TL;DR: Intents Protocol is creating an open, neutral commerce layer for the internet—similar to how SMTP became the foundational standard for email. Instead of tech giants controlling commercial intent data through surveillance-based advertising, we're building permissionless infrastructure where users own their shopping needs and sellers bid transparently to fulfill them.
By combining AI, blockchain, and open standards, we're enabling a new generation of commerce applications that work for users rather than advertisers. Our first dApp, Inomy, demonstrates how AI shopping assistants can operate on this user-owned foundation.
Every second, roughly $24,000 is generated by an invisible auction tracking your every digital move. Each click, pause, or search query reveals your intent—a clear signal of your wants and needs.
This collective human intent has become one of the 21st century's most valuable raw materials, with global digital ad revenue estimated at $780 billion in 2024. This staggering sum arises from packaging and reselling your digital footprints—your intent—to the highest commercial bidder, often without your explicit, ongoing consent for each transaction.
This relentless monetization of intent through advertising is not merely a business model; it's the economic engine of the current web, leading to several critical issues:
The Current System's Problems
Centralized Power & Surveillance: This advertising-centric model is the primary power source for many tech giants. For instance, firms like Google and Meta derive 80-90% of their revenue from advertising, and collectively with Amazon, they control over 60% of global digital ad spend.
Such financial reliance on advertising directly fuels pervasive online surveillance, including the tracking of user activity across myriad websites.
Skewed Value Exchange & User Dissatisfaction: Most mainstream app revenue models rely on user data monetization. Users, increasingly frustrated, are pushing back: 31.5% of global internet users now run ad-blocking tools, with 63% citing "too many ads" as the primary reason.
Furthermore, 91% of consumers feel ads are more intrusive than just a few years ago, highlighting a broken value exchange where users receive little more than irritation in return for their data.
Rising & Inefficient Business Costs: Businesses face ever-increasing customer acquisition costs (CAC), with some analyses indicating increases of over 50% in the past five years. Advertisers also grapple with systemic inefficiencies: in programmatic buying, as little as $0.36 of every dollar spent may reach the consumer due to fees and leakage.
Compounding this, an estimated $88 billion in global digital ad spend was lost to fraud in 2023, a figure forecast to hit $172 billion by 2028, while average ad prices across major platforms rose 21 percentage points year-over-year in Q1 2024.
Stifled Innovation: Developers often build within closed systems, their innovations dependent on the gatekeepers who control intent data. This overall imbalance, fueled by the lucrative trade in our digital intentions, profoundly shapes prices, privacy, and the direction of online innovation, often without us fully noticing.
Old search and links process
The AI Commerce Revolution
However, the landscape is changing. Artificial Intelligence is poised to fundamentally alter how we conduct transactions.
Projections suggest that by 2030, AI-driven agents could handle a substantial portion, potentially up to 40%, of all e-commerce discovery and negotiation. In the next five to ten years, expect conversational AI agents to act as personal digital negotiators, discussing prices, arranging deliveries, and managing support in real-time.
Commerce will feel less like scrolling through endless pages and more like instructing a capable, trusted assistant. This pivotal moment offers a chance to correct today's skewed incentives and build open infrastructure for an agent-driven, user-focused future.
The Technological Convergence
At the heart of this user-focused future lies a fundamental re-evaluation of digital ownership, specifically concerning the intent we generate online. This intent—the explicit and implicit expression of our needs, desires, and goals—has long been the internet's most valuable, yet most opaquely traded, core asset. The challenge has always been how to reclaim it.
For two decades, giving individuals true ownership over their digital intent seemed impractical; the necessary tools didn't exist. Three key technological shifts have now changed this reality:
Large Language Models (LLMs): LLMs are reshaping tech interaction. With well over a billion global active users now utilizing LLM-powered conversational interfaces, people can state needs naturally, enabling precise intent recognition. This moves beyond broad demographic targeting to clearly articulated desires. Concurrently, advertisers and sellers are actively seeking new avenues as traditional search interfaces are increasingly replaced by LLMs, where conventional ad placements are less effective.
Decentralized Ownership Tools: Blockchains have matured, reaching a stage where they offer scalability and high throughput. Faster chains and advancements like account abstraction are now enabling Web2-like user experiences, providing a robust foundation for creating cryptographic proof of intents without automatically exposing personal data.
Agentic AI is emerging: These are not just chatbots; they are AI agents that will soon compare options, negotiate terms, and make purchases on our behalf. Investment in agentic AI development is substantial, with some industry analyses projecting it to exceed $50 billion by 2027. Such powerful representatives require an infrastructure designed for the people they serve, not for the ad networks that currently monetize our digital activities.
Together, these advancements allow the web to move from a model of surveillance and guesswork to one of explicit declaration and consent.
Introducing the Intents Protocol
It is precisely to address the existing imbalances and to leverage these emerging technological capabilities that we are creating the Intents Protocol. This is a foundational, open, and permission-less blockchain standard designed to reshape digital commerce.
It aims to function for commerce much like HTTP does for information or SMTP does for email—as neutral, enabling infrastructure that:
Shifts commerce from opaque ad targeting to transparent bidding: Instead of hidden algorithms, sellers will openly bid to fulfill clearly stated user needs.
Empowers users: Individuals actively capture, truly own, and granularly control their commercial intents. These become verifiable digital assets, empowering users to decide precisely what to share, with whom, and on what terms.
Connects participants directly: Sellers and advertisers bid on shared intents, allowing users to see the offers and potentially share in the value created.
Enables builders: A robust foundation and toolset will let developers create a new wave of applications that run on user-owned intent and transparent value exchange.
Instead of relying on black-box ad auctions and third-party data brokers, the market can become a clear exchange where the people who create value directly participate in the benefits.
How It Works: A Real-World Example
Consider Maya, who wants a new laptop:
Using Inomy, her AI shopping assistant, Maya defines her requirement as "Intel i7, 16 GB RAM" and records it as a clear intent.
The Intents Protocol stores this intent, keeping Maya in full control and holding no personal data.
Sellers, Maya chooses to engage with, receive her anonymized intent and bid with an offer to satisfy it, while paying a small reward directly to Maya for the right to present their offer—a transparent alternative to today's ad model.
Maya reviews the offers, selects the best fit, and completes the purchase.
An ad auction that was once invisible now becomes a transparent, user-directed marketplace. This seemingly simple four-step flow is the pivotal shift that can open the door to a user-owned internet.
New intents bid process
Benefits at a Glance
Stakeholder | What They Gain |
Users | Save time, earn rewards, secure better prices, and exercise privacy control |
Sellers | Access high-quality, permissioned leads; achieve cost-effective, transparent performance |
Developers | Leverage a built-in monetization model on a censorship-resistant platform, fostering innovation |
Applications & Use Cases
Open standards do more than rebalance incentives—they unlock creativity. The Protocol's versatility can support applications such as:
AI shopping assistants that find the best products, prices, and rewards for the user
Creator-led niche experiences, like a "Sustainable European Adventure" vacation planner
Decentralized review platforms that tie incentives to verified-purchase reviews
Specialized healthcare & finance tools built on user-controlled data
Personal data stores that allow users to own and monetize their data
Next-generation social platforms that offer monetization as a transparent service
Because the rails are neutral, each application can choose its own privacy settings, fee structure, and user experience while remaining interoperable.
Demonstrating the Vision: Inomy
To demonstrate the tangible potential of the Protocol and what it makes possible, we are also building Inomy, an AI-powered shopping assistant. Inomy aims to:
Maximize user agency and privacy
Return the vast majority of value from each intent directly to the user
Offer a superior, conversational discovery experience
Inomy works for people today and for the AI agents they will use tomorrow—proof that user-centric commerce can effectively compete with incumbent platforms.
The Path Forward
Re-engineering core aspects of the web is a significant undertaking. Building reliable smart-contract libraries, creating comprehensive product catalogs, and a truly effortless user experience is a monumental task.
Yet, the goal—a market where intent belongs to its creator—is compelling enough to justify the effort. The internet periodically offers reset buttons: SMTP for email, TLS for encryption, RSS for open publishing. Intents Protocol could be the next one.
This is an invitation. If you're a developer, merchant, or simply someone who believes you should own your digital presence, we invite you to explore, contribute, and build.