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Austin King sold his startup to Ripple in 2019 and claims his technological approach called “intents” will revolutionize crypto, but the details he provides are scant.
‘Intents’ Could Be Ripple’s Game-Changer, Says Ex-Employee
Crypto entrepreneur and former Ripple software engineer Austin King published a curious post on Tuesday, claiming that Ripple is building a platform so revolutionary that it shelled out $250 million just to perfect it, but could it all be hyperbole?
King and his co-founder Dino Rodriguez launched Strata Labs in 2017, a company focused on developing a network based on Ripple’s Interledger protocol, which routes different digital currencies much like how the Internet routes data. Ripple, the largest owner of XRP, acquired Strata Labs in 2019 and King says he worked at the firm for a year afterwards to fully understand its internal operations.
Then in May 2023, Ripple paid $250 million to acquire Switzerland-based crypto custodian Metaco, a firm that specialized in digital asset custody for financial institutions.
And now, after quitting his role at Ripple in 2021, then launching another company called Omni Network, which is looking to increase interoperability across the Ethereum ecosystem, King says he recently met with the Ripple custody team and at the core of both the Omni and Ripple systems is a unique approach to crypto he refers to as “intents.”
“Intents allow users to work at a higher level of abstraction, simply stating their goals,” King told Bitcoin.com. He went on to explain that a single intent often comprises “a bundle of transactions.”
What are “Intents” Really?
Interestingly, King doesn’t provide the technical differences between so-called intents and regular transactions in his post. He does however, contrast the two from a conceptual perspective.
Essentially, an intent is the end result a customer is seeking, while a transaction is a single action in a series of steps required to carry out the intent.
“Today, with transactions, we make users specify how things get done. Soon, with intents, users will only specify what they want to get done,” King explained. “Users have to think about gas, different chains, and bridging to get anything done. It’s a huge pain,” he added.
The problem King points out is indeed real and many are working to address crypto’s user experience (UX) deficiencies, but it’s unlikely Ripple splurged $250 million to buy Metaco just for a superior UX, there must be more to it.
“Ripple is designing their entire custody platform around the concept of intents,” King reiterated. “This is going to be a key unlock for the industry.”
Bitcoin.com asked King for more in-depth technical details, but he had not responded at the time of publication.