The Abstraction (ADR-005)¶
People already have a complete mental model for moving money. It is called banking.
Sort codes, accounts, payees, statements, standing orders, cleared funds, this vocabulary has been taught to everyone for a century. Crypto invented a parallel vocabulary for the same concepts and then asked the public to learn it. AURA does not teach the new vocabulary. It translates.
The translation table¶
| What it is (technical) | What AURA presents to the user |
|---|---|
| Chain / network | Bank |
| Wallet address | Account |
| Stablecoin | Currency (US Dollars, Euros, Pounds) |
| Bridge / cross-chain move | Transfer between your accounts |
| Gas | Nothing, it is paid for you |
| Transaction hash | Reference number |
| Confirmation / finality | Cleared |
This is ADR-005, and it is treated as the whole product rather than a
skin over it. Every user-facing string is checked against a banned-word list in CI so a single
leaked term, gas, nonce, chain, hash, fails the build.
One deliberate exception
There is exactly one flow where the abstraction yields to precision: adding a payee. Choosing the wrong network is the one mistake that destroys the money, and the user is copying the value off a wallet or exchange screen that already says "network" and "address". So the add-payee form, and only that flow, says wallet address and network. The reasoning, being wrong here is unrecoverable, and only the user's stated answer can catch a wrong-network address whose format is otherwise valid, is recorded as an amendment to ADR-005. Everywhere else, the banking vocabulary holds.
The rules that keep the metaphor honest¶
A metaphor that misleads is worse than none. Four constraints bound it:
- The abstraction never leaks. No user-facing text contains
gas,nonce,revert,RPC,mempool, or a chain ID. Technical detail lives behind a disclosure, never in front. - The metaphor must not mislead. "Bank" does not imply deposit protection, and payments are irreversible. Both are stated plainly, not buried.
- Every figure is derived, not decorative. Balances reconcile against chain state everywhere; an unreconciled statement is never rendered.
- No dead ends. Every coming-soon surface is designed and names what unblocks it.
Why this is the wedge, not just the veneer¶
Every stablecoin app can hold and send. The unsolved problem, the loudest reason ordinary people will not touch this, is:
"I pasted an address and the money is gone."
The banking metaphor is what makes the answer legible. When a payment can't go through, AURA does not say "invalid recipient for selected network." It says:
"Sarah's account is at a different bank, and it can't receive US Dollars. Ask Sarah for an account at Base, or send Euros instead."
The translation is not decoration; it is what turns an unrecoverable error into an instruction a person can follow. See AURA Guard.