Our Investment in Ottr Finance: Solana-based Mobile App to Make Web3 Usable for Everyone
We are excited to announce that Race Capital led the $3.1M pre-seed round for Ottr Finance, a Solana-based Web3 mobile app that makes holding and using crypto as easy as Venmo, partnering with Aleksei Zakharov and the entire Ottr team.
Ottr is a Solana-based self-custody Web3 mobile app. With Ottr, millions of users globally can easily get started with crypto, and instantly send USDC to over 100 countries globally, all without the complexity of on-ramping, gas fees and staking. Building a truly Venmo-like experience for Web3.
We believe that Aleksei and team will empower users to make use of digital assets like USDC in more everyday & real world transactions.
Technical and Strong Founder Market fit from Square’s CashApp
We at Race Capital always look for strong technical founders that truly understand the pain point of their users, with the ability to ship products quickly, and Aleksei is a perfect example of this.
Aleksei was a former Senior Software Engineer at Cashapp, leading the crypto mobile team. Before that, he was a principal Software Engineer at Instagram and Lyft. His engineering leadership experience and eye for detail make him the perfect lead for the Ottr team.
Making crypto more accessible and global
The global crypto population is expected to reach one billion by the end of 2022, rising from 295 million in December 2021, according to Crypto.com. With global currencies continuing to decline in value versus the U.S. dollar, millions of users are looking for a solution to holding their savings and earnings in USDC, USDT and other digital currencies. Ottr provides a simple and intuitive solution that anyone with a phone can access in U.S. dollars.
With Ottr, millions of users around the world can instantly send USDC for free without going through the complicated steps of setting up their self-custody wallet, storing seed phrases and Centralized exchanges (CEX).
Decentralized Finance made easy
In 2020/21, mainstream adoption of stocks and trading happened primarily due to Fintech super apps making the experience much easier for consumer retail users. The same can be replicated for DeFi.
DeFi is by far the most complex and foreign category for new crypto users. From learning to stake to understanding LP pools and funding rates, the learning curve is extremely steep and likely to be a main point of attrition. Ottr Finance makes the overall experience much easier by removing all the unnecessary complexity of learning new platforms and terminology.
For more information, please visit: https://ottr.finance and follow Ottr Finance on Twitter. You can also download their app on:
- iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1628669270
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=finance.ottr.android
We look forward to working closely with Aleksei and the Ottr Finance team to onboard the next billion users to Web3 📈
