The crypto and Web3 space has seen a never-ending rollout of new blockchains since Bitcoin was invented. From layer-1 and layer-2 networks to modular and app-specific chains, each new launch brings incremental improvements and new approaches to solve long-standing problems. 

But each new chain adds complexity that developers and users are forced to navigate. The result is a patchwork ecosystem of fragmented networks, applications, wallets, liquidity, and users. This trend toward fragmentation is a major barrier to developer and user adoption, and keeps the focus on infrastructure at the expense of applications.

With Web3 hype cycles measured in weeks, not months or years, the choice of which chain to deploy an app to brings huge risks. If a developer launches their app on chain X one day, and users and liquidity flock to chain Y the next, it means months of wasted development time and capital. It’s one big game of musical chairs. Teams are forced to make risky bets on which chain will win, or manage multiple deployments across different chains, creating extra development and maintenance overhead that puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

For users, fragmentation is a nightmare for the experience of using blockchains. They’re forced to juggle multiple wallets, seed phrases, apps, chains, and bridges to do even relatively basic things. For anything involving multiple chains, users have to go down rabbit holes to find optimal routes, navigate complicated multi-step interactions, and sign a time-consuming series of transactions.

What if there was a better way to build and use Web3 applications?

Introducing Web3’s OS

Anoma is a decentralized operating system that unifies the fragmented Web3 landscape into a single, cohesive environment. Anoma will connect existing blockchains across ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, and more. But what does an operating system mean in the context of Web3? 

Let’s look at the example of Windows and what it did to revolutionize the way people interact with and develop applications for PCs. Windows unified the PC environment, creating a single cohesive interface that users and developers could interact with regardless of the underlying hardware. No matter which type of CPU a computer was built on, users could get the same familiar experience, and developers could write a single application that could work on many different types of computers. This kicked off the personal computing era, making PCs accessible enough to become a household device. 

Yet Web3 is still stuck in the pre-Windows era. If Web3 networks are like decentralized ‘world computers’, blockchains represent the underlying CPUs that handle all the ‘processing’. Today, developers are still stuck writing applications for specific blockchains, and users are forced to interact directly with complex low-level infrastructure. This keeps Web3 stuck in an immature state, without the types of user-friendly applications needed to break through the transition into mainstream relevance.

Akin to Windows for Web3, Anoma introduces a new approach to dapp development. It enables developers to build one app that works seamlessly across any underlying blockchain, and to provide a seamless experience for their users, free from the complexity that exists today. Developers are no longer faced with the risky decision of deploying on a specific blockchain. With Anoma, their app is automatically compatible with any underlying chain, and they’re ready for the next big blockchain launch, whenever it happens. 

This unified approach can significantly speed up the time and reduce the cost of deploying a dapp, and eliminates the overhead of juggling multiple deployments across different chains. With Anoma, dapp teams are free to focus on what matters most: their application and their users, leaving the complexity of underlying infrastructure and multichain interoperability to Anoma. 

Anoma also provides the most flexible and adaptable development environment possible, enabling developers to build new types of applications that haven't been possible in Web3. This includes full-featured Web2-style applications like Uber or Kickstarter (but fully decentralized), and the types of automated experiences that users have come to expect from AI-powered applications. This means that Web3 won’t be left behind as users expect increasing ease of use and more natural interactions from the applications they use.

Anoma is not yet another blockchain bringing incremental improvements to the existing paradigm. It’s a fundamentally new type of architecture optimized for application development and user experience, paving the way for Web3 to reach its full potential as the ‘world computer’.

The power of intents

A key component of how Anoma provides a superior developer and user experience is by introducing a new paradigm of intent-centric application development.

Intents are how humans naturally interact with applications. They’re the outcomes or goals that users want to achieve, along with any preferences or conditions for achieving those goals. A user opens an application because they want to trade X for Y at the best possible price, or to purchase a product that matches their specific needs and requirements. With Anoma, developers can write applications that process user intents into verifiable outcomes, a quantum leap forward in user and developer experience compared to what exists today. 

Intent-centric app development involves a shift from imperative to declarative programming. With imperative programming, you need to write a series of step-by-step instructions for the computer to process. By contrast, with declarative programming you simply declare the end state you want to achieve without needing to specify how to achieve it. This approach saves time and improves the developer experience by minimizing unnecessary complexity. It’s the difference between needing to tell a chef every step involved in making your meal vs ordering the dish you want and letting the chef handle the preparation.

While Web2 apps adopted intents and declarative programming long ago, the approach isn’t yet the standard in Web3. Indeed, the move from imperative to declarative programming (particularly the shift from jquery to react) is part of the secret sauce that led Web2 applications to take over the world. Because Web3 applications are tied to on-chain virtual machines (e.g. the EVM), which run on an imperative, transaction-centric model, dapp developers are still stuck writing step-by-step instructions.

Not only is this an inefficient and inexpressive way to write applications, it forces users to understand and interact with the complexities of the underlying infrastructure. They have to figure out which wallets and UIs to use, evaluate bridges, judge the risks involved, and then approve an often complex series of transactions.

With Anoma, users can simply communicate their desired outcome and let the system handle the complexity for them. No matter how complex an operation is or how many chains are involved, Anoma apps can provide a single, simple interaction for the user. Dapps can provide more seamless, automated experiences, comparable to those users have come to expect from LLMs and chatbots. 

Some Web3 protocols today are designed to process intents, but typically only involve specific use cases, such as cross-chain swaps. Anoma introduces the first system for processing generalized intents, that is, any type of intent that can be used for any type of application. Generalized intents are the key to building apps that can match the capabilities of Web2 without relying on any centralized components.

How does it work?

Anoma provides a level of abstraction that exists on top of underlying blockchains. This is similar to how an operating system provides a level of abstraction on top of computer CPUs that developers and users can interact with rather than needing to interact directly with the hardware. Anoma is designed around three basic layers: an application layer, a networking layer, and a settlement layer.

The application layer is where developers build applications and users interact with them. This is analogous to the UIs that we’re used to in Windows or MacOS. It includes a development interface for building intent-centric applications, powered not by a virtual machine (VM) and smart contracts, as in the case of conventional blockchains, but by an Anoma innovation called the intent machine (IM). While VMs work by processing transactions into state updates, the IM works by processing intents into state updates. The IM model is the key to bringing intent-centric applications to Web3.

The networking layer is a decentralized peer-to-peer network made up of intent gossip nodes and solvers that run the Anoma software. When a user submits an intent to an app interface, gossip nodes broadcast it across peers in the network. Special nodes called solvers watch for these intents and solve them by carrying out the necessary operations and settling transactions on underlying blockchains. Solvers can be specialized in certain types of operations, or more generalized for a wider range of applications.

The networking layer also handles counterparty discovery, the key to any type of application that involves multiple parties. 

For example, a decentralized token swap can involve two or more parties. Imagine Alice has token X that they want to trade for token Y, and Bob has token Y that they want to trade for token X. This creates a balanced intent. More likely, a swap can involve more than two parties: Alice wants to trade token W for token Z, Bob wants to trade token X for token Y, Cameron wants to trade token Y for token W, and Dave wants to trade token Z for token X. This is also a balanced intent that solvers can solve. 

Generalized intents on Anoma are fully composable, which means developers can write applications that rely on interaction between multiple users and multiple operations across several blockchains, and solvers can combine intents from different users together to solve more complex operations.

The only way to do counterparty discovery in Web3 today is by relying on centralized components like servers, or by putting the entire process on-chain, which is impractical in terms of efficiency and cost. With Anoma, intents can be arbitrarily complex, and the larger the pool of intents, the more ways that solvers can find to balance them. In his way, apps on Anoma can involve interactions between any number of users while maintaining full decentralization. This enables new types of applications that are impossible in Web3 today.

Finally, the settlement layer is where intents are ultimately settled on underlying blockchains. This layer is essentially the motherboard of the world computer. Intents can be settled across any number of blockchains, from L1s and L2s to app-specific chains for file storage, data availability, oracles, and more. Anoma connects to existing blockchains via protocol adapters, smart contract implementations of Anoma’s intent machine that enables those networks to seamlessly operate with the broader Anoma system.

Powering a universal app layer for Web3

By introducing an intent-centric paradigm for blockchain architecture and application development, Anoma enables a universal application layer to serve all of Web3. 

In the current paradigm, the focus is still overwhelmingly on blockchains and blockchain infrastructure rather than on what applications actually need. But what if we could redesign blockchains from scratch to make them more user friendly and better suited for hosting applications?

The good news is that we don’t have to. Anoma reexamines decentralized systems from a first-principles approach, to create a more application-centric and user-centric future for Web3. Best yet, Anoma is fully compatible with existing blockchains, so any chain can benefit from intents and developers can write one app with universal compatibility.

Just as Web2 apps can work seamlessly and update state across every device a user owns, Anoma enables dapps to roam seamlessly across every blockchain a user has state on at once. This is the sort of experience users have come to expect, but it hasn’t existed in Web3 until now. Anoma bridges the gap between Web2 and Web3 applications and experiences, so Web3 can finally serve as the backbone of a new internet. 

The rigid focus on blockchains and VMs has failed to give us a rich application layer to compete with Web2, imposing unnecessary complexity on developers and users. Anoma is Web3 without the complexity, enabling the space to evolve beyond infrastructure so developers can finally focus on building apps, not chains. 

Because the future of crypto isn’t more infrastructure. It’s infrastructure you don’t even notice.