Cross-chain funding has long been treated as a bridging problem — but Aurora Labs CEO Declan Hannon argues it’s actually a fragmentation problem, one that multiplies with every new chain a consumer product has to support. In this interview, Hannon walks through how Aurora Intents, built on the NEAR Intents protocol, is addressing that fragmentation for COCA, a fintech platform serving more than a million users across 75 countries. He discusses the mechanics of persistent deposit addresses, the solver-based execution model behind Aurora’s routing, and why he believes reducing user-facing complexity — not adding more chains — is what will ultimately drive crypto adoption into mainstream finance.
Q1. How is the partnership between Aurora Intents and COCA a significant landmark for Aurora Labs in the simplification of on-chain funding?
On-chain funding was never really a bridging problem. It’s a fragmentation problem. The problem is that every chain adds another funding path a consumer product has to account for. Coca has over a million users across 75 countries who would otherwise hit that, one chain at a time. Instead, Aurora Intents provides a single reusable address per user whilst managing that fragmentation underneath.
Q2. What important fundamental changes is Aurora Intents making to the overall consumer experience?
Put simply: no bridging, no waiting, no checking whether it landed, no retrying if it doesn’t. One signature, and our infrastructure manages the rest, the way people are already used to from traditional banking, just applied to something crypto’s never quite delivered on. Underneath, that’s Intents Deposits doing the work: a persistent deposit address, so a COCA user can top up their balance from USDC on Stellar, USDT on Tron, wherever the funds already sit, without touching a bridge themselves.
Q3. How is COCA clients’ ability to fund accounts via a persistent deposit address beneficial?
A persistent deposit address removes a repeated decision from the funding flow. A COCA user can save the address for a supported chain and use it again and again, whilst Aurora Intents handles the routing after the funds arrive. The routing complexity should stay inside the infrastructure because asking users to solve it on every deposit creates unnecessary friction and, more importantly, significant risks of losing assets or making a mistake.
Q4. What is the role of the solver-based model in enhancing cross-chain liquidity access and execution?
So Aurora Intents runs on the NEAR Intents protocol, which uses solvers competing to fulfil each intent. COCA, or any other integrator for that matter, do not need a direct liquidity relationship on every chain. Instead, the request is broadcast to the Solver network, which then competes to provide the best execution available. “Best” in this context is a combination of factors including the cost of the route, the speed of execution or the requirements of the integrated Partner. For COCA, this allows liquidity coverage to grow with the solver network whilst its own team avoids maintaining a separate liquidity route for every chain.
Q5. How is the elimination of blockchain complexity from the consumer interface crucial to expand the mainstream adoption of crypto products?
Adoption hasn’t been slow because there’s nothing to do on-chain. It’s slow because of what you need to understand before you can do it. Gas. Bridges. Which chain an asset actually lives on. None of that is the product. With the risk of mistakes being so high and the cost of mistakes potentially enormous, it has created a real roadblock for adoption, which we are now solving with products like Aurora Intents that banks and financial companies like Coca can easily leverage.
Q6. As Aurora Intents is widening intent-based execution beyond conventional DeFi utilities like liquidity routing and swaps, is user banking as well as payments the next key growth area?
Payments and account funding are important areas because users have very little tolerance for routing decisions in those moments. Depositing, transferring and spending from one place like Coca using Aurora Intents already transforms that user experience into what they are used to with neo-banks like Revolut and Monzo rather than traditional DeFi.
What’s more, though, we can actually take that further; for example, the interesting part about Intents Connect is it changes the fundamental thinking of “get funds to the right chain” to simply “get funds to the right product.” This means you can now stake on a chain you’ve never held gas for; get into a vault strategy on an ecosystem you’ve never bridged into or even rebalance a position across chains without ever holding the asset the destination actually needs. Users shouldn’t need to care about how to bridge, switch networks, or know where the yield even lives, which is exactly how fintech companies already operate today.
Q7. How has your professional experience changed your approach to developing Aurora in line with crypto and enterprise technology?
Having come from the fintech banking space, I understand how important UX and simplicity are to the user. Of course it’s not the only factor, cost and speed also matter. Take Revolut, for example; they started as a travel card that you could sign-up for and fully KYC in just 9 steps compared to the 78 steps HSBC used to demand. They made every aspect of banking simple and convenient, which is why they saw such big numbers. I try to take the same approach to Aurora, Our Intents product removes all the steps of bridging, routing, managing gas and wallets so that the only thing the user needs to care about is what they came to do in the first place. I believe fragmentation and silo’d networks have been one of the core issues with this industry ever since I entered in 2021 and at Aurora the core mission statement of our company is “making cross-chain convenient”. Aurora Intents delivers that.
Q8. What are the key challenges posed to Aurora Labs while broadening Aurora Intents to back more users, fintech entities, wallets, user applications, and chains?
A wallet like Solflare and a consumer app like COCA aren’t the same integration, or even sitting on the same infrastructure. Wallet users expect crypto-native behaviour and tolerate more visibility, whereas Fintech users often don’t know they’re touching a blockchain, and won’t forgive a failed transaction the way a crypto-native user might.
As a result, we often see that clients need very specific and nuanced features or tweaks to ensure seamless integration with more traditional tech stacks. This means working closely and collaboratively with our clients and Partners and also building out our infrastructure and Products to support an extremely wide set of use cases. This requires careful planning and flawless execution to deliver properly.
Q9. With reliability and security being the leading concerns for users when shifting assets across chains, how does Aurora Intents tackle this while maintaining a smooth user experience?
I think the biggest part of reliability and security is actually reducing the number of things a user has to get right.
In a typical cross-chain transaction, you’re asking the user to choose a bridge, switch networks, manage gas across different chains, approve multiple transactions, and sometimes make another swap once the bridge is complete. Every one of those steps is another point where something can go wrong.
With Aurora Intents, we flip that around. The user tells us what they want to achieve and signs that intent. From there, the infrastructure handles the complexity of getting them to that outcome, including finding the appropriate execution path through the NEAR Intents network.
So rather than asking users to understand all of the infrastructure underneath, we keep the interaction simple while still making sure the execution is based on exactly what they authorised. For me, that’s really the goal: cross-chain shouldn’t feel like using five different pieces of infrastructure. It should feel like one transaction.
