Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Get your weekly dose of Alpha Leaks. Tune in, ask questions, share good vibes!
Recorded: March 20, 2026 Duration: 0:23:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
Found a way through, carried every token like a message from you
No more broken tunnels, just a path that stays
Trustless, tireless, running night and day A roaring heart of a storm
Turned local, lucid, a newborn form
Plug in your vision, hit your boy
One click later, you're alive on day
All the means said to your soul
We drove a little more
Under every single joke was a battle plan
Raise your hands through the aurora
Watch it light the change tonight
From near it climbs
It runs the border
Bringing every dream inside
From the bridge into the future
Where the feet cut clean and grew
This is more than just a network. It's a promise shining through.
Hello, good afternoon and happy Friday. Welcome to this week's Alpha Leaks. My name is Declan.
I'm the CEO of Aurora and I'm also pleased to welcome Armand, our Head
of Product, to actually share a couple of the updates that we're going to be going through
today.
Now, before we start, as I mentioned last week, we had a big week this week.
As a leadership team, we met off-site to basically talk about what our strategy is looking like
for the next quarter and what of course 2026 looks
like as a whole. We have some really really exciting announcements that are going to be
coming in the next couple of weeks. Both our new kind of product iterations and of course some
core changes as well. You know back in December when I first took over from Alex, my very first Alpha Leaks, I said to everybody that we were transitioning Aurora to kind of hyper growth mode and really focusing on the growth of the company.
And that's really what the strategy meeting we had this week was about. We spent this quarter building a lot of the technology. We launched the new Intense Swap widget,
and we have some fantastic expansion plans
that is going to be extremely valuable
for a lot of projects and a lot of businesses going forwards.
So expect some changes to be announced in the coming weeks.
We are going to be changing quite a few things,
but it's absolutely going to be for the better,
and it's absolutely going to be for the better and it's absolutely going to support you know our vision really and our mission statement. We've always been heavily
focused on making blockchain as simple and convenient for everybody but with the advent
of near intense and with a lot of the work that we've been doing what we're really focusing on now is making cross-chain capability
convenient and simple for projects and businesses so more to come on that over the next few weeks
and now without further ado let's actually go into some of the updates from this week so
we've actually got a couple of new features and changes regarding the widget. And I've got Amand here.
You all know who he is.
So Amand, why don't you kick us off
and give us a bit of an update
on what you've been building.
Yeah, thanks Declan.
So yeah, so the widget is aimed to be the easiest way
to interact with the interns
and to do some question swaps.
And we do have a lot of features in the backlog,
and we're always releasing small improvements here and there.
With the plan of having actually bigger features
in the coming weeks, as Declan mentioned,
we will announce it in due time.
So this is what you're seeing here
as an example of an iteration of an existing feature about the deposit flow.
So before you had to select the exact amount that you wanted to deposit onto your Intense Balance.
Now we have removed that constraint and you can just deposit any amount as long as you select the asset and chain.
So as you can see, you just need to select the option
to deposit from external wallet, just select the asset,
and anything that you send to this address
will end up on your intense balance.
So it just makes it way more flexible for people to deposit
and a little bit more in line with what you would expect from uh from from from some kind
of like a new bank product in a way and then another feature that we added this week is the
support for uh for stellar and for the stellarets. So you are now able to connect your Stellar wallets
directly onto the widget and trade with it.
Okay, brilliant.
Thanks, Armand.
And I think there's another update
that was released this week as well, right?
Yes.
App mode.
Yes, also more for developers
to improve the visualization of the widget.
So there's two ways to integrate the widget.
You have either the standalone mode or the DAP mode.
So the standalone mode includes all the wallet connection
feature inside the widget itself.
The DAP mode reuses the Wallet Connect from your Dapp,
which makes more sense if you are adding the widget
to an existing website.
So before we didn't have the ability on the studio
to actually test that flow.
So now you do.
When you select Dapp mode, you have the Connect Wallet button that flow so now you do when you select that mode you have the
connect wallet button that appears at the top which kind of emulates what it would look like
on your on your own app brilliant thanks a man and obviously guys you know we are obviously aware of
you know what's coming so obviously you're seeing kind of features that are coming out that to you
guys you might be thinking well these are unconnected, what does this mean? Why are we
doing things in the order that we're doing it? But when we share the wider roadmap over the
next quarter with you guys and the direction that we're taking our products into, I think it's going to make a lot more sense.
Amand, is there anything else you want to add on the intent side, either from obviously the updates from this week or anything that we've been speaking about over the last week at the
OcSci? No, I think we're good. I think there might be some questions related to that so we can dive
there might be some questions related to that so we can dive into into something specific then
okay cool okay so moving on from um the intense updates there um of course near intense have also
um had a big big announcement this week they've just passed the 15 billion all-time volume
um you know i think i think given the state of the market over the past uh well i'd say three
months but it's been longer than that um you know the the fact that they're still seeing month-on-month growth and volume
increases is just a testament. And of course, the launch of near.com is only going to kind of
accelerate that along with all of the partnerships that are being announced and coming at the moment.
Coming back to the Aurora ecosystem, Omega, one of our partners, have actually expanded their prediction markets.
So they now actually support a wider range of options available.
You've got music, you've got stocks.
If you haven't checked out what they're doing, please do.
Their platform Olympus, which is part of the Omega network, which is built on Aurora,
is constantly being kind of fed new updates and new opportunities
for people to take part in within their applications. Now, we're going to come to the
meme competition of the week. It seems that there's something happening that even I'm not
aware of, right? So the theme this week seems to be having a special guest on AlphaLeague. So
I don't know if someone forgot to update me on this,
but actually I think it's a pretty cool idea.
You know, so if any of you as members of our community
would like to be a guest on Alpha League,
to talk about your views on Aurora,
you know, what you've been doing within our ecosystem
or what you're doing in general or things that you would like to see,
please do reach out.
You can tweet me directly
or you can reach out to Igor or the team.
Why not?
I think it'd be quite an interesting thing actually
to have some of our community members coming on here,
putting a face behind the name
and giving us their views
and what they would like to see as well.
So let's have a look then. Plotting on how to become a special guest of Alpha Leaks. God, there you've got the powerhouse
of actors there. Major Lazer, me and my friends celebrating, special guest. Alpha Leaks are my
exams. Okay. Johnny English. Good choice, Craig. Okay, we've we've gone from praise here me as a guest yeah see i think they're all on this today so
clearly i've missed the memo somewhere um when i got to know i'm the special guest of our folks
yeah you could help select the memes to be fair uh i would give you that honour, although you can't select yourself.
Thank you, Dungeon Master.
Immortal.
Want to stack up some funds and me positions for guest speakers.
Why not turn this Friday for a full package of Alpha Leagues?
Okay.
Social anxiety being caught on stage.
When Armand pretends to be me on friday athletics but can't do it like the master the community sees through it that's right armand you've been caught buddy
far enough i i like that zane you you're uh you're winning you're winning one of them this week and
just by dumb luck um it was when armand was on with me as well uh you know which
which just makes it even better uh leotan yeah included a special guest
and special guest okay julian okay so yeah um dungeon master you can have the second one
and craig i'm going to give you the third just because i'm a huge fan of rowan atkinson
so they are our three winners for this week um As I said, there's going to be some really big
updates that's coming from us. I actually think we're going to be sharing some of those announcements
next week, not to put any pressure on you, Oman. So please do join us next week and really find
out more about what we're going to be doing. It's going to be a really important thing. It's going to be a really important update as to what we're going to be doing. It's going to be a really important thing.
And it's going to be a really important update
as to what we're going to be working on
and what the future of Rural looks like
with that 2026 as well.
So let's have a quick look at the questions.
What do we have today?
What next will be added on the Near Intense widget?
So obviously, Armand has just walked us through
two of the updates.
Today, we've got the qr code for deposits to provide that kind of neobank-like experience
and we've now got that mode as well um to help builders navigate the functionality and the
workings of the widget when deploying it to the gap and of course we'll be sharing some pretty
big updates uh again the the goal is to share those next week.
But there's one small thing we can also share that we're working on.
It's the well-weighted feature, which is the transaction history.
So that is being tested at the moment.
So hopefully we'll be able to release next week.
Amazing.
Now, and that is something that actually
that quite a few of the projects and users have requested, so it'd be good to see that live,
and of course shared along with our other updates next week as well. Okay, so Liatan, hello,
any new projects for Calix in Spring 2026? Yeah, I'm going to be giving a bigger update on that
next week, so please do stay tuned. I'll be providing some more information on Calix the
future of Calix and what we're doing there on next Friday session okay we have a question here
does the near buybacks with intensities happen in real time that is per swap
that's not really that's not really an update for me that's not something that we control
you know or really have an input in that's something really an update for me that's not something that we control um you know
or really have an input in that's something that is done externally to aurora i'm not involved
unfortunately in the in the workings of that um okay immortal please can you give a breakdown
of the near intense widget will it be easier for newbies yeah um so look the whole point of the
swap widget is for people like newbies.
In fact, one of the more interesting things that I think it was Amand yourself who did
this was integrating the Intense widget with the Claude skill so that people can literally
just ask Claude to integrate it for them.
So it really is designed for kind of no code scenarios.
Now, of course, Near Intense has a native API called One Click
Swap, and a lot of projects that want to have kind of complete
end-to-end control natively within their application
are going down that route.
But the Near Intense widget is designed
for a much lighter touch.
You can go in, you can customize the color schemes,
the fees, the networks, the tokens that are applicable. And of course, more and more features that are going to be coming.
And you can do all of that within our studio, and then literally embed the code and off you go.
So it is designed for newbies. It is very light touch. And you know, you can test it out yourself.
Just go to intense.aurora.dev. You don't you know, it's completely free, there's no cost.
But it will give you an opportunity to see how the product actually works um okay so any other near future
updates regarding intense yes next week uh so join me next friday and there'll be some very big
updates on what's coming in q2 okay what inspired the new focus on cross-chain capabilities?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So look, obviously, near intense and the monumental success that has been seen there played a part into why we've been looking at this direction.
look at what Aurora has been doing over the past three years since I've been here,
everything we've been doing has been designed in a way to kind of abstract the complexity and
remove the difficulties when interacting with blockchain, right? So we have virtual chains,
which you can deploy with no code, that provides you the oracles, that provides you
the block explorers and all of the relevant integrations via the Aurora Cloud Marketplace.
the block explorers and all of the relevant integrations via the aurora cloud marketplace
but what we found from clients that were using it is they also wanted to be able to tap into
other networks and really the first iteration of this is something we call the forwarder
it's not really a product actually we talk that much about to be honest because it was kind of
designed as a unique use case for a couple of key partners that we had but arguably that was kind of designed as a unique use case for a couple of key partners that we had.
But arguably, that was kind of, you know, the first step in that direction, right?
Being able to bring assets from other networks seamlessly without having to manually, you know, bridge tokens across multiple networks.
But with the advent of Intense, all of a sudden that just massively unlocked the potential that was available to us.
And more importantly, the liquidity.
And many of you may have already read some of the articles where I've been talking about this, you know,
and the idea of kind of integrating and moving towards this kind of integrated system rather than everything operating in silo.
Calix was the next iteration and the next step that we took in this direction.
Calix was arguably the first main project
that was built on Near Intense, right?
And the idea being that users from 11 different networks,
well, actually up to 22 different networks
could participate in token sales
in a way that was never possible before,
seamlessly and easily
and really it's kind of been the evolution from that right you know we listen to the feedback
from our clients and our partners obviously we're attending events obviously we're working
very closely with ecosystem partners like diffused like the near foundation um and this has been the
natural evolution uh you know and of course it's
also a great way for Aurora to become more sustainable as a company which of course is
important when the market is not performing you know in a bullish way and that's brought us to
where we are today and you'll find out more next week in terms of the the direction that we're
going in but yes it's absolutely focusing around cross-chain capabilities um let's have a look um i once saw a tweet sounds like it
sounds like a star for once upon a time story i once saw a tweet of someone complaining of not
being able to access his funds isn't near intense fully custodial okay great question so the issue around accessing funds it's not about
custody uh it's actually about regulation so one of the legal requirements that anybody operating
um something like near intense has is to ensure um you know that you're not allowing money laundering
uh and illicit activity from taking place there are automated safeguards in place to do that, because otherwise platforms like
this can be used for washing and all sorts of other kind of malicious activity, which
of course regulators and authorities don't take kindly to.
So the only kind of instance where funds would be blocked is where some of these funds are
what we would call black funds, right?
And it's not something that's done centrally, right?
There aren't people that are going through and doing it.
These are automated third-party systems that operate across kind of any platform
that you will interact with on crypto, right?
Any on-ramp, off-ramp, centralized exchange, decentralized exchange.
It's not the near-intense team, or indeed us,
if it happens through the widget that's blocking these things.
It's the automated systems that are in place that are legal requirements. the near intense team or indeed us if it happens through the widget that's blocking these things
it's the automated systems that are in place that are legal requirements um you know it doesn't mean
they're blocked forever and of course i'm i'm sure every now and again there'll be a false positive
but there is a process in place for when that happens to ensure um the the outcome ends in the correct way. Let's have a look.
Do we have any other questions?
How does Near Intense handle large volume swaps without slippage?
Yeah, great question.
Amand, maybe this is one you'd like to take actually,
because this is something we were
only Tuesday, was it Wednesday?
Sure, so it's all thanks to the way Intense
has been built because you have the network of solvers
that are facilitating the trades. And the advantage of having a setup like that is that those solvers
can leverage liquidity from any sources of their own. So of course everything within Intense
sources of their own. So of course everything within Intense is happening on chain, but those
solvers to do their counter trading to facilitate those trades can use liquidity from centralized
exchanges, from other DEXs, from any other source that makes sense to them. So that's why they're
able to provide better quotes and in any case all the solvers are
competing for the best price when someone is requesting a quote and the combination of
those two means that you can have the best prices on the end ends and also at larger volume
yeah and it's also worth adding here that um you know, one of the big advantages of this
setup as well is it means that products like ours, you know, the swap which sits on top
of near intense can also tap in to these massive liquidity pools and can also allow projects to
facilitate much larger trades because they're not having to worry about both sets of pairs.
They only have to worry about their own token
and providing that as a liquidity loan.
So that's obviously hugely advantageous,
especially to smaller projects that, you know,
don't have a spare half a mil, right?
Sitting around that they can provide in USDC
alongside their own token to facilitate those swaps.
You know, and again, when we share some more updates next week,
hopefully it'll paint a better picture of where we're going
and the direction we're going.
But everything we're doing is really to support that builders
and it's really to support ecosystems
because we are obviously seeing the, you know,
an evolution within our space,
this migration towards the super app experience, right?
And there's a
lot of daps and a lot of founders that I'm speaking to at the moment that are genuinely
nervous about this because where does that leave them right well we have a very good answer to this
question and it's an answer that I'll be sharing with you guys next week okay I think there's one
more question from Craig does Aurora does aurora get a portion
of the swap fees from the swap widget yes we do um so essentially with the swap widget the the the
project can set any fee they want um and they then retain 60 of the fees uh and aurora retains 40
of the fees which then goes back into developing the product and of course projects could also
choose not to charge any fees,
they just want to be able to provide a better user experience for their users and in that scenario
obviously the revenue share doesn't apply but there is a minimum fee of two bips which is still lower than anyone else you're going to see on the market but is also critical just for kind of ensuring that the infrastructure is serviceable
and fundable. So I think I've covered every question. If I haven't, apologies. I will,
of course, be back next week with more updates. In fact, I might even be back with Armand because
a lot of the updates will be in relation to the hard work that him and his team are doing at the
moment. I wish everybody a fantastic weekend. Rest and i look forward to speaking to you all next week take care Thank you.
