Azura, a new platform for decentralized finance, launched on Tuesday after raising $6.9 million in a seed round led by Initialized. 21-year-old CEO and founder Jackson Denka says Azura will make DeFi easier by connecting a wide variety of crypto wallets, blockchains, exchanges and other protocols within one interfacing layer. “Azura is pretty much a platform that will let anyone trade anything from anywhere in the world enabled by DeFi,” Denka told Fortune. The trading terminal provides access to market data, full trade lifecycle support, and DeFi assets like Bitcoin or smart contracts. With funding from Initialized, Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, co-founder of Solana Raj Gokal and others, Denka seeks to provide a service that will simplify and enhance the DeFi user experience by standardizing transactions and allowing buyers and sellers to interact directly. “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 said in an email. “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 also eliminates the risk involved with trusting an exchange like the infamous FTX, which collapsed in 2022 and cost customers and investors billions of dollars, by removing the middlemen and giving control back to users, Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized, told 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 said.Azura was launched a year ago under the name Thunder as a private invite-only beta, a test of a product where only a select group of users can participate. Denka built Thunder for professional traders, similar to a Bloomberg Terminal, with the purpose of helping them move money on-chain fast. Within six months of launching in beta, Thunder accumulated about $10 million of annualized revenue. Today, the platform has facilitated a total volume of almost $1 billion.“As time passed and as it picked up traction, I sort of wanted to broaden the ambition and do something bigger,” Denka said. All Thunder users will be migrated to Azura. Initially, Azura’s user base will consist mostly of native professional traders, those who understand the technology and why this service is useful, Denka said, but he hopes Azura will eventually become a household name.He will use the money to scale the application by increasing the company’s payroll, improving the software and purchasing better servers, he said. “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 said. Learn more about all things crypto with short, easy-to-read lesson cards. Click here for Fortune's Crypto Crash Course.
