Why did we make Awaken?

Why did we make Awaken?

In 2022 I quit my job and started my crypto journey. I had always wanted to be a founder, and the excitement of the 2021 bull run swept me up. So I jumped in, without even an idea of what I wanted to build.

Back then, ETH gas fees were spiking as everyone rushed to purchase every hot NFT drop. I remember buying my first NFT, and paying $250 of gas. Naturally as a now unemployed person, that amount of money hurt.

So I started looking around for other blockchains. That's when I discovered Solana. Back then, Phantom was only 9 months old. Jupiter was 3 months old. But the early ecosystem had some amazing builders, and the tech made sense. So I decided to become a DeFi founder.

In 2022 Solana was in it's "copy pasta" era. We were all still building out the core infra for lending, DEXs, LPing, and more. We were all trying to build parity with EVM chains. And as part of that build out, Solana ended up with tons of yield farms like Francium, Tulip, etc... So it beckoned for one more thing to be copy pasted: yearn.

I got to work, this was my first project. It was called Accrue Finance. You'd deposit your tokens in our protocol, and we'd rotate them to give you the highest yield. We launched a waitlist (which was overrun by bots lol) and got cooking. We had the smart contract ready to go and a group of early believers to beta test. But before we could get started, we had to do our crypto taxes.

And boy, was it a huge pain in the ass.

We had been using DeFi while building this protocol and realized that every single crypto tax software was not built for the onchain future. But there were 10+ competitors on the market, and one of them had even raised at a $1.3B valuation. So surely, the problem must be solved. We had to be missing something.

One of the first people to believe in me was South Park Commons. Before even having conviction on a specific idea, they took a chance on us and backed us. So when we were mulling over building a crypto tax product, we asked in the crypto channel if anyone else had this problem. And to our surprise, people were willing to prepay us thousands of dollars. Before writing a single line of code. And from there, the rest is history.

Why do we love what we're building?

To bring the world onchain, we need to address all the UX challenges that make crypto worse than TradFi. And the biggest one to us is taxes. When you use Robinhood or Fidelity you are given a tax form at the end of the year. But in crypto, tax time is often paired with stress and a lot of manual work. We believe solving this will help bring crypto to the masses.

We are truly obsessed with improving our product. Every single day we make it better. People ask us what makes us different. And besides the onchain focus, I'd say our biggest differentiator is just that we truly care. We care about solving this problem for you, and every single crypto user.

So if you ever have feedback, you can email me personally (andrew@awaken.tax). And I'd be happy to chat with you. Thank you so much for using (or considering using) Awaken, and if you have a friend that needs crypto tax help, we always appreciate a share :)

Best,

Andrew Duca