Azura, a brand new platform for decentralized finance, launched on Tuesday after elevating $6.9 million in a seed spherical led by Initialized. 21-year-old CEO and founder Jackson Denka says Azura will make DeFi simpler by connecting all kinds of crypto wallets, blockchains, exchanges and different protocols inside one interfacing layer.
“Azura is pretty much a platform that will let anyone trade anything from anywhere in the world enabled by DeFi,” Denka instructed Fortune. The buying and selling terminal offers entry to market knowledge, full commerce lifecycle assist, and DeFi property like Bitcoin or sensible contracts.
With funding from Initialized, Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, co-founder of Solana Raj Gokal and others, Denka seeks to supply a service that may simplify and improve the DeFi consumer expertise by standardizing transactions and permitting consumers and sellers to work together immediately.
“This is the holy grail for DeFi. Many have tried and failed to create a platform like this,” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of Winklevoss Capital mentioned in an e mail. “Today, the space is highly fragmented and crypto power users are forced to use many different tools to access DeFi. We believe Azura will change this landscape by making DeFi easy and accessible.”
Azura additionally eliminates the danger concerned with trusting an alternate just like the notorious FTX, which collapsed in 2022 and value clients and traders billions of {dollars}, by eradicating the middlemen and giving management again to customers, Brett Gibson, managing companion at Initialized, instructed Fortune.
“I have a wallet that I maintain full custody over. I’m able to create a transaction that has very narrow parameters as to how I’d want to trade. And then, there’s not actually counterparty risk in execution of the transaction,” Gibson mentioned.
Azura was launched a yr in the past underneath the title Thunder as a personal invite-only beta, a check of a product the place solely a choose group of customers can take part. Denka constructed Thunder for skilled merchants, just like a Bloomberg Terminal, with the aim of serving to them transfer cash on-chain quick.
Inside six months of launching in beta, Thunder collected about $10 million of annualized income. Immediately, the platform has facilitated a complete quantity of just about $1 billion.
“As time passed and as it picked up traction, I sort of wanted to broaden the ambition and do something bigger,” Denka mentioned.
All Thunder customers will probably be migrated to Azura. Initially, Azura’s consumer base will consist principally of native skilled merchants, those that perceive the expertise and why this service is beneficial, Denka mentioned, however he hopes Azura will ultimately change into a family title.
He’ll use the cash to scale the applying by rising the corporate’s payroll, bettering the software program and buying higher servers, he mentioned.
“With Larry Fink talking about the tokenization of all financial assets, it’s pretty clear to me that one day, and quietly, this will become the new technology standard for finance, and ideally we could help a little bit,” Denka mentioned.