The interesting part of Arkade Intents is not another way to swap into Lightning.
It’s the attempt to standardize the execution layer.
Today, adding a liquidity provider usually means another API, quote format, state machine and recovery flow.
With Intents, the wallet defines a route, for example arkade:BTC to lightning:BTC
Solvers provide pricing, liquidity, routing and execution.
RFQs can travel over Nostr.
A wallet can address one solver directly, or eventually publish an intent to a market where multiple solvers can return bids.
Nostr is just transport and discovery infrastructure here. Relays don’t select the solver, custody funds or enforce settlement.
The client selects a quote, verifies it and derives the settlement contract locally.
Funding that contract is the actual commitment.
For Lightning send, the solver pays the invoice first, learns the preimage, then uses it to claim the Arkade lockup. If it fails to execute, the contract defines the recovery path.
So you get a pretty clean separation.
Nostr for communication.
RFQ for price discovery.
Solvers for liquidity and execution.
Bitcoin contracts for enforcement.
One solver is still a dependency.
Multiple independent solvers speaking the same protocol become a market.
This is a much better abstraction than hardcoding liquidity providers into wallets.
Standardize execution, make providers replaceable, let liquidity compete.
Lightning is back.
A recent outage exposed the risk of having so much depend on a single provider.
We felt it, you too. We’re working to ensure this never happens again.
Today we are launching Intents, a shared market interface for payments & exchange, built on Bitcoin.