The Web3 Era: AI-Driven Decentralized Finance Revolution

In mid-January 2025, the highly anticipated Solana AI hackathon concluded successfully. This 15-day event attracted over 400 projects competing for the top spot. After intense competition, the DeFi project The Hive (BUZZ) emerged victorious, winning the championship and a prize of $60,000.

The Hive is a modular, interoperable Decentralized Finance Agent network built on the Solana blockchain. It adopts a Swarm architecture and can automatically handle complex DeFi operations such as trading, staking, and lending through user chat commands. The developers of The Hive have achieved outstanding results in several well-known hackathons.

The success of The Hive has once again sparked market attention on the DeFAI sector, which saw its market capitalization rise to $2.7 billion at one point. The concept of DeFAI originates from the founder of a well-known project, representing the fusion of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), aiming to simplify the complex processes of DeFi through AI technology, making it easy for ordinary users to utilize DeFi services.

From Intent Trading to Decentralized Finance AI

In fact, the combination of DeFi and AI is not a new phenomenon. As early as 2023, discussions around AI and "intent trading" had become a hot topic within the blockchain community. "Intent" is a set of declarative constraints that allows users to delegate the creation of transactions to a specialized network of third-party participants while retaining full control over the process.

Traditional DeFi operations often involve complex steps, such as cross-chain interactions, selecting the optimal trading pool, and comparing rates. With intention trading, users only need to express their goals, such as "buy as much BUZZ as possible with 1000 USDC," and the system can automatically complete all the complex calculations and trading processes.

However, building the intent layer faces many challenges, such as designing a suitable intent expression language and balancing expressiveness with normativity. Several projects attempt to build an intent layer, but often require the introduction of complex domain-specific languages, which affects user experience.

The emergence of AI Agents provides a solution to this problem. AI Agents are intelligent programs that can autonomously make decisions and execute tasks based on the environment, input, and predefined goals. They can directly understand users' natural language expressions and convert them into standardized intent language.

AI Agents can not only act as solvers but also enhance the efficiency and intelligence of trading strategies. They can integrate various functions such as knowledge bases, token analysis, and social media publishing, greatly expanding the application scenarios of intent trading. AI Agents based on the Swarm architecture can achieve collaboration among multiple agents, handling more complex and large-scale tasks.

Functions and Implementation of DeFAI

Currently, there are multiple DeFi applications in the market, such as Griffain, Hey Anon, Orbit, etc. Among them, The Hive stands out due to its completely free and open-source characteristics.

The interface of The Hive is primarily based on a chat box and supports various large language models. Users can express their trading intentions in natural language, such as "exchange 1000 USDC for BUZZ". The system will call the corresponding Agent to execute the operation, and the user only needs to connect their wallet to sign the transaction.

In addition to basic trading functions, The Hive also offers a variety of services such as token trend analysis, staking operations, and knowledge inquiry. Users can easily access market information, trading advice, and Decentralized Finance knowledge.

From a technical implementation perspective, The Hive defines multiple specialized Agents, such as Wallet Agent, Staking Agent, Market Agent, etc. The system selects the appropriate Agent based on user input, organizes the workflow, and returns the results to the user.

Looking to the Future

The emergence of DeFAI is expected to completely change the interaction paradigm of Web3. By providing a natural language interface, DeFAI greatly simplifies the complexity of DeFi operations and enhances the user experience. Even users who are not familiar with blockchain and DeFi can easily participate in the Web3 ecosystem.

With the continuous advancement of technology, we can expect to see more innovative DeFi AI applications emerge. These applications will further lower the barriers to entry for Web3, promoting the popularization and development of Decentralized Finance. In the future, the AI-driven DeFi revolution may reshape the entire landscape of the financial industry, bringing unprecedented convenience and value to users.