Former Revolut employees launch Solvo, an app that simplifies crypto investing • TechCrunch

Meet Sol­vo, a new mobile app that wants to make it eas­i­er to invest in cryp­tocur­ren­cies and cryp­tocur­ren­cy-relat­ed finan­cial prod­ucts. The two founders Aye­len Den­ovitzer and Shailen­dra Sason met while they were work­ing for Rev­o­lut, in the cryp­to team more specifically.

Ear­li­er this year, Sol­vo raised a $3.5 mil­lion seed round from Index Ven­tures with Coin­Fund and FJ Labs also par­tic­i­pat­ing. Since then, the com­pa­ny has put togeth­er a small team of 10 peo­ple and start­ed work­ing on its iOS app.

The main the­sis behind Sol­vo is that cryp­tocur­ren­cies are still too com­plex. If you want to buy cryp­to assets, chances are you don’t know where to start because there are thou­sands of dif­fer­ent tokens. While you may have heard about DeFi (decen­tral­ized finance) and the abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate yield, access­ing those prod­ucts is even more complicated.

When Sol­vo releas­es its app in Octo­ber, users will be able to buy and sell tokens (obvi­ous­ly). But Sol­vo has picked 10 cryp­tocur­ren­cies so that you don’t get lost in an end­less list. You can also deposit and with­draw tokens from Solvo.

The start­up is also tak­ing advan­tage of stak­ing or DeFi prod­ucts that gen­er­ate yield by con­tribut­ing to liq­uid­i­ty pools. This way, Sol­vo cus­tomers earn inter­ests when they move their cryp­to assets to what the com­pa­ny calls ‘Vaults’. For instance, the start­up plans to offer Solana and Car­dano Vaults.

Hid­ing the com­plex­i­ty is an inter­est­ing strat­e­gy as Sol­vo can take a cut of earn­ings from Vaults. As long as cus­tomers still earn some inter­ests, the prod­uct is work­ing as expected.

Final­ly, Sol­vo also lets you invest in Bun­dles. It lets you invest in mul­ti­ple projects and tokens in a sin­gle trans­ac­tion. Essen­tial­ly, it works like those pop­u­lar tok­enized bas­kets, such as the DeFi Pulse Index or the Meta­verse Index.

“Invest­ing with Sol­vo will be sim­ple, easy and under­stand­able – three words not asso­ci­at­ed with cryp­to. Sol­vo is meet­ing a clear need for investors today, offer­ing prod­ucts that are focused on high qual­i­ty assets, that pro­vide diverse expo­sure and reduced risk as well as an attrac­tive yield. It is for all the investors who want to use cryp­to to diver­si­fy their invest­ments and want an easy way to do that,” co-founder and CEO Aye­len Den­ovitzer said in a statement.

In many ways, Coin­base orig­i­nal­ly posi­tioned itself as the eas­i­est way to get start­ed with cryp­to. But the com­pa­ny has launched many dif­fer­ent prod­ucts over the years, includ­ing deriv­a­tives and sup­port for 225 cryp­tocur­ren­cies. Let’s see if Sol­vo can fill that gap in the market.