Opinion: Alex Shevchenko, co-founder of Aurora
Try buying it easily with a code today. You’ll be forced to strangle your wallet extensions, decipher long hexadecimal addresses, select networks, sign transactions, calculate unpredictable gas prices, and repeat all of this as the transaction gets stuck or fails.
You may also need to bridge assets across the chain. Only technically savvy users can complete the gauntlet.
Meanwhile, in traditional finance, Apple Pay completes a transaction in just one tap.
That’s the bar. In cryptography, the user experience remains in the dial-up era.
A simpler paradigm: just say what you want
Rather than letting users learn the mechanisms of swap, bridge and signature flow, intention-based architectures shift the mental model completely. The intention is to allow users to simply express their goal of “I want to pay $5 for this coffee” and allow the system to grasp the rest.
The term “intent” broadly refers to results-driven interactions across Crypto, a fundamental paradigm for simplifying all user actions, not just atomic cross-chain swaps.
Under the hood, intentions are met through a fast, reliable, minimal infrastructure where transactions are often carried out by market makers rather than traditional solver networks.
Users initiate results-driven requests, and the backend handles routing, execution, and payments without exposing the complexity of the wallet, gas fee, or chain. The result is a seamless, intentional experience that hides infrastructure while maintaining distributed guarantees.
Cryptography is not action driven, but results-driven.
Free from wallet type
The wallet-centric paradigm has long defined and constrained how users interact with cryptography.
New models have already emerged that completely remove the need for wallets. The PassKey-based system allows users to authenticate familiar tools such as Face ID and Touch ID. You can now eliminate seed phrases, secret key management, and passwords.
More importantly, intentional approaches are chain-independent. Users do not need to be mounted on a particular blockchain to trade or participate. Sending Crypto is as easy as sharing a signed link. No apps are installed and no wallet setup.
This intuitive and portable interaction is the key to ultimately driving mainstream adoption.
Recreate familiar financial experiences
Central exchanges like Binance conquered the market to prioritize user experiences. Infrastructure based on modern intent continues with familiar routes of comparable deposit, trade and withdrawal flows, with comparable payment speeds important, but significant differences.
Recently: Intention-based solutions can modify definition liquidity
By intent, smart contracts act as custody and payment layers, maintaining a secure on-chain ledger for user balance and most importantly publicly available and publicly available reservation decorations. The ultra-low rates on scalable blockchains make decentralized transactions practical for the first time.
This architecture is built to provide Web2-style payment rails rather than just traders, but features a scalable sharding infrastructure for use cases ranging from Defi swaps to booked flights.
Intent and AI are natural interfaces
If the intent is a new execution layer, the AI ​​Assistant will be a new interface layer.
Consider telling your assistant “send $50 in BTC to your brother” and “bet my Sol for the best yield.” I don’t manage my wallet, sign transactions, or worry about MEVs. We are expressing our goals. The assistant parses the request, the solver network fulfills it via intent, and the results are seamless.
AI and intentions rethink Crypto Ux from scratch and ultimately maintain the central doctrine of decentralization, tailoring (and beyond) traditional financial elegance.
The intent is an infrastructure that is particularly important for an increasingly agent-driven microtransaction-based AI economy. People are lazy and have no time. So, the microtransaction business model has failed, but subscription-based services thrive. Allowing payments is complicated and it’s easy to forget to cancel your subscription when you no longer use the service (especially with services that deliberately complicated UX). This situation will not last long.
AI agents think much faster. They can be optimized for price and rates. This is an easy and concrete feature to automate. Once AI agents reach a certain level of adoption, services that offer microtransactions thrive simply because all agents choose them over subscriptions.
This is the moment when the blockchain shines. Traditional payment systems such as Visa and MasterCard are not built for large quantities of conditional microtransactions. The intent allows for high levels of primitives for these financial interactions – direct payments, escrowed contracts, streamed payments, currency exchanges, etc.
Beyond payment
Payment is obviously the first application, but intent is not limited to retail. They abstract complexity from various multi-step transactions.
Perform multihop swaps between chains
Managing your cross-chain asset portfolio
Place gas-efficient limit orders on defi
Automate yield strategies based on dynamic conditions
This is the next generation of Crypto app infrastructure designed for everyone, not Degen’s power users.
The road ahead
Crypto’s disadvantaged UX has been the elephant in the room for years. Intention ultimately represents a turning point in industry maturation. Marks a shift from a protocol-centric design to an interface that is prioritized by user intent.
The intent is outcome-driven and intuitive, and reflects the way users actually want to trade, especially in an AI-driven future.
The true success of blockchain will come when users understand how it works but don’t realize that they are using it.
Opinion: Alex Shevchenko, co-founder of Aurora.
This article is for general informational purposes and is not intended to be considered legal or investment advice, and should not be done. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or express Cointregraph’s views and opinions.
