Azura, a new decentralized finance platform, launched on Tuesday after raising $6.9 million in a funding round led by Initialized. Jackson Denka, its 21-year-old CEO and founder, says Azura will facilitate DeFi by connecting a wide variety of crypto wallets, blockchains, exchanges and other protocols within a single interface layer.
“Azura is pretty much a platform that will allow anyone to trade anything from anywhere in the world using DeFi,” Denka said. Fortune. The trading terminal provides access to market data, full transaction lifecycle support, and DeFi assets like Bitcoin or smart contracts.
With funding from Initialized, Volt Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, and others, Denka seeks to provide a service that will simplify and improve the DeFi user experience by standardizing transactions and enabling buyers and sellers to interact directly.
“This is the holy grail for DeFi. Many have tried and failed to build a platform like this,” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of Winklevoss Capital said in an email. “Today the space is very fragmented and experienced crypto 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 of relying on an exchange like the infamous FTX, which collapsed in 2022 and cost customers and investors billions of dollars, by removing middlemen and returning control to users, said Brett Gibson, Managing Partner at Initialized. Fortune.
“I have a wallet that I have full custody of. I am able to create a trade that has very narrow parameters as to how I want to trade. And then there’s no real counterparty risk in executing the transaction,” Gibson said.
Azura launched a year ago under the name Thunder as an invite-only private beta, a test of a product in which only a select group of users can participate. Denka built Thunder for professional traders, similar to a Bloomberg Terminal, with the goal of helping them move money quickly on-chain.
In the six months since its beta launch, Thunder has accumulated approximately $10 million in annualized revenue. Today, the platform has generated a total volume of almost $1 billion.
“As time went on and it got bigger, I kind of wanted to expand the ambition and do something bigger,” Denka said.
All Thunder users will be migrated to Azure. Initially, Azura’s user base will be primarily 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 app by increasing the company’s payroll, improving the software and buying 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 .
