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What is IntentGuard?

Enforcement Layer for Transaction Outcomes

Ensuring economic outcomes match user-signed intent

IntentGuard is an enforcement layer for blockchain transactions. It ensures that transactions settle within predefined economic boundaries or they do not settle at all.

IntentGuard introduces a new security primitive for Web3: Transaction Outcome Enforcement.

What IntentGuard Enforces

IntentGuard validates that the economic result of a transaction matches the user's declared intent. Rather than verifying only that a transaction was authorized, IntentGuard verifies what happened:

  • Balance changes are within expected ranges
  • Transfers go to approved recipients
  • Slippage remains within acceptable thresholds
  • Collateral ratios remain intact
  • Governance outcomes reflect the intended vote
  • Capital is not redirected or extracted unexpectedly

Security shifts from:

"Did the user authorize this call?"

to:

"Did the blockchain deliver the economic result the user agreed to?"

The Problem: Blockchains Validate Code, Not Outcomes

Blockchains verify that a transaction is valid, that the signature is correct, and that the code executes successfully. They do not verify that the economic outcome matches what the user intended.

Between simulation and block inclusion, chain state changes. Prices move, liquidity shifts, MEV reorders transactions, and competing transactions alter the assumptions the user relied on when signing. Simulation predicts what should happen. It cannot guarantee the final result.

IntentGuard enforces what must happen. Constraints are evaluated at execution time, not before.

How Enforcement Works

IntentGuard bundles the user's transaction with an on-chain enforcement contract. At execution time, the enforcer captures the relevant chain state before and after the transaction runs, and verifies that the outcome falls within the constraints the user declared and signed. If any constraint is violated, the transaction is not included in the block. No gas is consumed.

Because verification happens on-chain, enforcement is trustless. Neither the user nor the wallet needs to rely on IntentGuard infrastructure for correctness. The result is determined by the chain itself.

IntentGuard ships with an enforcer for token balance constraints, covering the most common DeFi execution risks. Additional enforcers for other financial primitives are in development.

IntentGuard: The Enforcement Layer

IntentGuard sits between the signed transaction and the blockchain. It transforms transaction execution from:

"Submit and hope"

into:

"Execute only if the outcome matches the declared intent."

Execution becomes conditional on outcome compliance. If the final state deviates from the declared boundaries, the transaction does not proceed.

Enforcement Guarantees

Enforcement is atomic. Constraints are verified as part of the transaction execution flow. There is no partial enforcement. Either all constraints pass and the transaction is included, or at least one is invalid and the transaction is discarded. Because rejected transactions are never included on-chain, the user does not pay gas.

Constraint authenticity is verified on-chain via EIP-712 signature verification. On-chain verification makes enforcement trustless. Both wallets and users can audit constraint validation independently. No trust assumption on IntentGuard infrastructure is required for enforcement correctness.

IntentGuard does not custody funds. It cannot modify the transaction or alter the constraints chosen by the user or wallet.

Private Transaction Submission

Protected transactions must remain private until block inclusion. If a protected transaction were broadcast to the public mempool, another party could include the raw transaction without executing the constraint verification logic.

Protected transactions are routed privately to block builders instead of being broadcast publicly. This prevents external actors from observing the transaction before inclusion, eliminating common mempool attacks such as frontrunning, sandwich attacks, and transaction copying.

To guarantee enforcement, protected transactions must only be submitted through the IntentGuard RPC endpoint.

A Universal Enforcement Primitive

IntentGuard is not a wallet. It is not a simulation tool. It is not a monitoring dashboard. It is infrastructure.

A universal enforcement primitive that integrates with:

  • Wallet providers
  • Custodians
  • Asset managers
  • DeFi protocols
  • Institutional capital allocators
  • Machine-managed capital systems
  • Autonomous agents

As capital becomes increasingly programmatic and autonomous, validating economic outcomes becomes foundational infrastructure.

IntentGuard ensures that a blockchain transaction settles within predefined economic boundaries or it does not settle at all.