such as Aave and other DeFi yield platforms: Intended assets can be seamlessly transferred across chains and used for transactions at any time

In summary, the experience provided by Intent Assets is to some extent similar to the "Yu'ebao" service we experienced in web2. It makes a new trade-off in the profitability, usability, and convenience of assets and provides an excellent experience.

A better experience is likely to be the key factor in the crypto economy to introduce hundreds of millions or even billions of users. At present, the crypto economy is still in its early stages of development. As pioneers, we may have become accustomed to the coexistence of USDT and USDC, and have mastered the skills of how to exchange between the two at the lowest cost, and which asset should be used in which scenario. But in the real world, no one thinks that we should accept "JPMorgan dollars" and "Citi dollars" at the same time, even though the two are very similar analogies. For the new generation of crypto-economy experiencers, they may not need to understand "what is the difference between L1 and L2" and "how should I cross the chain" these "technical details", just like they don't need to understand how the interbank clearing system works, but only need to realize their needs more directly. The huge experience gap in the middle is exactly what the projects in the intention track want to work hard to make up.

2.2 Business Status and Partners

Due to the particularity of the business model, most of dappOS's business is carried out in cooperation with other dAPPs. At present, dappOS has reached cooperation with many dAPPs.

In January 2023, dappOS and perpetualcontractThe platform GMX has reached a cooperation and launched the front-end gmx.dappOS.com. GMX users can use dappOS to further simplify the transaction process.Xiaobai Navigation时可以降低 20% 的费用支出，并且允许用户使用任何代币来支付费用。在今年的 1 月 -3 月周活跃用户一度超过 6000，最近一段时间也保持 1000 左右的周活跃用户。同时获得了近 1.5 亿美元的交易量，高峰时期日交易量超过 1000 万美金。

Source: Dune

In addition, dappOS and public chains such as Avalanche zksync and polygon, as well as Quickswap, MakerDAO, Frax and other DeFi protocols have also reached cooperation.

Source: dappOS official website

2.3 Financing

DappOS has completed 3 rounds of financing in total.

In November 2022, dappOS was selected for Binance Labs' fifth season incubation program, and received Pre-Seed round of financing from Binance Labs on June 20, 2023, but the specific amount of financing was not announced.

On July 21, 2023, dappOS completed its seed round of financing with a valuation of US$50 million, led by IDG Capital and Sequoia China, with participation from OKX Ventures, HashKey Capital, KuCoin Ventures, TronDao, Gate Labs, Taihill Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Foresight Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Leland Ventures, etc.

On March 28, 2024, dappOS completed a $15.3 million Series A financing round with a valuation of $300 million. Polychain led the investment, and Nomad Capital, IDG, Flow Traders, IOBC, NGC, Amber Group, Uphonest, Taihill, Waterdrip, Bing Ventures, Metalpha, Spark Digital Capital, Web3Port Foundation and Satoshi Lab participated in the investment.

Overall, dappOS has an excellent investment background and has just completed a $15.3 million financing, so it has sufficient funds.

Conclusion

The intention track aims to enhance web3 user experience, thereby opening up web3 The "1995 moment" of the VC industry introduced massive adoption. The intention track has also been a hot track for VC investment in the past year, and many projects have also aligned their projects with the concept of intention.

However, the intention track is still in its infancy. Most of the projects in the track have not yet launched a complete product, and the business model is not very clear. Most of the products and mechanisms of the dappOS we wrote in this article have not yet been launched, and there is a lot of uncertainty in the future development of the track and the project.

For projects with relatively little short-term content but long-term narrative value, investment background and business development capabilities may be two important reference indicators.

dappOS's investment background includes top exchanges, traditional VCs and crypto VCs, and its investment lineup is luxurious; and the successful cooperation with a series of excellent DeFi projects such as GMX demonstrates dappOS's outstanding business expansion capabilities.

We will continue to pay attention to the future development of dappOS, which aims to become a leader in the intention track.

The article comes from the Internet:dappOS: An Intention Execution Network Backed by Top Institutions

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