Intent-Cert

Counterfactual-stable route certification for intent-based markets.

Lab home · Project site · Paper · Repository

Research question

An AI agent holds an already-approved trading intent. Should it delegate the order to a solver market, execute directly against an automated market maker, or abstain because the available evidence cannot certify either route?

Intent-Cert specifies the estimand, counterfactual construction, three-way decision rule, leakage controls, and fail-closed adequacy gate for that creation-time decision. Delegate, Direct, and Abstain are evaluated in a common buy-token unit. A route is certifiable only when its complete feasible outcome envelope clears a frozen threshold.

Public status

Protocol and engineering-validation artifact; feasibility gate failed.

The fixed 20,000-block acquisition completed with 3,282 of 3,282 accounts and zero owner failures. It produced 2,216 eligible intents, but only 108 expired orders; the primary USDC/WETH cohort contained 13 expired orders, with 10 in calibration and 18 in the chronological test cohort across the full eligible frame. Those counts did not satisfy the frozen evidence requirements.

The gate therefore stopped downstream modeling. No comparative route- performance, welfare, profitability, or deployment claim is established. This negative feasibility result is the intended fail-closed behavior of the protocol, not a substitute endpoint.

The binding machine decision is recorded in artifacts/gate_a_final_decision.md.

What is public

• The reader-facing project site and venue-neutral research manuscript.
• The route-certification specification, gate logic, tests, and audit commands.
• Hash-bound engineering evidence and derived gate summaries.
• Explicit fallback, gas, fee-tier, information-clock, and abstention rules.

Raw and derived market data are rebuildable but excluded from Git. Public artifacts do not establish prospective validity, financial suitability, or authorization to trade.

Reproduce the engineering gate

python3.10 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.lock
.venv/bin/pip install -e . --no-deps

.venv/bin/aex-delegate audit-cow \
  --from-block 25529262 --to-block 25549261
.venv/bin/aex-delegate finalize-gate-a \
  --from-block 25529262 --to-block 25549261

.venv/bin/ruff check src tests
.venv/bin/pytest -q
.venv/bin/mypy src

The complete acquisition and validation path is scripts/reproduce_gate_a.sh. Historical-state RPC and quote probes are infrastructure checks only; they do not turn the failed feasibility gate into a scientific route comparison.

Scope and evidence map

• docs/fallback_and_abstention.md: payoff, fallback, and abstention semantics.
• docs/gate_a_finalization_protocol.md: frozen pass/fail checks.
• artifacts/settlement_timestamp_audit.md: exact settlement-time joins.
• artifacts/account_endpoint_semantics.md: account-versus-owner source rule.
• artifacts/rpc_capability_audit.md: historical-state capability probe and its limits.
• RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md: public-release verification.

Citation

Use CITATION.cff for the canonical project title and repository URL. The manuscript remains a research artifact; no venue affiliation or acceptance status is claimed.