> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.intention.xyz/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Welcome to Intention

> Intention is a Layer 1 blockchain for open markets, with native capabilities for AI agents built into the protocol.

> ## Trade different.

Intention is a Layer 1 blockchain for open markets, with native capabilities for AI agents built into the protocol. Matching, risk, clearing, and price integration are not applications deployed on top of a general-purpose virtual machine. They are first-class operations of the protocol itself, executed inside a deterministic state-transition kernel and finalized by Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus. The trading venue *is* the chain.

That is two things at once. For human traders and integrators, it is an open, public, professional venue: a high-performance perpetual futures DEX with a full central limit order book, professional order types, isolated and cross margin, protocol-native liquidations, and on-chain liquidity vaults — running on a chain that anyone can audit, replay, and build on. For autonomous agents, it is something more fundamental: a substrate where the venue itself is *legible*, where the chain is not a noisy oracle to guess at but a function that can be inspected and acted on at block cadence.

The first application running on Intention is **Intention Exchange** — a perpetual futures DEX, live at `app.intention.xyz`, that inherits its matching engine, risk pipeline, and pricing guarantees from the L1 by virtue of running on it. The same substrate is designed to host other order-book markets — including tokenized real-world assets — without changing the execution model.

## Open by asset, AI-native by protocol

Most chains were designed for human users, where opacity and probabilistic execution are tolerable because a human is in the loop to react. That makes them awkward for serious traders and unworkable for autonomous agents. Matching priority is at the mercy of block-producer reordering. Mark prices live on a different cycle than execution. Liquidations are keeper races. Per-transaction effects are reconstructible only via third-party indexers.

Intention removes that opacity. Every block on Intention satisfies four invariants by construction:

* The block is **byte-deterministic** — any honest replay produces identical state and identical per-transaction outputs.
* The price used to settle each transaction is **certified in the same consensus event** that committed the transaction.
* **Risk is a protocol state machine** — mark pricing, liquidations, ADL, insurance, and funding execute atomically with matching, in the same block, under the same prices.
* Every state change is **cryptographically bound** to the user transaction that caused it.

For a human trader, these properties produce a fairer venue: ordering you can audit, prices you can verify, liquidations that follow protocol rules instead of off-chain races, and a per-trade attribution trail that exists at the protocol level rather than in someone else's database. For an autonomous agent, the same properties produce something more: an environment that can be reasoned about with the same rigor an agent applies to its own internal state. The chain becomes a function the agent can inspect.

The [Intelligence Layer](/architecture/intelligence-layer) page covers the AI-native side in detail — the four agent capabilities the protocol is shaped to host, and how each maps to one of the guarantees below.

## Four protocol-native guarantees

These are not best-effort properties of an application. They are properties the protocol enforces and that any honest validator can replay.

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Order-Time Determinism (OTD)" href="/architecture/otd">
    Replaying a finalized block produces byte-identical state, events, and per-transaction outputs on every honest node.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Price-Transaction Atomicity (PTA)" href="/architecture/pta">
    The price used to settle a transaction was certified by the same $2f+1$ validator quorum that committed the transaction.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Risk-Native Semantics (RNS)" href="/architecture/rns">
    Mark pricing, liquidations, insurance, ADL, and funding run as protocol state machines in the same atomic context as matching.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Per-Transaction Attribution (PTAD)" href="/architecture/ptad">
    Every state change and event is cryptographically bound to the user transaction that caused it, even under batch matching.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

The four are coupled. PTA depends on OTD; RNS depends on PTA; PTAD depends on both. Together they remove the entire class of "off-chain matching with on-chain settlement" hacks that other on-chain perpetual venues have relied on, and they make the trading engine itself auditable rather than the activity around it.

## Where to go next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Architecture overview" href="/architecture/overview">
    The asset, infrastructure, and intelligence layers, and how IntentionKernel and IntentionBFT compose into the four guarantees.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Intelligence Layer" href="/architecture/intelligence-layer">
    What the protocol enables for autonomous agents, and how the four guarantees translate into AI-native capabilities.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Trading overview" href="/trading/overview">
    Markets, order types, margin modes, mark pricing, and the full lifecycle of a perpetual futures position.
  </Card>

  <Card title="API Reference" href="/api-reference/introduction">
    REST, WebSocket, and node integration tracks for human and machine integrators.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Status

Intention is under active development. Several pages in this site describe behavior that the protocol guarantees by design but that has not yet been exposed through a public mainnet UI or API. Those pages are clearly marked. The architecture, trading mechanics, and risk-and-security sections describe the system as it is being built; the get-started and API-reference sections are largely placeholders pending mainnet launch.

<Note>
  No native token currently exists. Documentation does not describe tokenomics, staking incentives, or any token sale. Token-related material will be published only after the asset is live.
</Note>

For the long-form rationale and proofs behind the four guarantees, the Intention whitepaper is available on request from `contact@intention.xyz`. For other questions, write to the same address.
