The New Wave of Web3: The Rise and Development of DeFAI

In January 2025, the Solana AI hackathon came to a close, with the Hive project taking the crown and winning a prize of $60,000. This 15-day event attracted over 400 projects, making for a fierce competition.

The Hive is a modular and interoperable DeFi Agent network built on Solana. It adopts a Swarm architecture, enabling it to automatically handle complex DeFi operations such as trading, staking, and lending through users' chat commands. The success of this project has once again ignited interest in the DeFAI sector, with the sector's market value once climbing to $2.7 billion, although it has now fallen back to around $800 million.

The concept of DeFAI originates from the combination of decentralized finance ( DeFi ) and artificial intelligence ( AI ), aiming to simplify the complex processes of DeFi using AI technology, allowing ordinary users to easily access DeFi services.

The Evolution from Intent Trading to DeFAI

As early as 2023, discussions around AI and "intent trading" have become a hot topic in the blockchain community. "Intent" is a set of declarative constraints that allow users to delegate the creation of transactions to a dedicated network of third-party participants while retaining full control over the process.

To illustrate with a specific example: Suppose user Alice wants to purchase BUZZ tokens on Solana using 1,000 USDC on Ethereum. In the traditional way, Alice would need to go through tedious steps such as connecting to the network, cross-chain transfers, and selecting a trading pool. However, with intent trading, Alice only needs to express her intent by saying, "I want to buy as many BUZZ tokens as possible with 1,000 USDC on Ethereum, at least 30,000 tokens," and the system will automatically handle all the complex operations.

However, building the intent layer faces many challenges, such as the design of intent expression languages and protocol specifications. Several projects, such as Anoma, SUAVE, and Essential, are trying to build the intent layer, but most are still in the conceptual stage.

The emergence of AI Agents provides a new solution to this problem. An AI Agent is a computer program that can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously based on the environment, input, and predefined goals. It can directly act as a solver, improving the efficiency and intelligence level of traditional solving processes. In addition, AI Agents can also integrate modules such as knowledge bases, token analysis, and social media publishing, greatly expanding the use cases for intention trading.

Functions and Implementation of DeFAI

Currently, DeFAI applications that can realize intention trading in the market include Griffain, Hey Anon, Orbit, The Hive, Neur, and others. Among them, The Hive is completely free and open-source, and we will use it as an example to introduce the functions of DeFAI.

The main interface of The Hive is a chat box that supports multiple large language models. Users can express their trading intentions in natural language, such as "Swap 1000 $USDC to $BUZZ on Solana", and the system will automatically invoke the Trading Agent and guide the user to complete the transaction.

In addition to trading functions, The Hive also provides services such as token analysis and knowledge queries. For example, users can enter "Analysis the trending of $ETH" to obtain market analysis and trading suggestions for Ethereum, or enter "What is DeFi" to learn about DeFi-related knowledge.

The architecture of The Hive includes 7 main Agents: walletAgent, stakingAgent, marketAgent, tradingAgent, knowledgeAgent, tokenAnalysisAgent, and liquidAgent. These Agents are responsible for different functions such as wallet operations, staking, market inquiry, trade execution, knowledge base inquiry, token analysis, and liquidity inquiry.

The core logic of the system is to analyze user input through a large language model, select the appropriate Agent, and then organize the workflow through the AI Agent framework, ultimately returning the execution results to the user.

Summary

The emergence of DeFAI is expected to completely change the interaction paradigm of Web3. By providing a natural language interface, DeFAI significantly simplifies the complexity of DeFi operations, enhances user experience, and allows users who are not well-versed in blockchain and DeFi to easily participate in the Web3 ecosystem.

This revolutionary change further straightens the curve of "intent trading," creating real value for users and is expected to drive the mass adoption of Web3 technology. With the continuous development and improvement of DeFAI technology, we can look forward to a more widespread and convenient future in the Web3 world.