Aurora CEO Declan Hannon on the shift from virtual chains to Aurora Intents, why Web2 users want privacy, a no-upfront-fee commercial model and what is on the Q4 roadmap.
Declan Hannon took over as Aurora's chief executive the same week its token listed on Revolut, and he admits he had half forgotten the coincidence. "I've obviously been with Aurora for over 3 years now anyway," he told Block Insider at TOKEN2049 Singapore. His predecessor and co-founder, Alex Shevchenko, "spent the better part of six years building all of the infrastructure and technology that Aurora relies on today."
Hannon's job, as he describes it, is narrower and harder: get people to use it. According to him,
"My job now really is just to kind of push that forward and to accelerate that growth so that clients are able to use our technology, customers are able to rely on our technology, and Aurora as a company is able to grow and prosper. That's really been the focus of the last 8 months."
Hannon's appointment came attached with the phrase "commercial execution," and he was the first to admit it sounds like a slogan. He said,
"It sounds, you know, almost like a power term, right? But in reality, what we needed to do was package our products in a way that businesses and projects would be able to take them and then go to market straight away."
The result is Aurora Intents. Launched in April, Aurora now sells a menu rather than selling a chain. "What Aurora Intents has allowed projects to do is to be able to choose the products that best suit their kind of use case," Hannon said. Illustrative use cases he cited include a banking application needing deposits, a recent launch wanting only swaps for Zcash. "We've packaged kind of a suite of products in a way that builders can just choose what they want," he added.
The pricing is where the model differs from most infrastructure vendors. "We don't charge an upfront development fee, or an upfront integration fee, or a license fee," Hannon said, adding,
"Instead, we say, 'Look, if you don't want to charge fees, there's our technology. There's a minimum. If you do want to charge fees, we share in the success.' And I think that's the right way to do it."
The line he kept returning to: "We only win if our partners and projects win."
Hannon spent years at Revolut before Aurora, so the question of what crypto has failed to learn from fintech was aimed squarely at him. His answer was not onboarding or UX. It was privacy. According to him,
"Crypto has celebrated the idea of transparency for as long as I've been in the space. But what we've really seen over the last 12 months, or a bit more, is actually this stronger push towards privacy."
The reason, in his opinion, is that the users now arriving are not crypto natives. He said, "You're coming across users that want to be able to protect their assets. They don't want their trading strategies to be shared online. They don't want other people to know what their salaries are, or what tokens they're most interested in buying."
That is the thread running through the product work since April. Confidential Intents, which hides the details of a swap, is live. Shielded addresses are next. "That's going to allow users to not only ensure that their swaps are confidential, but actually if they're receiving assets from somebody or sending assets, they're able to shield their wallet address as well."
Aurora took what Hannon called "the unusual step" of publishing its fourth-quarter roadmap in a community session a few weeks before the conference. "We've got our core products in a place that we're really happy with," he said, adding,
"What we wanted to do was share what's coming next so that our partners, our clients, people in the ecosystem, and our community are able to see that and respond to that."
The list he gave: shielded addresses on the deposit products, a reworked developer integration path based on "a lot of feedback from our flagship clients that we went live with in Q3", and two items he would not name. "We're also going to be doubling down in a couple of new areas. I won't go too much into it now, but there are some hints online," said Hannon and further emphasized, “There's going to be a pretty big new product. But I can't say anything about that yet because there are a lot of moving parts involved."
Pressed on the longer roadmap, he laughed at his own answer. "Sorry, that's a very politician-like answer, but there's really not much else I can reveal at this stage."
Aurora has talked about bringing non-EVM liquidity, Solana's in particular, onto EVM chains. Asked why EVM ecosystems have not cared more about that, Hannon turned the question around. He said,
"It's not that we don't care. It's more that the user doesn't care, right? Users have their intention. This is the whole purpose around the whole Intents brand…They want to be able to move their assets from A to B."
Solana matters because "there's a lot of liquidity that wants to be able to enter and exit," and Aurora's job is to make sure "the routes via Aurora Intents, through the solver network at the Near Protocol level, have enough liquidity for users to be able to do whatever they want to do."
Intents Connect, which lets projects interact at the smart contract level, launched with Solana among its first integrations.
The sharpest question was about Aurora's earlier strategy. The company launched more than 200 virtual chains. How many have real users?
"You're going back a bit now," Hannon said, then answered it.
"With virtual chains, we made a decision at the time to go for volume. I think there was a target for 100 chains or something like that. But actually, what we quickly realized after going live with this campaign was that virtual chains solve very specific use cases."
The pivot came from that realization. "Paradoxical as it sounds, that's actually where Near Intents came from. We built Intents because we realized that people and users actually care less about chains themselves and care much more about being able to fulfill their intended action."
He did not abandon the product. Banking, he said, still needs "a trustless environment for partner banks, other banks, and payment providers," and TurboChain "had a fantastic community that got behind this idea of a chain for their own ecosystem." But the role has changed.
"Virtual chains are going to have a slightly different purpose. And actually, that's probably a great clue as to what might be coming up in the future in relation to Aurora."
Hannon's closing advice to new entrants was about what kind of project survives. "It's a very different space than what it was 24 months ago, 4 years ago, or even 12 months ago. The projects that will succeed in this cycle are not going to be just projects that are purely speculative and hype-driven. They're going to be projects that have an actual product that solves an actual problem."
For a company that once measured itself in chain count, it is also a description of the turn Aurora has taken under him.
"If you've got that, an idea, and a product in mind, there's never been a better time to do it."
This article is information, not financial advice.
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