Intents fix crypto’s UX crisis.

Opinion by: Alex Shevchenko, co-founder of Aurora

Try to make a simple purchase with crypto today. You are forced to wrangle wallet extensions, decipher long hexadecimal addresses, select networks, sign transactions, calculate unpredictable gas fees and repeat all of these because your transactions get stuck or fail.

Sometimes, you also need to bridge assets across chains. It’s a gauntlet that only a technically savvy user can complete.

Meanwhile, in traditional finance, Apple Pay completes a transaction in a single tap.

That’s the bar. In crypto, the user experience remains stuck in the dial-up era.

A simpler paradigm: Just say what you want

Rather than forcing users to learn the mechanics of swaps, bridges and signing flows, intent-based architecture shifts the mental model entirely. Intents let users express their goals simply, “I want to pay $5 for this coffee,” and let the system figure out the rest. 

The term “intents” refers broadly to outcome-driven interactions across crypto — not just atomic crosschain swaps, but a foundational paradigm for simplifying all user actions.

Under the hood, intents are fulfilled through high-speed, trust-minimized infrastructure where trades are executed by designated actors, often market makers, rather than traditional solver networks.

Users initiate outcome-driven requests, and the back-end handles routing, execution and settlement without exposing wallets, gas fees, or chain complexity. The result is a seamless, intent-driven experience that hides infrastructure while preserving decentralized guarantees.

Crypto becomes outcome-driven, not action-driven.

Break free from the wallet mold

The wallet-centric paradigm has long defined how users interact with crypto, and it also constrained it.

A new model that removes the need for wallets entirely is already emerging. Passkey-based systems now allow users to authenticate with familiar tools like Face ID or Touch ID, eliminating seed phrases, private key management and passwords.

More importantly, an intent-based approach is chain-agnostic. Users don’t need to be onboarded to a specific blockchain to transact or participate. Sending crypto becomes as simple as sharing a signed link. No app installs, no wallet setup.

This intuitive, portable interaction is ultimately key to driving mainstream adoption.

Replicate familiar financial experiences

Centralized exchanges like Binance conquered the market because they prioritized user experience. Modern intent-based infrastructure follows that familiar route of deposit, trade and withdrawal flow with comparable settlement speeds but with crucial differences.

Recent: Intent-based solutions can fix DeFi liquidity

With intents, smart contracts serve as the custody and settlement layers, maintaining secure onchain ledgers of user balances, and most crucially, publicly available proof-of-reserves. Ultra-low fees of scalable blockchains make decentralized trading practical for the first time.

This architecture is also not just for traders — it’s built to provide Web2-style payment rails but with scalable, sharded, onchain infrastructure for use cases ranging from DeFi swaps to booking flights.

Intents and AI are a natural interface

Where intents are the new execution layer, AI assistants become the new interface layer.

Consider telling your assistant, “Send $50 in BTC to my brother,” or “Stake my SOL for the best yield.” You’re not managing wallets, signing transactions or worrying about MEV — you’re expressing a goal. The assistant parses your request, the solver network fulfills it via intents, and the result is seamless.

Together, AI and intents reimagine crypto UX from the ground up, finally matching (and exceeding) the elegance of traditional finance while maintaining the core tenets of decentralization.

Intents are especially critical infrastructure for an increasingly agent-driven, microtransaction-based AI economy. People are lazy and don’t have time. That’s why microtransactions business models failed, while subscription-based services thrive: It’s complicated to authorize payments all the time, and it’s easy to forget to cancel the subscription when you no longer use the service (especially with services intentionally complicating the UX to do it). This status quo won’t last. 

AI agents think much faster. They’ll be able to optimize for price and fees, which is an easy, tangible function to automate. Once AI agents reach a certain level of adoption, services offering microtransactions will flourish simply because all agents will choose them over subscriptions.

This is the moment for blockchains to shine: Traditional payment systems like Visa and Mastercard aren’t built for high-volume and conditional microtransactions. Intents will enable higher-level primitives for these financial interactions — direct payments, escrowed agreements, streamed payments, currency exchange and much more.

Beyond payments

While payments are the obvious first application, intents aren’t limited to retail. They abstract away complexity from a variety of multi-step transactions:

• Executing multi-hop swaps across chains

• Managing crosschain asset portfolios

• Placing gas-efficient limit orders in DeFi

• Automating yield strategies based on dynamic conditions

This is infrastructure for the next generation of crypto apps, designed not for degen power users but for everyone.

The path forward

Crypto’s unnavigable UX has been the elephant in the room for years. Intents finally represent a turning point in our industry’s maturation. They mark a shift from protocol-centric design to interfaces that prioritize user intent.

Intents are outcome-driven, intuitive, and reflect the way users actually want to transact, particularly in an AI-driven future.

The true success of blockchain won’t come when users understand how it works — it will come when they don’t even realize they’re using it.

Opinion by: Alex Shevchenko, co-founder of Aurora.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.