The funding problem nobody had solved Every wallet faces the same drop-off. A user arrives ready to participate, and then hits the hardest step in crypto: getting their funds onto the chain i
Every wallet faces the same drop-off. A user arrives ready to participate, and then hits the hardest step in crypto: getting their funds onto the chain in the first place. For Solana, that friction was acute. If your assets lived on Ethereum, Bitcoin, or any other chain, the path onto Solana ran through a bridge — and bridging has been the most anxiety-inducing experience in the space for years.
The problem was never just the number of steps. It was architectural. Traditional bridges rely on lock-and-mint: your asset is locked in a contract on the source chain and a wrapped representation is minted on the destination. That model is the reason users end up holding tokens they didn't ask for, and it's the root of most of the industry's largest exploits. On top of that, the flow demanded connecting a wallet — often holding significant funds — to an unfamiliar third-party application, approving multiple transactions across two chains, and waiting. On mobile, it was close to impossible.
Solflare wanted to erase all of it. The goal was specific: take the mental model of a Solana-to-Solana transfer — instant, reliable, something every user already trusts — and apply it to funds arriving from any chain. Not a better bridge UI. A different primitive.
“Bridging has always carried too much anxiety — too many steps, too much that can go wrong. We chose Aurora Intents because its intent-based model removes all of that: you state what you want on Solana, and you receive the real token, on one permanent address for each source-chain-and-token pair that you can reuse forever. No dApp to connect, no wrapped assets. We think this turns the hardest part of getting onto Solana into something as simple and trusted as a send — and makes Solflare the natural home for funds flowing in from every major chain.” — Vidor Gencel, co-founder and co-CEO, Solflare
The conceptual shift that made this possible is the move from routing to intents.
A traditional bridge integration asks the user — or the wallet — to select a route and execute it: choose the path, handle the source transaction, manage destination gas, deal with the wrapped output. An intent-based model inverts that. The user states a desired outcome — “I want to receive SOL on Solana” — and a network of solvers competes to fulfill it, delivering the real asset. The user never touches the machinery.
That inversion maps almost perfectly onto a deposit-address product. If the user's only job is to state what they want and send funds, then the wallet's job is simply to represent that intent as an address and let the network do the rest. This is the insight the whole feature is built on.
Solflare chose Aurora Intents as the execution layer.
Aurora Intents was the execution layer that natively supported the deposit-address primitive Solflare needed — a deterministic, reusable address per user per chain, rather than a one-time route. A few other factors matter too. Aurora Intents works the same way across very different chains — EVM, Bitcoin, and Tron — so Solflare didn't need separate solutions for each. There's enough liquidity behind it to make sure transfers actually go through, not just "best effort." And every transfer comes with a guaranteed minimum amount out, locked in before it even runs — so Solflare never had to build their own backup plans for slippage or failed transfers.
Aurora Intents runs on top of NEAR Intents, the solver network developed by NEAR Protocol — infrastructure that has settled more than $24+ billion in volume since launch, with over $2.3 billion moving through it monthly. Solflare's deposits now run on that same foundation.
The product expression of an intent is a permanent deposit address — and its properties are what make the experience feel like a send.
Deterministic and permanent. Each address is deterministic per source-chain and destination-token pair. Ethereum → SOL is one address; Ethereum → USDC is a different one. Critically, the address is permanent — it doesn't expire after a single use. A user saves it once and reuses it for every future deposit of that pair, the way you'd save an exchange deposit address or a bank account number for a specific rail.
A persistent address is determined by three things: the user's Solflare wallet, the origin chain, and the token they want to receive on Solana. That combination always resolves to the same address, which is what makes it safe to save and reuse — change the receive token and you get a different address.
Solflare does not compute the address themselves — Aurora derives it from those inputs, with the user's Solana wallet fixed into it at creation, so whatever arrives there can only settle to that wallet.
The intent lifecycle. Once the user sends assets to that address, the flow runs without further input:
From the sender's perspective, their part ended at step one. Everything after is the network fulfilling the intent. Settlement is typically under a minute from EVM chains and around 14 minutes from Bitcoin.
The net effect: no dApp connection, no route selection, no destination-gas management, no wrapped tokens. The entire bridge operation collapses into an action every user already knows — sending to an address.
On Solflare's side, the integration surface was deliberately lightweight.
The frontend is intentionally minimal: show the address, render it as a QR code, and let the user watch the deposit land. That's the entire visible product.
The backend surface is deliberately small too: we ask Aurora which chains and tokens are supported, create deposit addresses, and track what happened to deposits. Almost everything we wrote lives between those calls. Under the hood, every asset has a technical identifier that no human should ever have to read, and they aren't even consistent between chains. So our job was to keep the map between the two worlds and make sure nothing unsupported can ever reach the screen — the user only ever sees a clean list of chains and tokens, and an address.
On fees, we wanted to be transparent with users, so we set different fee layers depending on what's being transferred — and the right rate applies at the moment the deposit arrives.
“The frontend was almost the easy part — an address, a QR code, a status view. The real work was the abstraction underneath: making sure a user only ever sees ‘send to this address,’ whether the funds are coming from Bitcoin or an EVM chain, when those chains behave nothing alike under the hood. Aurora Intents carried the hardest piece of that — the routing and settlement — so we could keep the surface we exposed to users genuinely simple. The thing that surprised me was how little we had to build on our side once the intent model clicked. We spent more time deciding what to hide from the user than writing integration code.” — Murat Dacić, Engineer, Solflare
"A deposit address looks simple on the surface. Under the hood, the intent is fixed the moment funds land — the user's told us what they want on Solana — and the solver network competes on execution: best route, best price, a guaranteed minimum out. Solflare's requirement was specific: a permanent, deterministic address per chain-and-token pair, not a one-time route. That's exactly the primitive intents are built for. Getting it production-ready at their scale forced us to harden edge cases — liquidity gaps, malformed deposits, timing — that make the system more reliable for everyone else building on it too." — Chris Gutkowski, Tech Lead - Aurora Labs
The collaboration itself moved fast because it ran engineer-to-engineer, with a named owner on each side rather than a support queue in between.
“Honestly, it felt like one team. We had a direct line to Aurora's engineers the whole way — questions got answered the same day, and when we hit something unexpected there was always a real person on the other side who owned it with us.” — Murat Dacić, Solflare
"Our goal the whole way was to support their team, whatever came up, we made sure they had what they needed to ship. Direct line to their engineers, no queue, no relay. Address derivation edge case, an unhardened chain — whoever could fix it got looped in same day. That's how the entire integration took roughly two weeks." — Chris Gutkowski, Tech Lead - Aurora Labs
Bridge launched to all Solflare users across mobile, web, and the browser extension, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Tron, NEAR, and Base supported as source chains at launch and more planned. For the first 30 days, all deposits are free (up to $125k in total waived fees); the standing rate afterward is 0.1% for stablecoin-to-stablecoin transfers and 1% for other assets, calculated on the token received.
The outcome for users is the thing worth measuring: the hardest, most abandonment-prone step in the Solana journey now behaves like a send. No wrapped assets, no dApp connection, and a permanent address that turns one-time onboarding into a repeatable rail — the same address, reused every time funds come in from a given chain.
Bridging, in a sense, has gone full circle: from the most painful flow in crypto to something a first-time user can do without thinking about the bridge at all. For Solflare and Aurora, that's the point.
