After an outage that exposed the risk of relying on a single provider, Arkade introduces a common interface for requesting executable quotes, selecting conditions, and settling payments or swaps on Bitcoin with defined recovery paths.
Arkade has launched Intents, an open interface that standardises how wallets and applications request executable conditions from providers for payments and swaps. The announcement follows an outage that, according to the post published on X, exposed the risk of depending on a single provider – in Arkade’s case, and in many other ecosystems, Boltz.
The proposed response is a common layer between products and operators. In the technical post dedicated to Intents, the project describes a market currently fragmented across different APIs, quote formats, transaction flows, and recovery procedures.
With Intents, an application sends a request containing the details approved by the user – such as asset, amount, destination, price limit, or expiry. Compatible providers respond with conditions they are willing to execute; the product decides which operators to use and which offers to display. The wallet verifies the selected quote and funds the route.
The flow is summarised in four steps: intent, quote, fund, fill or recover. The transaction built on Arkade establishes what the provider must deliver in order to be paid, how long the agreement lasts, and when the user may cancel or recover funds. For a swap internal to Arkade, recovery coincides with cancellation; if the route crosses another payment network, a time-based refund applies.
Each provider retains control over routes, assets, prices, fees, capacity, expiries, limits, and compliance requirements, and may decline a request. A single integration can thereby distribute the same service across multiple wallets and financial products. This is the infrastructure direction for which Ark Labs had raised 5.2 million dollars. Bitcoin remains the settlement boundary and external exit point outside the commercial relationship: amounts, destinations, expiries, and recovery are defined in the transaction, while providers handle liquidity and routing.
