Gone crypto: From Revolut to Zeal

“All of a sudden, all these things that used to be promises on white papers or ideas turned out to actually be tangible products,” Graah told Blockworks.

“The financial building blocks of traditional finance now existed also in decentralized shapes and forms — the zero-to-one moments of trading as an AMM, of lending as lending protocols — those are the core pillars of traditional finance, and now they existed also in a decentralized shape,” he said.

Graah and a few colleagues first launched DeFi protocol Gro, which was a decentralized risk and yield tranching protocol, organized as a DAO. But as interest rates fell, it became difficult to attract capital and make fully automated on-chain strategies competitive with off-chain options.

The Gro DAO recently voted to wind down and is allowing members to redeem capital from its treasury.

“We always had an idea that we wanted to build something that lets normal people access DeFi, and we started thinking about that in the context of yields, but now DeFi yields and [traditional finance] yields have to some degree converged,” Graah explained.

As interface builders for Revolut, the next logical step was to tackle the broader challenge of how to make DeFi apps more accessible to newcomers.

“Revolut experiences, like neobanks in Web2, are highly curated. They are king-made specific services, often built by the developer of the neobank,” Graah said. “Web3 is open finance where you have access to all kinds of products that are built, and right now we don’t do any curation of that.”

Zeal is a browser wallet, like MetaMask, and will connect anywhere MetaMask does. A mobile version is also in the works. But there are some key differences.

The wallet will route token trades via 1inch and 0x aggregators to find the best price, and it handles multichain transfers with built-in bridging using Socket.tech.

It launches with zero-fee fiat on- and off-ramps to connect to users’ bank accounts in the UK and wider Europe.

Today, most users must use a crypto exchange intermediary that sometimes raises red flags with banks, or dedicated on-ramp services that charge fees.

“What boggles my mind is that now, 15 years after the Bitcoin white paper [which] said that it was going to be peer-to-peer digital cash — and I still can’t just send you some digital dollars today,” Graah said.