Hello
Every Saturday, I listen to a podcast from our partners at Decentralised.co and share my reflections with you.
This week, it’s the conversation between Saurabh Deshapande, Androo (co-founder), and Andy (growth lead) from HypurrFi, hosted by our partners at Decentralised.co.
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Three years ago, I was covering India's fintech explosion as a journalist. Every startup pitch deck I came across had the same slide: a map of India with "1.4 billion people" boldly written across it. I was so bored with the narrative that it seemed like copy-paste. “We're going to onboard the next billion users to digital finance.” Most failed spectacularly.
Then I encountered CRED, CEO Kunal Shah's credit card rewards platform that deliberately chose to serve only India's top 1% of credit users. While competitors burned cash trying to acquire anyone with a pulse, CRED targeted customers with credit scores above 750. The product was beautiful, the customer service was premium, and the unit economics actually worked.
At the time, it felt counterintuitive. Wasn't the whole point of fintech to open up financial services to the mass market?
That memory resurfaced while listening to Androo and Andy from HypurrFi explain their approach to building on Hyperliquid. Their thesis cuts against most crypto scaling narratives I've heard. Instead of building for mass adoption, they're deliberately targeting financial sophistication.
But the decision is backed with a rationale.
On Hyperliquid, Androo estimates "17-18 out of 20 users will come from some form of financial background," compared to traditional DeFi ecosystems, where "probably 18 out of 20 users are not financially informed.”
This mirrors exactly what I observed with CRED. I have heard many in the crypto space telling the same “democratising DeFi” story for years, to the point where the word now repels me. Every protocol promises to "bank the unbanked" or "bring DeFi to everyone." But why bring everyone to DeFi? What if most users just want solutions that make using finance simpler?
Looking at successful financial innovation throughout history, sophistication typically flows downward, not upward. Investment banks developed complex derivatives for traders who understood these products, and eventually, they became retail products. Credit cards started as corporate expense tools before becoming a mass-market product.
The HypurrFi approach suggests that DeFi might follow the same pattern. Instead of trying to educate retail users about complex financial concepts while simultaneously building the infrastructure, they're focusing on users who already understand leverage, yield, and capital efficiency. These users provide better feedback, tolerate higher complexity in exchange for more functionality, and generate revenue that can fund future development.
This creates a different kind of moat than what most crypto projects pursue.
Mass-market applications compete on simplicity and user acquisition costs. Sophisticated platforms compete on depth and capability. Their users are looking for tools that let them do things they can't do elsewhere, not for the easiest possible experience.
This is precisely where HypurrFi is attempting to build something that could help elite traders make efficient use of their capital.
The architecture they've designed centres on a simple insight about how real finance works. When traditional banks lend against your money or offer overdraft power against your balance, why shouldn’t DeFi provide the same? HypurrFi creates velocity by going beyond conventional lending. Users can borrow against positions they want to maintain long-term and also swap that borrowed debt between different assets, from USDC to USDT, for example, based on changing rates and market conditions. This debt flexibility, along with synthetic dollar creation and real-world spending rails, turns static positions into dynamic financial instruments.
Listen to full episode here 👇🏾
Most DeFi protocols reverse this flow, asking users to lock up capital for static rewards. Think of staking.
HypurrFi enables users to borrow against long-term positions, mint synthetic dollars that can move freely across DeFi, and spend against these positions in the real world via traditional payment rails. This transforms idle speculation into productive financial activity.
The card integration completes the payment loop that is often found missing in the crypto world. It brings utility by bridging on-chain positions with off-chain needs. Instead of forcing users to sell appreciated assets to access liquidity, they can borrow against them and spend that liquidity directly.
Having covered fintech for years, I recognise this pattern from traditional finance. The most successful financial products create utility. A credit card gives you options about when and how to pay. A mortgage allows you to own property without paying the full purchase price upfront.
This sophistication-first approach also addresses a practical problem I've watched destroy crypto projects for years.
New projects often take the route of unsustainable customer acquisition costs. The mass-market approach typically requires enormous marketing spend to educate potential users about concepts they've never encountered, sometimes even before the product is fully built. They then subsidise usage through token incentives, rent total value locked (TVL) from mercenary capital, and burn through runways trying to show traction to investors.
The results are predictable. When the incentives end, users leave. When bear markets arrive, the rented TVL evaporates. What remains are ghost chains with hollow metrics.
This is why HypurrFi's approach works. When building a product for users who already grasp complex financial concepts, they already know why capital efficiency matters, what leverage provides, and how sophisticated financial products should behave. This dramatically reduces both acquisition costs and support overhead.
When sophisticated traders are willing to pay fees to use your platform, they value what you have built. With the detailed feedback about features they need, you have a clear product roadmap driven by real user demand rather than theoretical market research.
I find such models running successfully across the traditional finance world. Retail investors have never fully grasped the value of Bloomberg terminals. Yet, offer a professional trader or a finance guy access to one such terminal, and you will see what it means to them.
The same dynamic appears throughout financial innovation. Derivatives markets, high-frequency trading systems, and institutional banking platforms all started by serving professional users with complex needs and deep pockets.
Yet this strategy raises uncomfortable questions about crypto's ‘build for everyone’ narrative. If the most sustainable path forward involves building for financial elites first, what happens to the broader mission of financial inclusion?
In India’s finance world, the companies that survived and eventually served mass markets were platforms that first proved their unit economics with sophisticated, high-value users, then used that foundation to expand downmarket.
CRED's trajectory follows this path. It began as a premium platform for India's highest credit score holders, and then expanded to serve a broader middle class through products like CRED Pay and investment features. It also became an aspirational benchmark for people who were not already in the elite bracket.
I am keen to know if platforms built for financial elites eventually serve mass markets without losing the depth and functionality that made them valuable in the first place.
The answer may depend on whether the crypto industry is willing to abandon its populist rhetoric in favour of proven models for financial innovation. Sometimes, the fastest path to the mass market runs through temporary elitism.
That’s it for this week’s reflections.
I’ll see you next week,
Prathik
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Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.