Rising Funding for Essential
Recently, Essential, an avant-garde startup, has successfully secured an impressive $5.15 million in seed funding. Taking the lead in this funding round was Maven 11, who, along with Robot Ventures, Karatage, Batuhan Dasgin, Skip, James Prestwich, Brandon Curtis, and Eclipse’s Neel Somani, placed their confidence in Essential’s vision.
Intent Over Instruction
Inaugurated just this year, Essential’s mission revolves around refining the crypto transactional supply chain. Its main objective? To mitigate the dominance of “rent-seeking intermediaries,” maximizing the benefits for its users. To achieve this, Essential has embarked on the development of intent-based infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems which provide step-by-step commands, this innovative technology aims to interpret end goals or “intents” of the user. The upshot? Users are presented with a variety of on-chain solutions, significantly elevating their flexibility compared to the typical solitary pathway provided by their chosen app.
Liesl Eichholz, Essential’s co-founder and CEO, provides a clearer picture using the instance of token swapping on a decentralized exchange. Ordinarily, users are limited to the DEX and its particular smart contract. However, with Essential’s intent-based platform, Eichholz says, “The user simply states their objective. The system then specializes in pinpointing the optimal on-chain solution for them.”
Building the Foundation
At the heart of Essential’s innovations are several core components. They’re in the process of developing an intent standard specifically for Ethereum, a unique domain-specific language tailored for expressing intents, and a blockchain protocol centered wholly on intents.
Following their funding success in April, Essential has unveiled an Ethereum request for comment (ERC) aimed at enhancing the composability of intent-centric products, not just for Ethereum but other EVM chains too. This is in conjunction with their significant strides in their domain-specific language which will underpin their upcoming protocol.
A Step Towards Improved UX
Balder Bomans, the managing partner at Maven 11, shared his insights on Essential’s endeavor: “The prevailing transaction-based blockchain interaction approach often leads to a subpar user experience (UX). A paradigm shift towards user-stated intents could potentially rival the UX quality of Web2. The difference? We’ll achieve this without the inherent middlemen and restrictive barriers typical of Web2.”
