Introduction
📄️ Intents
Intents offer a fundamentally user-centric approach to on-chain interactions. Instead of signing a raw transaction—a rigid sequence of machine-readable instructions dictating what actions to take (as seen on platforms like Uniswap or Aave)—users define an overarching objective, or "intent," and sign that instead. This intent encapsulates the desired outcome in a structured message. For Garden, this means specifying parameters such as assets, chains, and amounts for the swap.
📄️ Solvers
Solvers are the market makers of Garden protocol, responsible for ensuring user intents are executed efficiently and securely. By leveraging diverse liquidity sources—on-chain, off-chain, and private order flows—solvers are incentivized to optimize every transaction for users, delivering competetive quotes.
📄️ Stakers
Staking serves as the gateway for users to engage with the Garden protocol, supporting its decentralization, efficiency, and accountability. By staking SEED tokens, stakers can vote for trusted solvers to execute intents and earn rewards based on their performance. This system incentivizes long-term commitment, balances solver selection, and helps maintain the protocol’s fairness and reliability.
📄️ Auctions
The auction process identifies a solver to execute user intents, such as performing a swap. Garden's auction system ensures intents are fulfilled efficiently and at competitive prices.
📄️ Atomic swaps
Atomic swaps are trustless peer-to-peer swaps that are used for settlement between user and the solver chosen to implement their intent. The atomic nature of these swaps comes from the fact that they are designed in a way to either complete the swap or not do it at all, there is no intermediate state. As a result, users and solvers don't lose control of their asset at any point of the swap process. Traditional bridges require you to give up control of your asset during the bridging process to the custodian (WBTC), intermediary network (Threshold, Thorchain), or a multisig (Avalanche bridge).