Founder Jackson Denka and our managing partner Brett Gibson chat about Azura, a platform that lets anyone trade anything enabled by DeFi.

Initialized: Walk us through your background, and how you became a founder.

Jackson: I originally wanted to go into banking and had attended the University of Chicago for a bit to do economics and data science. It turned out not to be for me. Seeing FTX’s implosion, I realized there was the potential to build a better alternative, a non-custodial alternative, and that’s exactly what we decided to do.

Initialized: Brett, tell us a little about why you invested in Azura and why you were so excited to work with Jackson.

Brett: For background, I’d spent a lot of time in DeFi and using a lot of individual protocols, and you’re stuck in this hell of switching between client app, client app, for every protocol you want to use. Everyone always seemed to understand that the end state that we were supposed to get was one UX that worked with everything and felt much more like what we’re used to for a centralized exchange.

So I was fairly primed when I started to talk to Jackson, and then it was just immediately apparent this is the type of person I wanted to work with. I don’t think it took much of the call to understand that he’s an outlier in terms of drive and getting things done, and his vision was really complete, which was quite compelling.

Initialized: Can you explain what was broken about onboarding into DeFi previously, and the solution you are offering today. How are you making things faster, and more efficient? 

Jackson: Thanks, by the way, Brett. I appreciate that. Yeah, I think that traditional finance is a lot more broken of a system than people are able or willing to recognize. Especially in the West, we have a very well-designed and working financial system, but in most parts of the world, that’s not the case. To be honest, my economics answer is I think the more participants you have in a market, the sooner you reach what the price of an asset really is.

Brett: It’s two sides to the same coin. Everyone should have access to well-functioning markets, and then when everyone does have access, we get even better functioning markets.

Jackson: That’s true, but governments would beg to differ. 

Initialized: Let’s talk about the technicals. How exactly does Azura work?

Jackson: So I guess in regards to the technicals, it’s fully non-custodial; it’s fully on-chain. The way it works is we’ve built, what we call a standardized interfacing layer that effectively takes together all pre-existing blockchains protocols, bundles them together, and then extracts them away to the end user.

These DeFi protocols are entirely permissionless to build on top of, and they’re a financial backend, which a lot of people forget. So obviously leveraging that to build a platform is what we decided to do.

Initialized: What’s your vision for the future of DeFi? 

Jackson: I guess in regards to vision, the goal is to connect the world to DeFi. I think that the barrier to entry is extraordinarily high. I think that DeFi is largely inaccessible. It’s extraordinarily complicated and the user experience is very poor. You could compare it to sort of like the early nineties internet, pre-search engine, even. I think that if you were to lower the barrier to entry for these types of assets in this financial system, you could probably bring in quite a few people and ultimately make the system better.

“DeFi is not inherently unsafe. It just needs better guardrails.”

Jackson Denka, Azura Founder

Initialized: What’s a common misconception of the crypto industry?

Jackson: People wildly misunderstand crypto because it’s very abstract of a topic. It’s software, it’s not tangible. You can’t hold it. The technicals are really complicated. And I think that one thing people get wrong is that crypto is not fundamentally an unsafe place. It lacks the regulation guidelines to be a safe financial system. It’s messy right now.

If you allowed anyone to go to the New York Stock Exchange and list anything, you’d see photos of people’s dogs listed. You’d see Ponzi schemes, you’d see a lot, and that’s the same case with crypto. The only reason why there’s a lot of negative press around the space is just because, I mean, it’s like the internet. Anyone can post anything. Anyone can say whatever they want, except it’s a financial system. DeFi is not inherently unsafe. It just needs better guardrails.

Brett: Yeah, that’s interesting. All the bad press is not endemic. This is what we make of it, and we get to go decide.

Jackson: Yeah. People can’t really differentiate between the parts of crypto, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and centralized exchanges. It’s all this big giant blob when obviously those things are extraordinarily different from one another. It’s like you know how there is no one single flavor of the internet? There’s theoretically an infinite number of things that you could do on the internet.

Initialized: What’s next for Azura?

Jackson: In the near term, obviously the goal is always to add support for additional venues, so different types of assets, blockchains protocols, but I think that going multi-platform is where DeFi is largely unexplored. You see them almost exclusively as web apps today. I think that a native mobile app is probably the next big thing on the menu.