The three-layer stack
Intention’s architecture is organized as three layers that depend on the one below.Asset layer
The substrate on which value exists on the chain: native balances, tokenized real-world assets, derivative positions, and the collateral that backs them. The protocol does not care whether an underlying is a crypto perpetual, a tokenized commodity, or a tokenized equity — the same pipeline processes all of them as long as the reference index is defined.Infrastructure layer
The technical core of the protocol. This is where the four guarantees live and where the vast majority of this documentation section is focused. Two components do the heavy lifting:IntentionKernel
The deterministic state-transition kernel. A closed-world execution environment whose instruction set is the enumerated set of typed financial primitives — not a general-purpose VM.
IntentionBFT
A HotStuff-family consensus protocol extended with canonical sequencing commitments, in-consensus price quorums, batch availability, and stake-weighted leader reputation.
Intelligence layer
Autonomous agents — liquidity providers, risk engines, semantic oracles, strategy agents — that consume the chain’s execution stream directly and act on it at block cadence. This layer is not part of the protocol; it is what the protocol enables. What the infrastructure layer owes it is a complete, attributed, cryptographically verifiable view of execution. Intention is open by asset, AI-native by protocol — a Layer 1 blockchain for open markets, with native capabilities for AI agents built into the protocol. The Intelligence Layer is where the AI side of that mandate becomes concrete: the four protocol-native guarantees below are exactly the properties autonomous agents need in order to treat the chain as a function they can reason about rather than as a noisy environment they have to model. The same properties produce a fairer, more auditable venue for human traders and integrators — the two audiences want the same thing from the substrate, and the protocol serves both. See the dedicated Intelligence Layer page for the four AI-native capabilities the protocol is designed to host: autonomous liquidity provision, intelligent risk management, semantic data interpretation, and autonomous strategy execution.Four protocol-native guarantees
The infrastructure layer commits to four invariants. Each is a property the protocol enforces by construction, not a best-effort promise made by an application.Order-Time Determinism
G1. Replaying a committed block against the same pre-state produces byte-identical post-state, events, and per-transaction outputs — on every honest node.
Price-Transaction Atomicity
G2. The price a transaction uses for settlement was certified by a stake-weighted quorum in the same consensus event that committed the transaction.
Risk-Native Semantics
G3. Mark pricing, liquidation, insurance, ADL, and funding are protocol-native state machines that execute in the same atomic context as matching.
Per-Transaction Attribution
G4. Every state change and every event is cryptographically bound to the specific user transaction that caused it, even under batch matching.
Why a specialized substrate
A general-purpose smart-contract chain cannot make protocol-level claims about order-book semantics because those claims would not generalize to other applications. On such a chain, matching priority is subject to block-producer reordering, mark prices live on a different cycle from execution, liquidations are keeper races, and attribution is reconstructible only through third-party indexers. Intention compiles matching, risk, clearing, and oracle integration into the native execution semantics of IntentionKernel. The trading venue is the protocol. New primitives arrive through protocol upgrades rather than contract deployments — a deliberate tradeoff that prefers a small, stable instruction set over the fragmentation of independently deployed application contracts.For the operational side — validator roles, batch dissemination, and client access — see Network Topology. For price data specifically, see Oracle. For cross-chain movement, see Bridge.