Declan Hannon Takes Helm at Aurora as $AURORA Goes Live on Revolut

Aurora’s native token $AURORA is now available to millions of retail investors after the fintech giant Revolut added the token to its in-app crypto roster, and the announcement comes hand-in-hand with a leadership change at Aurora itself: Declan Hannon has been appointed CEO as the project pivots toward growth and mainstream adoption.

The Revolut listing means users of the app can buy, hold and track $AURORA alongside more than 250 other cryptocurrencies, with access to fiat on-ramps, recurring buys, price alerts and in-app portfolio management, the same familiar flows Revolut has built for other tokens. For Aurora, the move opens a straightforward path for everyday users to gain exposure to the project without needing specialised wallets or bridges.

Strengthening Mainstream Access 

Revolut’s platform, which now serves more than 65 million customers globally, has become a common on-ramp for many retail investors; listing on the app is therefore a clear signal that Aurora is trying to make $AURORA easier to access for a mainstream audience. That accessibility is important because Aurora’s core proposition is less about trading and more about powering builders: the protocol enables teams to launch and operate EVM-compatible chains on NEAR without running validators or managing heavy infrastructure, giving projects their own chain performance while inheriting NEAR’s scalability and interoperability.

Aurora has also been investing in tooling that lowers cross-chain friction. The team behind Aurora built Calyx, a cross-chain token launchpad powered by NEAR Intents, which lets projects issue tokens and reach users across major ecosystems such as Solana, Base and TON in a single flow, a design meant to reduce the need for manual bridges or repeated user actions during token sales. For builders and communities that want to run launches across multiple chains at once, Calyx is the practical expression of Aurora’s multichain philosophy.

The personnel changes make the strategic shift explicit. Declan Hannon, who has been part of Aurora’s growth leadership, steps into the CEO role and frames the next phase in blunt, execution-focused terms: “Listing on Revolut expands access to $AURORA as the ecosystem grows. Our focus is execution – helping teams launch chains, ship products, and reach users at scale,” Hannon said, underlining a move from pure infrastructure development toward commercial growth and broader user adoption.

Meanwhile, Aurora co-founder Alex Shevchenko will move into a strategic advisor role concentrating on NEAR Intents and protocol-level innovation, according to the company’s announcements and press coverage. The reshuffle is being presented internally and publicly as a reallocation of talents: Shevchenko will double down on the deep technical work around cross-chain intent execution and underlying protocol improvements, while Hannon leads the push to scale product usage and commercial partnerships.

Behind the organizational labels is a governance structure that remains community-oriented: the Aurora Protocol and its $AURORA token are governed by Aurora DAO, which votes on strategic proposals, treasury allocation and future upgrades, while Aurora Labs remains the development shop that implements DAO decisions and maintains the protocol. The combination of DAO governance, an engineering arm and now a consumer distribution channel via Revolut positions Aurora to try and convert developer momentum into everyday usage and liquidity.

Taken together, the Revolut listing and the leadership transition point to Aurora’s next chapter: make the stack simple for builders, and make the token simple for ordinary users. If the strategy works, it will be a test of whether infrastructure projects can move beyond dev ecosystems into the mainstream financial plumbing without losing technical credibility, and whether convenient access on apps like Revolut actually translates into more real-world usage of the chains those projects power.