What actually happens between “buy me some ETH” and an on-chain transaction.
A DeFAI agent turns your instruction into action in a few steps: parse your intent, decide the strategy or route, and execute on-chain from a wallet — either yours (non-custodial) or one it generates. The big design questions are who holds the keys, how much autonomy the agent has, and how it protects you from bad fills.
Generated-wallet model: fast directed transactions from natural language.
Assistant model: parses your request and routes swaps/bridges across chains.
Strategy model: backtests first, then executes a defined quant strategy.
Always check the wallet model and how much authority you grant — that’s where the real risk lives.