From Designer at 1inch to His Own DeFi Startup: How Dmitry Vazhenin Is Building Lifted Finance

Dmitry explained why he deliberately set his sights on 1inch, why he decided to become a founder again after working at a large Web3 company, why he is betting on Solana, and how DeFi could become financial infrastructure whose complexity the end user simply stops noticing.

From a design studio to Web3

For a long time, Dmitry's career developed at the intersection of two areas — design and entrepreneurship.

First he worked as a designer, then launched his own design studio, which mainly worked on fintech products. After that came his own venture-backed startup in the creator economy.

Web3 was not part of the plan at first. Dmitry had known about Bitcoin since his school years, but for a long time he was skeptical about the crypto industry. Everything changed once he started working inside a Web3 company.

The turning point came when he found himself inside a Web3 company for the first time and saw what actually stood behind the tokens, prices and charts.

"I started to see not just tokens and charts, but how products, protocols, users, liquidity, risks and economics really work."

At one of his first Web3 projects, the fund managed roughly $300 million in assets. That was when crypto stopped looking like pure speculation: behind the interfaces there was real money, real risk and complex financial infrastructure that still had to be made understandable to the user.

"Go where it's scary and nothing makes sense" — that's how Dmitry sums up one of the main lessons from the early part of his career.

$12M in trading volume and 500,000 users

Before joining 1inch, Dmitry worked as a Founding Designer at a DeFi marketplace which, in his words, grew from zero to around $12 million in trading volume. Then, together with his co-founder Yerassyl, he launched dappSheriff — a Web3 product built around reputation and on-chain reviews. In roughly two months the project reached 500,000 users.

That experience mattered not so much because of the numbers as because of the change of role. By that point Dmitry was no longer just doing design: he was building products from scratch, looking for hypotheses that worked, observing user behavior and operating under constant product uncertainty.

The next target was 1inch.

How to get into 1inch while barely applying anywhere else

Instead of mass-sending his resume, Dmitry decided to bet on essentially one company.

"I had a very conscious goal of getting into 1inch specifically. At that point I hardly applied to any other openings — I made an all-in bet on 1inch," he recalls.

His preparation looked more like product research ahead of launching a business of his own.

He studied 1inch itself, the market, competitors and user scenarios, dug into the product's strengths and looked for things that could be improved.

After that he recorded a short Loom video introducing himself and sent it to the team. Then came a test assignment, several interviews — and an offer.

Today Dmitry works on the 1inch team building the crypto wallet — one of the key products through which users interact with Web3.

Why a good crypto wallet should hide the blockchain

A crypto wallet is one of the main interfaces between the user and Web3: it's where a person makes transactions, interacts with networks and DeFi protocols, and manages assets. Meanwhile, all the technical complexity stays under the hood.

"A good wallet should give you control and transparency, but not turn every step into a blockchain exam," Dmitry says.

That same principle — complex infrastructure inside, a simple product outside — later became the foundation of Lifted Finance.

Why launch yet another DeFi product

Lifted Finance did not come out of a single sudden insight.

According to Dmitry, the product went through several transformations. The team studied the stablecoin yield market, watched user behavior and tried to understand why many potentially interesting DeFi strategies remain tools for a small group of advanced market participants.

The problem turned out to lie in a particular balance of risk, complexity and yield.

A crypto product user faces additional risks, the need to use wallets, pick networks, execute transactions and figure out protocols. And in many cases the resulting yield may not differ all that much from more familiar financial instruments — US Treasuries or money market funds, for example.

Higher yields do exist in DeFi, Dmitry argues, but getting to them is significantly harder.

To do so, a user has to analyze lending and borrowing rates, liquidity, liquidation risks and changing conditions across different protocols — and then monitor the position continuously.

That's exactly the gap Lifted Finance is trying to close.

How Lifted Finance works

Stripped of technical detail, the idea looks like this: Lifted Finance tries to automate the strategies that let you increase yield on stablecoins.

Stablecoins are crypto assets whose value is usually pegged to a traditional currency, such as the dollar.

One of the mechanics Lifted Finance uses is called leverage looping.

Imagine a user deposits a stablecoin into a DeFi protocol and earns yield on it. Using that asset as collateral, they borrow another stablecoin at a lower rate, deposit the borrowed funds again, and repeat the cycle several times.

If the yield on the deposit is higher than the cost of borrowing, a gap appears between the two rates — the spread. Repeating the operation increases the potential final yield.

But the complexity grows along with it.

Rates in DeFi are not fixed. A strategy that works today may stop working tomorrow. Yields can fall, borrowing costs can rise, and liquidity can dry up.

So the job of Lifted Finance, according to its founder, is not simply to create such loops automatically. The algorithm has to find suitable asset pairs, track changes in rates and risks, and optimize the position.

For a two-person team, this turned out to be one of the hardest parts.

"We were working on the math, the algorithm and risk management all at the same time," Dmitry says.

And there's an important caveat: leverage does not create free yield. It can amplify a strategy's results, but it also amplifies its sensitivity to market moves and risks.

Why Lifted Finance is being built on Solana

For their product, the team chose Solana.

Dmitry describes the network's main advantage in three words — "quick programmable money."

Ethereum still holds more capital and a historical advantage, he notes. But for new financial applications, where a user or an algorithm has to perform many operations, the speed and cost of each transaction become far more important.

And here Solana offers a different set of trade-offs.

"If we're talking about new scenarios and new players, Solana looks like a very strong alternative: it's cheaper, faster and better suited to products where speed, frequency of operations and good user experience matter," Dmitry believes.

There's also a less technical factor — the ecosystem itself.

In the founder's observation, an active community has formed around Solana, one that is willing to experiment with new products and financial mechanics.

But the more interesting question isn't which blockchain wins — it's whether the mainstream user will even notice which blockchain runs under the hood of their financial app.

DeFi could become invisible

Today, using most DeFi protocols requires at least a basic understanding of crypto.

You need to set up a wallet, figure out networks, move assets, connect to a protocol, sign transactions and understand the risks involved.

Dmitry believes that in five years this model could look completely different.

"Right now many protocols still look like a toolkit for advanced users. The next stage is when all that complexity is packaged into products that an ordinary person can use without needing to understand the internal mechanics."

In other words, the financial infrastructure under the hood may become even more complex, while the user interface becomes simpler.

And this is where space unexpectedly opens up for cooperation between two worlds that were long seen as near-opposites: banks and DeFi.

What if the bank becomes the interface to DeFi

Traditional banks have what most DeFi projects still lack: mainstream trust, regulatory infrastructure and enormous distribution.

DeFi has a different advantage — open financial infrastructure, a high pace of experimentation and the ability to create new mechanics for working with capital.

But both sides have limitations.

DeFi is too complex for most users. Banks, in turn, have no need to become experts in dozens of protocols and on-chain strategies themselves.

In Dmitry's view, one possible scenario is a division of roles.

The bank or fintech app can own the customer relationship: a clear interface, trust and access to the product. The DeFi company owns the strategy and the technological infrastructure under the hood.

Then, for the end user, interacting with decentralized finance could stop looking like interacting with crypto at all.

It's the same problem Dmitry ran into while working on the wallet: the technology can keep getting more complex, but the product doesn't have to make the user feel that complexity.

What Kazakhstan needs to become a visible player in Web3

Dmitry is positive about the development of Web3 in Kazakhstan: major blockchain ecosystems, exchanges and infrastructure companies are appearing in the country, and interest from the government and business is growing.

"For Kazakhstan to become a visible player in Web3, it needs capital. And capital goes where there's strong business, innovation and clear rules of the game," Dmitry says.

At the same time, geography is becoming less important for the specialists themselves: developers, designers and founders from Kazakhstan can already build products for the global market.

From interfaces to financial infrastructure

Working on Web3 products, Dmitry focused more and more on what defines their value for the user: how yield is generated, how to manage risk, and how to make complex financial mechanics clear and accessible.

Lifted Finance became a continuation of that path. Rather than simply making DeFi easier to understand, the team is trying to remove part of its complexity from the user experience entirely — automating the search for strategies, position management and risk.

Perhaps the next stage of DeFi's development will look exactly like this: the user won't have to figure out lending protocols, liquidity and complex yield strategies — the product will take that work on itself.