DeFi’s Missing Link
Introducing: Azura
Read our press release here.
DeFi was supposed to be a more open financial system. But instead, we’ve ended up with something that is harder to use and less accessible than ever.
How did that happen?
For a decade now, investors, founders and developers have focused more on technology than the actual user experience. This isn't surprising. Think back to the influence of Joel Monegro’s “Fat Protocols,” which argued that the lion's share of value in crypto accrues to infrastructure, not applications. With funding and attention focused on protocols and blockchains, a strange paradox has emerged: there’s more value than ever in crypto, and more capacity for scale, but the opportunities are so scattered across an endless maze of blockchains, protocols, exchanges, and bridges that most users don’t have a realistic chance of participating.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. DeFi was designed to counter the exclusivity and power concentration of traditional finance. Yet today, crypto has come to mirror TradFi’s worst tendencies. Where TradFi uses regulatory barriers and high capital requirements to lock out retail, DeFi gates participation through technical complexity and information asymmetry. And it’s getting more closed off by the day. The result is a system where only a select few, with the time and expertise to navigate its complexities, reap the benefits.
This dynamic threatens DeFi's relevance and potential. It simply won't be relevant at scale until it has simpler entry points and clearer value props for non-expert users.
The Search for Crypto’s “Super App”
Crypto has long been searching for its "super app"—some breakthrough application that drives mass adoption and unlocks the full potential of blockchain technology. But I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong solutions and neglecting crypto's core value proposition.
Here's the good news: the investments in infrastructure over the last decade have laid a strong foundation for crypto going forward. Thanks to our industry's focus on composable and interoperable standards, all of these scattered pieces can theoretically be pieced together. The raw ingredients for a super app are all there.
Many have looked to new L1 and L2 blockchains, hoping that faster transactions or lower fees would be the key to unlocking mass adoption. Others pursued broader web3 consumer strategies across social media or gaming. Finally, there is the ongoing quest to design the best possible wallet, as if that alone is the missing piece. (We’ve seen again and again that it’s not.)
What if we've been looking for crypto's super app in all the wrong places? What if, instead of waiting for a revolutionary new protocol, or trying to blockchain-ify every aspect of our digital lives until something sticks, we started with trading, and built outward? What if we focused on organizing, simplifying, and improving access to DeFi, to make it irresistible to both traders and everyday users?
A super app like this wouldn't just benefit individual traders and investors. By creating a unified entry point to DeFi, we can attract liquidity and activity at a scale that individual protocols could never achieve on their own. This increased adoption would benefit the entire ecosystem. This super app would bring the original promises of crypto to life in a way that nothing else has.
Introducing: Azura
Today, we’re announcing our $6.9m seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Raj Gokal (co-founder, Solana), Meltem Demirors (fmr. co-chair, WEF Cryptocurrency Council), Stephane Gosselin (co-founder, Flashbots), and others.
After several months in closed beta, and nearly $1b in total volume, we’re opening Azura to the public. Think of Azura as a user-friendly gateway to the entirety of DeFi. We’ve built the first standardized application that aggregates and abstracts multiple blockchains, protocols, and other forms of infrastructure, all with the goal of unifying a fragmented ecosystem and making it accessible to more traders. Azura is the first app that enables users to onboard, trade, and discover investment opportunities from a single platform—much in the way you can with traditional fintech products—all while maintaining the benefits of decentralization.
So how does Azura actually work? We've built a proprietary, intent-based order execution engine that acts as an interfacing standard between the hundreds of non-standard protocols and exchanges across the EVM and Solana DeFi ecosystems. From there, we ruthlessly focused on user experience, and worked to abstract away the complex jargon and workflows that have hampered wide adoption. This means we can offer seamless trading across multiple chains and protocols.
But Azura isn't just a trading interface. We've built an end-to-end user experience for the DeFi ecosystem. Our platform offers fiat on and off-ramps, embedded wallets, integrations for hundreds of DeFi protocols across 7 EVM chains and Solana, advanced order execution and routing, cross-chain swaps, and a unified dashboard for managing your entire DeFi portfolio across chains. With Azura, experienced traders can work faster and more efficiently, while new investors can onboard and begin trading within minutes.
Compare that to the multi-step marathon that is onboarding into DeFi today. First, you wait for approval from a centralized exchange to convert fiat to crypto. Then it's wallet setup time (hope you like managing multiple seed phrases). Next, make sure to send your tokens to the right wallet on the right chain (one wrong move and they're lost in the void). Finally, you can interact with a dapp—but only for specific assets on that specific chain. Want to jump on a new yield farming opportunity on a different chain? Prepare for bridging your assets that could take minutes, hours, even days.
With Azura, not only is that complexity gone, but we don’t compromise on DeFi's core tenets. Unlike centralized exchanges, we never introduce custodial risk. Users retain full control of their assets, and all operations occur on-chain, ensuring complete transparency and auditability. Additionally, users have access to all the same assets on centralized exchanges, along with millions more.
What’s Next
Looking ahead, I see Azura as more than just a trading platform. We're laying the groundwork for the next evolution of finance. Imagine a world where anyone with an internet connection can access the most sophisticated financial tools and opportunities, regardless of their background or technical expertise. A world where the lines between traditional and decentralized finance blur, creating a more efficient, transparent, and equitable global financial system.
That's the future we're building towards. As we continue to expand our offerings and integrate more protocols, Azura will become the industry-standard platform for all things DeFi. From yield farming to NFTs, from prediction markets to real world assets—if it's happening in DeFi, you'll be able to access it through Azura.
Ultimately, we want to allow anyone from anywhere in the world to trade anything–enabled by DeFi. Azura will do for finance what the internet did for information.