AURA Money Whitepaper v1.2¶
SBX AURA · Whitepaper
An operating system for stablecoin money¶
AURA Money is a self-custodial banking application built on ERC-4337 smart accounts. Its security guarantees live in the contracts, not the interface, not a backend. If a guarantee lived only in the UI, it would not be a guarantee.
Abstract¶
Roughly a trillion dollars a month moves on stablecoins, yet the interface to them is still built for people who already understand blockchains. The seed phrase, the 42-character address where one wrong character is permanent loss, the "network" you must choose correctly, the gas fee in a token you do not own, none of these are problems with stablecoins. They are problems with the shell around them.
AURA Money replaces the shell. It presents stablecoin money through the mental model everyone already has, accounts, payees, statements, cleared funds, while running on a smart-contract kernel that enforces every security promise on-chain. A person never sees a seed phrase, a gas fee, or a raw error; a developer sees a modular ERC-4337 / ERC-7579 account whose policy is auditable byte-for-byte.
This document is the technical description of that system: the contract kernel, the trust model, the key hierarchy, the address-verification engine (AURA Guard), the AI boundary, the settlement and data model, and the threat model it was designed against.
The three claims this architecture makes true¶
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:material-shield-key: Non-custodial, structurally
No single key held by AURA, not the relayer's, not the second-factor service's, not the deployer's, can move a user's funds. The account enforces its own policy. This is a property of the contracts, demonstrable on-chain, not a promise in a terms-of-service.
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:material-bank-outline: A bank-shaped interface
Chains are presented as banks, addresses as accounts, confirmations as cleared. The abstraction is a first-class design constraint (ADR-005): the metaphor never leaks, and it never misleads about irreversibility or deposit protection.
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:material-radar: Verification before value moves
The category's defining failure is "I pasted an address and the money is gone." AURA Guard checks validity, network, asset support, and sanctions before a unit moves, and explains the result in language a person can act on.
How to read this¶
| If you want… | Start at |
|---|---|
| The design principle behind the whole product | The abstraction (ADR-005) |
| What is actually built vs. designed vs. planned | Implementation status |
| The contract kernel and the authentication ladder | Smart-account architecture |
| Why no AURA key can move funds | System architecture · Identity & keys |
| How wrong-chain loss is prevented | AURA Guard |
| The security posture end to end | Threat model |
Status of this system
AURA Money is a testnet demonstration on Base Sepolia, and the contract suite is unaudited. This whitepaper describes the architecture and marks each component as Implemented Designed or Planned. Nothing here is a solicitation, and nothing here should be read as handling real customer funds today. See Implementation status.