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Anoma CEO Adrian Brink: Intent-Oriented Coding Will Change Everything

Anoma's co-founder Adrian Brink discusses how their intent-centric decentralized OS aims to be Web3's "Windows 95 moment," enabling seamless cross-chain apps and targeting enterprise adoption post-$XAN launch.

On September 29, Anoma, the intent-centric decentralized operating system, officially launched its native token $XAN with simultaneous listings on Binance Alpha and Binance Futures, marking the commencement of Anoma mainnet deployment.

Prior to these significant project milestones, TechFlow conducted an extensive conversation with Anoma co-founder Adrian Brink at Korea Blockchain Week.

At the event venue, Adrian was readily identifiable, this founder who purchased beer with ETH in 2016 has distinctive red hair and was actively engaged in roundtables, keynote presentations, and networking sessions. Adrian reflected on this with amusement:

"We launched Shrimpers, Anoma's official NFT, which is engaging, distinctive, and well-designed. We aim to foster stronger community connections through Shrimpers. I own a red-haired Shrimper myself, and it has become something of a personal signature."

When addressing Anoma's comprehensive vision, Adrian, drawing from his technical expertise, offered insights that balanced depth with clarity:

"Since Ethereum's launch, the industry has experienced limited genuine innovation. Emerging applications require more appropriate infrastructure foundations. Anoma serves as an intent-driven decentralized operating system that enables users and developers to transcend specific tech stack limitations, facilitating seamless interaction across various security models. Anoma can be understood as the Web3 equivalent of Windows 95, enabling applications to operate fluidly across different chains, or as the Web3 version of Linux, fully open source, highly interoperable, and remarkably user-accessible."

Given the Korea Blockchain Week setting, Adrian also addressed the significance of the Asian market, particularly the Chinese-speaking region:

"Both China and Korea maintain leading positions in terms of cryptocurrency engagement and development expertise. The Korean community demonstrates a stronger orientation toward financial applications, while the Chinese community shows greater interest in developer ecosystem development."

Regarding post-TGE and mainnet launch priorities, Adrian expressed measured optimism:

"Our discourse has evolved from 'what constitutes this underlying technology' to 'what are the practical applications of intents.' Going forward, Anoma will concentrate on the application layer, developing comprehensive applications that genuinely engage users. We anticipate several noteworthy developments in the months ahead."

Through Adrian's perspectives, we examine Anoma's intent-centric product design philosophy, ecosystem development trajectory, and strategic roadmap planning. 

 

Bringing Web3's "Windows 95" Moment with Intents

TechFlow: We're delighted to have this opportunity for an in-depth conversation with you. Some Chinese-speaking users may not be familiar with Adrian's background, so welcome, and could you please introduce yourself and share some of your past experiences and current responsibilities?

Adrian:

Hello everyone, I'm Adrian, and I'm pleased to connect with you all.

I entered the crypto industry around 2016, when Ethereum was just beginning to gain attention. My thesis focused on implementing censorship-resistant electronic voting using Ethereum. I purchased some ETH and installed Trust Wallet when Ethereum was trading at approximately $2. During university, I even used my ETH to buy beer.

In 2017, I encountered the Tendermint consensus algorithm and later became a core developer for Cosmos. I was involved in Cosmos's entire technology stack, including the Tendermint consensus layer and IBC cross-chain communication.

In 2019, I co-founded Cryptium Labs when Proof of Stake was still a novel concept. Cryptium Labs was among the world's first companies focused on PoS validation, and at our peak, we managed approximately $10 billion in assets.

By early 2021, I felt the crypto industry had reached a standstill. Everything seemed similar, merely different variations of virtual machines. This led me to contemplate what the industry truly needed, ultimately giving birth to Anoma.

Anoma focuses on creating a cross-chain, intent-driven design that enables users and developers to interact seamlessly across different security models. Anoma is fundamentally a distributed operating system where chains are no longer the focal point, allowing users and developers to build and utilize applications anywhere.

TechFlow: If you had to describe what Anoma does in one or two sentences, how would you explain it? Could you provide a concrete example to illustrate what Anoma accomplishes?

Adrian:

Anoma is a Web3 distributed operating system where applications users love can run seamlessly across different chains, regardless of where they're hosted.

We can think of Anoma like Windows 95: whether the underlying hardware uses an Intel or AMD CPU, software like Microsoft Word runs "out of the box." Similarly, Anoma enables your applications to run wherever the operating system exists.

I use the Windows example because it's more widely recognized, but Anoma is actually completely open source, more akin to early versions of Linux, except Anoma emphasizes usability. Early Linux was extremely difficult for most people to use, while Windows achieved a balance between openness and usability, which is what we strive for with Anoma.

TechFlow: Although discussion about Anoma in Chinese-speaking circles has increased recently, I understand Anoma has been building for several years. Could you tell us the story of Anoma from its founding to today? What was Anoma's original intention?

Adrian:

Anoma's creation stemmed from our realization about the industry: since Ethereum's launch, there hasn't been genuine innovation. While projects like Solana made improvements, fundamentally, Solana and Ethereum are very similar, both sequential execution virtual machines. When we examined the entire industry, we recognized that while the industry focuses on application development, it lacks the infrastructure necessary to support application growth.

Our key insight was this:

Users have "intents," not just transactions. For example, if you want to trade, you cannot directly create an immediately executable transaction on Ethereum. You can only perform partial operations and need to find a counterparty to complete it. This inspired our intent-based design approach, which became Anoma's foundation.

Ultimately, Anoma was born because we realized no one was building the infrastructure needed to support these emerging applications. We wanted to create a system that helps developers build applications more flexibly, enabling them to operate across different trust models and chains.

TechFlow: Could you share more about Anoma's ecosystem and introduce some system partners you're particularly optimistic about?

Adrian:

Anoma is an open ecosystem where users can choose components that suit them without being locked into an entire technology stack. This makes it highly attractive for developers. For instance, Anoma applications can run on Ethereum while still leveraging Anoma system's flexibility and openness.

Regarding ecosystem development, I'm particularly excited about stablecoins and payments. We're collaborating with teams like Noble and Anoma Pay to build a seamless ecosystem that enables ordinary users to make stablecoin payments while focusing on security models they trust. This is crucial for making cryptocurrency more accessible.

We're also working on more complex integrations, such as defragmenting liquidity across different networks. Currently, liquidity is fragmented across Ethereum, Solana, and various rollups. We're collaborating with multiple teams to address this issue. While I cannot reveal too many details now, there will certainly be some very exciting developments in the coming months.

TechFlow: Recent increased user discussion is also related to the launch of Shrimpers NFTs. Could you share the vision behind launching this NFT project?

Adrian:

Honestly, I'm not particularly familiar with NFTs, especially regarding physical art aspects. But for launching Shrimpers, we simply wanted to create something fun and unique. I appreciate Shrimpers not because they have any specific functionality, but because I find them visually appealing. It's an excellent way to engage with the community and bring some lighthearted atmosphere.

Shrimp NFTs aim to provide everyone with a simple and enjoyable way to connect with others in the ecosystem. Personally, I own a red-haired Shrimper, which is an amusing tribute to my personal style. During San Francisco Blockchain Week in 2017, I was remembered for wearing a red jacket. Over the years, red has become my signature, and now my red-haired Shrimper has become one of my personal symbols.

 

China and Korea Lead in Crypto, Especially China's Developer Community

TechFlow: We see that Anoma's rewards for Kaito Yapper also have specific focus on Chinese and Korean communities. What characteristics do you think the Chinese and Korean markets have? Are there any differentiated strategies for operations or growth in these two communities?

Adrian:

When I research market adoption curves, I find that both China and Korea are leading in terms of people's attention to cryptocurrency and the development talent they possess. At the same time, when I think about which countries are truly driving crypto development through large-scale construction, China and Korea often come to mind.

Personally, I really love both countries. I enjoyed wonderful times in Shanghai and Seoul, which is one of the reasons I'm more inclined to focus on these two places.

Third, more specifically, we're also starting to see a large influx of developers emerging in the Chinese and Korean markets, which is why I emphasize the importance of these two markets.

TechFlow: In your view, what are the differences between the Chinese community and the Korean community?

Adrian:

I think the differences are quite subtle. The Korean community leans more toward financial application scenarios, while the Chinese community focuses more on the developer ecosystem. This isn't a black-and-white distinction, but if I had to point out a difference, that would be it.

I'm very familiar with the Nervos team, who built a blockchain early on, and the team was all based in Hangzhou at the time. Therefore, many of the excellent Chinese developers I know come from Hangzhou.

I've always been a fan of China, especially the Chinese developer community. My connection with China dates back to the early days of Cosmos, when I spent a lot of time in Shanghai. The developer ecosystem in China, especially in places like Hangzhou, has left a deep impression on me.

When I think about the role Anoma can play in China, I believe our visions align. Unlike Ethereum's global trust model, I think different regions should have dedicated chains, like a "Swiss chain" or a "Chinese chain." For many users, a more suitable trust model is often local, relying on their government or region. I'm not a decentralization extremist; I just want systems to integrate seamlessly, allowing applications to function properly across various trust models.

TechFlow: AI is very popular in China, and many Chinese AI companies are based in Hangzhou.

Adrian:

I think Anoma is particularly noteworthy on this topic.

While I'm not yet sure how the intersection of blockchain and AI will ultimately evolve, I'm almost certain that Anoma will play an important role in it.

The core of this perspective is that when I think about user interactions, everyone might own thousands of AI agents, some running on local phones, which raises the key question: how do these agents communicate with each other?

They need "intents" to avoid being tied to a specific chain, and they need a mechanism that can distribute, coordinate, and settle these intents.

The solution we envision is: I input my needs to a local AI Agent on my phone (perhaps built by DeepSeek), the AI Agent converts my needs into structured intents and presents these intents to me, and I confirm they meet my requirements; then, my AI Agent uses the intents and Anoma's open-source framework to collaborate with other Agents, finding intersections of needs, matchable points, and solvable problems. It assembles a solution and sends me a notification, like "I found a suitable flight + hotel combination for you, are you satisfied?"; after my confirmation, these intents are aggregated and executed on the network.

I believe there will be very attractive convergence points between blockchain and AI, especially at the end-user level. If every user eventually owns thousands of AI Agents, then with today's infrastructure, we still can't achieve efficient collaboration between different AI Agents, such as enabling 1,000 Agents from DeepSeek to efficiently coordinate with 1,000 Agents from ChatGPT. We need an open-source framework that allows them to truly interact and coordinate, and Anoma is built exactly for this purpose. 

 

Intent-Oriented Apps Brings Real Mass Adoption

TechFlow: Recently, AI and RWA have been quite popular directions. From an ecosystem perspective, does Anoma expect specific track projects to build on the platform? Will there be ecosystem support programs in the future?

Adrian:

If you want to build applications on Anoma, please feel free to contact me on Telegram, and we can discuss how to provide you with the most suitable support.

Regarding RWA and AI topics, what particularly excites me right now is that most people are still in the "pre-intents" stage. While some are beginning to design specialized intent solutions for specific trading scenarios, in AI-driven RWA applications, we need thousands of general-purpose intents, but there's virtually no infrastructure capable of supporting all of this today.

Anoma is currently the only place where you can start building on open, intent-native infrastructure, whether you're developing AI or RWA applications.

I don't favor any specific RWA team, but there are indeed several interesting teams. RWA is strongly correlated with local markets. For instance, if you want to tokenize Chinese stocks, the team would almost certainly be in Hong Kong; if it's tokenizing US stocks, the team would likely be in the United States. The challenge lies in connecting these globally. We need to build multiple trust models so users can handle tokenized Chinese and US stocks simultaneously within a single application.

This is precisely where Anoma's strength lies: providing excellent support for such applications and scenarios.

When I think about what Anoma is doing, I'm also excited about our development: today's financial system is still built on technology from the 1960s-80s, designed for an era when the internet wasn't widely adopted, user volumes hadn't exploded, and attacks were limited. This system is now outdated.

Anoma is rebuilding the financial coordination layer: providing a modern coordination infrastructure that allows banks, nations, and communities to build their respective financial systems upon it. In this sense, Anoma's open-source technology stack is the ideal path to upgrade outdated financial systems to the new era. As the internet scales larger, we need more robust financial coordination infrastructure, and Anoma is the perfect solution.

I'm particularly excited about adoption by enterprises, especially Web2 companies, because in my view, no company would trust the global Ethereum network to protect their systems. They prefer maintaining their own sovereign infrastructure. Anoma is built for this purpose - you can deploy Anoma within your company and autonomously decide what data and interoperability capabilities to make public. Once you start making some information public, many applications can not only interface with your sovereign stack but also connect to the global Anoma network and even applications on Ethereum, achieving global collaboration where users can seamlessly switch between local, enterprise, and global infrastructure. For example, if you're a bank wanting to support users depositing ETH, you currently need to do custom integration with Ethereum. In the future, you can directly integrate Anoma, run a local Anoma instance within your bank, and users can transfer ETH into your local Anoma instance.

This is what excites me most, because I believe that upgrading the outdated infrastructure used by Web2 companies and existing financial systems will bring true adoption, and Anoma technology will play a key role in this transformation.

TechFlow: From the public's perspective, can we understand Anoma as similar to Linux, or as "intent infrastructure"?

Adrian:

Exactly, the Linux analogy is very apt. Linux has strong interoperability: there's the underlying kernel, upon which you can build very specialized systems. Anoma provides similar capabilities: while maintaining interoperability, you can customize and specialize Anoma according to your application needs.

TechFlow: I understand that Intent is an important keyword for Anoma. In my impression, Intent was discussed more at the beginning of last year, but now it has shifted to AI, RWA, and Stablecoins. Do you think Intent will be widely discussed again in the future? Will AI development promote discussion of Intent?

Adrian:

I believe so. Last year we were more focused on discussing the underlying infrastructure of intents. If you want AI or other scenarios to achieve scale, you actually need intents. I believe we've now moved from the stage of discussing "what is this underlying technology" to the stage of "what are the specific applications of intents." We'll focus on the application layer, building more and more applications.

I believe most future applications will use intents. In the future, discussions about intents may shift from conceptual interpretation more toward applications enabled by intents.

TechFlow: So, do you also believe that AI will accelerate the development of intents?

Adrian:

Yes, because currently we're still very limited in terms of capabilities supported by cryptocurrencies. If all transactions must be settled through some form of global consensus, your applications will face high latency and be expensive to use. However, through intents and Anoma, you can achieve processing 50 transactions per second, which is currently not feasible. Therefore, I think this makes applications that were previously impossible become possible. 

 

Building Super Apps That Truly Attract Users

TechFlow: Anoma recently announced the $XAN token model, which is a very important event. After the token TGE, what areas will the team's work focus on?

Adrian:

Our main area of focus, and what we've been consistently working on, is continuing to build the core infrastructure.

After the TGE, we'll shift a significant portion of our energy toward building vertically integrated applications that end users can actually use - user-friendly products. We've been talking about "applications are important" in the crypto space for many years, but we've always lacked sufficiently mature underlying infrastructure to support truly usable application experiences. With Anoma's emergence, this is finally changing.

Moving forward, we'll focus much more on end users. We'll be committed to creating applications that truly attract users, including user-friendly payment applications, trading applications, RWA applications, and possibly even "super applications" that integrate all these capabilities together.

Our core vision has always been simple and direct: I want to have a local chatbot on my phone that provides a conversational experience like Telegram or WeChat. For example, I could message the local chatbot saying "help me find the best yield opportunities," and after it performs some local computations, it presents me with a set of intents for me to review and confirm. Then the bot would help me find the optimal execution solution. This is what excites me: building more truly useful applications.

TechFlow: Through your sharing, Anoma will be a very large-scale ecosystem, so developers are very important. What specific measures do you have for attracting developers?

Adrian:

Currently, we haven't launched specific incentive programs because once you clearly announce incentives, it tends to attract a lot of spam from people just chasing rewards, which not only increases noise but is also very difficult to manage.

For developers, we welcome everyone to visit Anoma's GitHub: if you start building and encounter problems, contact us directly, and we'll provide help.

We will very likely launch incentive programs in the future, but the problem is that once you announce specific incentives, everyone rushes in, and the result is spam everywhere. I'd rather focus my energy on developers who genuinely want to build things and create real applications. So currently there are no specific incentives. But if you have a cool project, please feel free to reach out.

 

 

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