#366: Defi App's Path to Becoming the Operating System for Defi

🧑‍🎨 I chat with founder and CEO Dan Greer on building great UX and Defi App's future roadmap

Over the past several years of my journey in crypto and web3, one trend has been clear and encouraged me to remain optimistic despite all the ups and downs: Consumer apps are improving at a rapid pace on many non-technical dimensions: accessibility, onboarding, GTM, design, and UX.

And time has passed, we’re within striking distance of the web2 apps and user flows that have been hyper-optimized thanks to a multi-year lead.

When Shreddy from Defi App reached out to me a few months ago to see if I’d be interested in writing a sponsored piece, I was cautious but open to the proposition. What makes them unique, and what are they doing that’s different than all the other existing competitors and options out there already?

Shreddy read my mind and preempted those thoughts by providing a sneak peek of their launch video:

A live-action launch video that’s entertaining and informative? Not common in this space, especially for a startup. It’s something that a large exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, or OKX would do (and have done). You got my attention Shreddy.

So when I spoke with Dan (Defi App founder and CEO) last week to dig deeper on the app, approach, and vision, I had to ask:

• Is that actually your Nana?

• Is that a real taser?

• Were you actually tased?

And the answer to all 3 questions was yes. After all, if you had a real taser as a prop might as well try it once to say you did it. I’d do the same 😂

Defi App has grown considerably since its mid-February Beta launch, with over $4 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days. Some of this has been due to their in-app incentive program Degen Arena, appearing on Kaito’s Yapper platform, and other efforts. However my gut told me there was more to it, especially with that memorable t(e)aser video.

And that’s where Dan and the team’s focus on UX and design shines.

Just a couple of degens chatting it up

This piece is brought to you by Defi App. Thoughts and opinions are mine and informed by conversations with the Defi App team (thank you for taking the time to chat!).

Defi App’s emphasis on UX

Although consumer crypto UX has improved considerably, there still seems to be a sweet spot between overengineering and oversimplification. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have largely figured this out, but decentralized ones are still getting there (and they will!).

For illustrative purposes, we now have apps like Moonshot that make it really easy to buy and sell tokens, and that’s pretty much all you can do on there. On the other end, we have powerful apps like Hyperlane that allow you to bridge tokens with modern interfaces but are still confusing, even to more experienced users.

And honestly, no shade to either, as both have unique roles in the ecosystem and serve specific audiences. Who’s going to grab the middle?

Defi App has a shot.

Speed Matters

App Responsiveness

As I continued testing out the app, I couldn’t help but notice how fast the website was. Not the swapping experience, but the actual pages on the website itself. If you’re trying to tout yourself as the new Defi app on the block, details like speed onchain and offchain certainly help. You’ll have to try out the app and click around yourself to see what I mean.

Optimistic Swaps

Another concept that the Defi App employs is ‘optimistic swaps’. Although swapping tokens has become significantly faster over the years, it may still take a bit of time depending on what the swap actually is.

Swapping from Mainnet ETH to Arbitrum USDC

This gives the user the perception that swaps are instantaneous, while showing the actual status of the swap, pending (with parentheses) vs. complete (total balance post-swap). And Dan said the team has improvements on the roadmap that will make the actual swap experience an additional 30-50% quicker 👀

Reducing complexity

We can also see what Defi App does to reduce the complexity of swapping and bridging into a simpler experience when comparing the swapping UI with another tool that provides similar capabilities, Jumper (all love 🫂). For example, if I wanted to swap my ETH for Solana:

Defi App (Left) vs. Jumper (Right)

1. Defi App provides the quote and the option to look under the hood for anyone who wants to inspect the details of the swap route while Jumper provides several options

2. Defi App’s cost (bridge provider fee + gas) calculation is on top of the swap itself while Jumper separates out the gas fee and bakes in the bridge provider fee to the output received

3. Jumper also provides an estimate for how long the bridge + swap will take. This is great and also comprehensive to a fault. No one would want to select the third option which has the worst swap rate and takes 15 minutes

This UI creates an experience that is much simpler while providing transparency for those who want to verify what’s going on.

Organizational Design

The last piece that provided more perspective on Defi App’s emphasis on design and UX was their team. Dan himself has a design background, previously leading UX and product efforts at Shopify and Zapper.

The team has a 3:1 engineer to designer ratio, which is significantly lower than most other companies.

That also explains why the app is nice 😉

The Defi App roadmap and vision

As interesting as Defi App is today, the roadmap and vision for Defi App are even more interesting.

Roadmap

Although trading/swapping is only available today, the team gives a clear idea of what’s next:

• Earn: One-click yield farming

• Perps: One-click Hyperliquid perps integration (leverage trading)

• AI: An AI-powered assistant that provides insights, shares opportunities, and executes actions

Unfortunately I didn’t get a sneak peek for any of these features, but if they’re anything like the trading experience, they’ll be slick.

Despite this, Dan shared his worldview of how Defi App’s agent will operate. Today’s positioning of many onchain agents is that they can and will eventually do everything for you. And yes, that will likely come true over time once they are good enough.

However, there’s a different approach where these agents can be a backseat driver or instead of taking the steering wheel, provide context, strategies, and ideas while also pulling info from external sources like Twitter.

Ah…can’t help with that one, sorry!

In addition to these features, Dan shared a few other pieces on the roadmap:

• Discovery: Become a platform for discovering other apps across the ecosystem

• Integrations: Providing the ability for other builders to integrate Defi App into their apps

• Mobile app: The best comp for this would be Slingshot, which was recently acquired by Magic Eden

• Bank Card: Bringing onchain to IRL with spending and other possible rewards and perks

• “Trench trading”: Oh boy 😂 Gotta give the degens what they want right?!

Vision

The explicit roadmap shared in the app, and the additional features shared by my call with Dan not only provided a better idea of the team’s vision but also answered some questions I had in my head:

• Why is it called Defi App?

• Why is their (eventual) token HOME?

The name ‘Defi App’ is generic, and HOME…has no relationship with Defi App. It’s like if Apple’s stock ticker was GRAPE or something lol. As our conversation continued, those questions were indirectly answered.

Defi App’s vision isn’t just to have a great trading experience. They want to be the operating system for Defi in general, and they want to be the ‘home’ for Defi, with all the features you would want under one roof. And by doing so, their target audience expands from crypto-native users to the half a billion CEX users who don’t know of better alternatives that are just as convenient.

Coincidentally, last week’s piece was about consumer crypto aggregators and how we are seeing emergent players (Jupiter and Magic Eden) acquiring other companies to scale up.

Defi App is doing their own version of this in-house (or should I say, in HOME).

Just as Uber started out as a transportation app focusing specifically on black cars, they eventually branched out to become a P2P version of taxis, then other types of rides (pets, packages, shared rides, etc.), food, and more.

Defi App is doing something similar, starting with trading and swapping tokens.

And they’re doing it in a way that we want our physical homes to be: in a comfortable, cozy, and welcoming manner. And with their focus on a great UX, it’s like having great curb appeal and interior design 🏠

See you next week!