The One Idea That Could Finally Make Crypto Work for Everyone
In Brief
Mounir Benchemled, founder of Velora, argues that DeFi’s user interface is broken, despite significant technical progress. He proposes Intents as a potential solution, aiming to make DeFi feel complete.
According to Mounir Benchemled, founder of Velora and an early innovator in decentralized exchange aggregation, despite billions of dollars locked in DeFi and years of technical progress, decentralized finance still feels broken for the average user.
Gas fees fluctuate wildly. Wallets require constant attention. Bridges are fragile. And navigating across multiple chains often feels more like debugging than investing.
In theory, DeFi should be simple: permissionless, global, and intuitive. In reality, it’s anything but.
“Crypto was designed for protocols, not for people,” says Benchemled. “We’ve made big strides in scalability and composability, but the average user still has to think like a blockchain engineer just to make a basic trade.”
He argues that we’ve reached the limit of what minor UX improvements and protocol tweaks can achieve. What DeFi really needs, Benchemled believes, is a fundamental shift in how users interact with blockchains.
His proposed solution? Intents — a seemingly simple but potentially revolutionary idea that could finally make DeFi feel complete.
From Protocol Complexity to User Intent
The concept of intents is simple: rather than requiring users to manually create transactions, such as selecting chains, choosing liquidity sources, approving tokens, and paying gas, they should just express their objective and allow the network to determine how to achieve it.
Envision using a DeFi application and typing, “Swap 1,000 USDC for ETH at the best price.” That’s all there is to it. There’s no need to identify a DEX, chain, or slippage tolerance. An intent engine processes your request, and a network of competing agents works swiftly to fulfill it for you, optimizing for price, speed, and security along the way.
“It’s like switching from command line to GUI,” Benchemled explains. “You don’t instruct the computer on the exact steps to take; you simply indicate what you want to accomplish.”
This model goes beyond merely simplifying UX; it eliminates the operational intricacies that have made DeFi difficult for the general public to access. Gas fees are estimated in advance, and cross-chain executions happen automatically. Additionally, many intent-based frameworks incorporate protection against frontrunning (MEV), usually through private off-chain auction mechanisms.
The outcome is an experience reminiscent of Venmo rather than Solidity, all while preserving the decentralization and transparency that are fundamental to cryptocurrency’s value.
The Coinbase Breach As a Reminder
If there was any uncertainty regarding the price of prioritizing convenience over control, recent events have made this tradeoff starkly evident. Just last week, Coinbase reported a $20 million data breach involving rogue customer support staff. Sensitive user information was affected, and an internal ransom was demanded.
Such incidents highlight the delicate trust model inherent in centralized platforms and stress the importance of self-custodial tools, such as those utilizing intent-based infrastructure.
“With intents, we can finally provide the convenience of a centralized exchange,” Benchemled points out, “without losing control to a middleman who could be hacked, act deceitfully, or vanish.”
A Developer Flywheel, Finally
Intents not only enhance the usability of DeFi but also simplify the building process.
In the past, DeFi developers faced challenges such as navigating different chains, liquidity fragmentation, gas optimization, and ensuring smart contract compatibility. The 2024 Crypto Developer Report by Electric Capital reveals that only one-third of crypto developers work across multiple chains. Furthermore, this practice carries risks: a 2025 Arvix study of over 900,000 smart contracts discovered that almost 18% malfunctioned when copied across networks.
Intents change that equation.
By separating application logic from protocol execution, developers can create DeFi applications without the concern of where or how their logic operates. Rather than crafting Solidity contracts that have to be redeployed and re-audited on each chain, they can simply establish intent schemas and connect to the existing execution layers.
“Think of how Web2 developers build apps,” says Benchemled. “They don’t stress about DNS settings or server architecture. They just call APIs. That’s what intents make possible in crypto.”
This abstraction unlocks faster development cycles, better composability, and, critically, a smoother onboarding path for traditional developers who’ve been put off by crypto’s steep learning curve.
Unlocking New Use Cases
Intents also pave the way for a new class of financial strategies—ones that were previously only available to centralized players or highly technical users.
Users can now place conditional limit orders, execute time-based strategies, or build crosschain arbitrage bots without writing custom smart contracts. Everything becomes a matter of defining “what” you want to do, and letting the network coordinate the “how.”
“DeFi shouldn’t just replicate TradFi, it should outperform it,” Benchemled adds. “And that’s only possible if we remove the bottlenecks that slow users and developers down.”
By abstracting complexity while improving execution quality, intents help make advanced onchain strategies accessible to everyday users, not just power traders.
The Road to the Next 100 Million Users
If cryptocurrency is to become the financial backbone of the future, it must abandon the attitude of early adopters and begin developing for average people.
That implies the experience must be clean, straightforward, and focused on outcomes rather than execution. Intents and their supporting infrastructure, from agent networks to private auctions—provide a viable, scalable road ahead.
“Mass adoption isn’t going to happen because we ship more chains,” Benchemled tells me. “It’ll happen when users stop thinking about chains entirely.”
In that way, intentions are not only a new technology. They are a reset button, allowing DeFi to be rebuilt in a way that finally makes sense to those who use it.
Disclaimer
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About The Author
Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
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Victoria is a writer on a variety of technology topics including Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her extensive experience allows her to write insightful articles for the wider audience.
