Why Use Saline?
To answer the question, "Why should I use or switch to Saline?", here’s the short, direct explanation:
- You can do everything you already do on other networks,
- With increased security (you retain full custody—there are no smart contracts that can fail and lose your assets),
- With greater flexibility (our intent system supports more features than any other),
- With extreme simplicity (yes, you can literally drag and drop blocks),
- And with access to features that are either not possible elsewhere or are too complex and expensive to use.
In More Detail
The Saline Network is designed to be intuitive and logical. If, after learning how it works, your reaction is “This makes sense—why isn’t crypto already like this?”, then we’ve achieved our goal. That’s exactly the experience we’re aiming for.
Decentralized Without Delegation of Custody
Saline operates with a standard proof-of-stake consensus and a set of validators that verify whether transactions comply with the custom rules (intents) attached to the wallet addresses they touch.
This is what we mean by intent-governed: verification happens at the validator level, and it’s mandatory. This differs from Layer 2 rollups, where solvers bundle transactions and send them back to a Layer 1 like Ethereum, which does not natively support intents. In Saline, user-defined rules are embedded directly into the base protocol, making them as secure as the chain itself.
Key properties:
- When users attach a rule to their assets, any transaction touching that address must pass verification—whether it's incoming, outgoing, a swap, loan, etc.
- This is non-optional: similar to how Ethereum rejects transactions with invalid signatures, Saline rejects transactions that do not conform to wallet intents.
- Because these rules are part of the chain and enforced by consensus, complex operations can be trivially encoded, eliminating the need for third-party wallet apps that take custody of your assets.
With Saline, you remain the sole and complete custodian of your assets.
Simple. Extremely Simple.
Saline was created out of frustration with the complexity and cost of existing crypto systems. Whenever users want to perform anything more than a simple transfer, they’re often forced to:
- Use complex and error-prone smart contracts (if they know how to write them), or
- Sign up with centralized platforms and give up custody of their assets.
After 15 years in crypto, we believed users deserved better.
Saline is based on the assumption that everyone should be able to do what they want with their assets simply and without trusting intermediaries.
Whether you want to schedule transfers, protect assets, or define logic around them—it’s all done by drag-and-dropping a few blocks in our graphical interface.
Soon, it will be even simpler with our Intent Marketplace—an App Store-like platform for reusable, pre-built intents.
And simpler still with a GPT/LLM integration: just describe what you want in English, and intents will be auto-generated for you.
We’ve looked; there is no simpler platform.
Focus on the Outcome
Saline is built on a simple philosophy:
State what you want, not how to get it.
Crypto should be accessible to everyone—not just developers or early adopters. That's why Saline is declarative: users express desired outcomes, not implementation details.
The network then determines the path to realization. Whether the result is a basic transfer or a complex, multi-party atomic bundle of swaps and orders—it doesn’t matter. Validation guarantees correctness as long as all intents are satisfied.
It’s a hard stop - A guarantee.
A Note On Validators
The Saline Network being a verification layer (vs. an execution layer for traditional blockchains) means that very little work is done in the nodes; however complex the transaction or intents might be.
An immediate conclusion is that the burden of carefully balancing how much users have to pay (the gas fees) and how much interested parties are rewarded (validators) is lightened considerably. As a first approximation (which is not true): the cost "being constant", the majority of what is being paid by users can directly go to validators.
Of course, reality is slightly different: transactions costs are not constant (if nothing else, the more complex a transaction is, the more bytes, hence storage it consumes), but the cost grows so much slower than for Smart Contracts that it gives us much more margin to operate with. Thus:
- costs can be kept extremely low for users (if only one example: a (guaranted atomic) swap costs about the same as a simple one-way transfer)
- validators get rewarded a higher share, with a comparatively small cost of operation
These factors, when coupled with our Transaction Fee Mechanism (TFM), make validators in Saline extremely profitable.