Anoma

• Anoma is an intent-centric architecture where users express what they want rather than how to achieve it.

• Solvers compete to find and execute the path, including matching intents directly against each other.

• XAN is the network token.

• Supply allocated across community, ecosystem and contributors.

• Used for fees and network security.

Pros:

• Intent-centric design is a genuinely different architecture rather than an incremental improvement.

• Direct intent matching can settle trades without touching a liquidity pool at all.

• Long research history with published academic work.

Cons:

• Very long development timeline relative to funding raised, with repeated delays.

• Intent architectures are conceptually elegant but have proven hard to ship at scale.

• Solver centralisation is a live concern in every intent system so far.

• Exposure to a distinct architectural bet rather than another execution layer.

• Research foundation is substantial.

• Weigh the long gap between the research and a production network.

• Intents matched directly against other intents, so a trade can settle peer-to-peer without any liquidity pool involved.

• Users must specify exact transaction paths, which requires knowing the whole landscape of venues and routes.

• Expressing only the desired outcome shifts that work to competing solvers.

• Founded by Adrian Brink, Christopher Goes and Awa Sun Yin.

• Backed by Polychain, Electric Capital and CMCC Global.

• No public ICO. Distributed through ecosystem and community allocations.

• Extended development timeline with delivery risk.

• Solver markets tend toward centralisation, which undercuts the decentralisation claim.

• Intent architectures remain largely unproven in production.

• Competing intent-based systems are shipping sooner.

Anoma's papers argue that blockchains have standardised on the wrong abstraction: a transaction specifies an exact sequence of state changes, which forces the user to know every venue, route and price in advance and hands any information advantage to whoever sees the transaction first. An intent instead states only the desired end condition and the constraints on acceptable outcomes, leaving discovery to solvers who compete on execution quality. The architecture's distinctive claim is that intents can be matched against each other directly, so a set of users wanting complementary trades can settle among themselves without any liquidity pool. The papers acknowledge that solver competition is what makes this safe, and that concentration among solvers would reintroduce exactly the extraction the design aims to remove.