A crypto trade can begin with a surprisingly long list of chores. Choose a wallet. Check the network. Find a bridge. Buy the right gas token. Approve the transaction. Move the funds. Then, if nothing has gone sideways, place the trade. Clinton Bembry built his career around a plain objection to that sequence: the customer came for the asset, not the plumbing.
That objection has now carried him through two acquired companies. Astro Wallet, the Ethereum wallet he co-founded while in his twenties, went to Coinbase in December 2019. Slingshot, the multichain trading app he started the following year, was acquired by Magic Eden in April 2025. The products lived in different moments of crypto, but they shared a piece of taste. Both tried to make a technically complicated system behave like a familiar consumer application.
Bembry’s public biography is spare. He studied computer science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from 2012 to 2017. After graduating, he founded the crypto hedge fund Toshint Capital, which managed $30 million, and worked on Astro Wallet. The wallet’s pitch was compact: let people use Ethereum through dollars. Economic abstraction was not yet the industry’s favorite phrase. It was already the product.
The first version of the idea
Astro Wallet gave Bembry an early view of the gap between what blockchains could do and what a normal person could reasonably be asked to do. The infrastructure invited experimentation. The interface often demanded fluency. When Coinbase bought Astro, Bembry joined the buyer as a software engineer. His tenure lasted from December 2019 to September 2020, a short bridge between one founder chapter and the next.
The timing matters. Decentralized finance was beginning to turn wallets into trading terminals, lending desks and yield dashboards. Bembry also appeared among the co-founders of Yam Finance, an experimental protocol launched during the 2020 DeFi summer. The period moved quickly and exposed the tradeoff at the center of the category: new financial tools could ship at internet speed, while the user still had to manage every technical seam.
Slingshot began in September 2020 with co-founders including Scott Lewis and Zak Cole. Its first form was a portal into decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. It aggregated routes, displayed live on-chain information and let people compare opportunities without bouncing among tabs. In May 2021, the company picked Polygon for its full launch because Ethereum’s transaction fees were pricing out many users. Product convenience and network economics were already the same problem.
The scale-up was a shrinking checklist
By late 2021, Slingshot said more than 100,000 traders had visited and volume had crossed $1 billion. A $15 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital followed. K5 Global, Shrug Capital, Electric Capital, Framework Ventures and a group of individual backers participated. Bembry said the company planned to double a team of 18, add mobile apps and support more blockchains. Each roadmap item reduced another reason for a user to leave.
The investor list was eclectic. Alongside crypto specialists and venture firms were the Chainsmokers, Jason Derulo, Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz and Morning Brew chief executive Austin Rief. The mix reflected the product’s position between infrastructure and consumer finance. Slingshot needed the technical credibility to route on-chain trades and the consumer instinct to make those routes feel unremarkable. The company did not add a board seat in the Series A, leaving the operating team with room to execute the expansion Bembry had described.
The company’s funding story kept growing after that first Series A announcement. By the Magic Eden deal, Bembry described a $3 million seed round, $27.5 million across the Series A and its extension, and a $2.5 million insider round. The total was $33 million. Slingshot had also grown to nearly one million users and offered access to millions of tokens across more than ten chains.
A 2024 integration with MoonPay filled in a missing entrance. Users could fund a non-custodial Slingshot wallet with cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or a bank transfer. Bembry’s description of the feature revealed his standard for the product: people should be able to move from fiat to an on-chain trade “without even realizing they’re transacting on a blockchain.” The line is less about hiding the truth than hiding the homework.
Slingshot’s consolidated USDC balance was the organizing device. Instead of presenting each blockchain as a separate financial island, the app treated the balance as portable purchasing power. Spot orders and limit orders sat inside the same non-custodial environment. The user saw an asset and a price; the system handled the route. By autumn 2024, the app supported more than 250,000 cryptocurrencies across seven blockchains. That count would rise into the millions by the acquisition announcement, but the number of user-facing concepts was meant to fall.
“Users can deploy fiat currency to fund their non-custodial Slingshot wallet in minutes and jump straight into the action on-chain without even realizing they’re transacting on a blockchain.”Clinton Bembry, 2024
There is a useful tension inside that sentence. Slingshot remained non-custodial, which meant users kept control of their assets. Yet the interface tried to resemble the centralized exchanges it wanted to replace. Bembry was not asking people to choose between agency and ease. The product challenge was to preserve the first while borrowing the second.
A buyer with the same map
Magic Eden arrived with an adjacent ambition. The company had begun as an NFT marketplace on Solana, then expanded across chains, launched a wallet and moved deeper into token trading. Its stated strategy was one platform for all chains and all assets. Slingshot brought the routing, universal balance and trading interface that could turn the slogan into a more complete product.
The acquisition discussions ran from roughly January through April 2025. Terms were not disclosed; the consideration included equity and Magic Eden’s ME token. Slingshot was not folded immediately into a larger department. The operation stayed intact, its team joined Magic Eden, and Bembry remained CEO while reporting to Magic Eden co-founder and chief product officer Zhuoxun Yin.
For Bembry, it was a second exit and a continuation. His public announcement promised a “complete replacement for centralized exchanges,” with all assets and all chains but without manual bridging or gas management. Magic Eden gained a path beyond collectibles. Slingshot gained distribution and a broader home. The shared bet was that on-chain markets could compete on experience, not only ideology.
The fit also depended on complementary strengths. Magic Eden had a recognizable consumer brand, a wallet and experience scaling products across a restless market. Slingshot had spent years on the less visible work of chain abstraction and execution. One side brought reach; the other brought a trading engine designed to make network boundaries recede. Keeping Slingshot intact preserved the team that understood that engine while giving it a larger surface on which to operate.
“As the world leaves centralization in the past, this move allows us to further empower the individual and make crypto more accessible for everyone.”Clinton Bembry, 2025
The quiet consistency of a repeat founder
Founder stories often get arranged around discontinuities: the new company, the new market, the new lesson. Bembry’s is more useful when read for repetition. Astro Wallet used dollars as the familiar layer over Ethereum. Slingshot used a consolidated balance as the familiar layer over many chains. Coinbase and Magic Eden bought different products, six years apart, that expressed the same preference.
Graduated from the University of Minnesota and moved into wallets and crypto investing.
The acquisition brought Bembry into Coinbase as a software engineer.
A new company applied the abstraction thesis to decentralized trading.
Bembry appeared on the Finance list as Slingshot scaled.
The second exit paired Slingshot’s trading system with a multichain marketplace.
That consistency is a practical founder lesson. Markets cycle. Language changes. Infrastructure improves. A durable customer complaint can survive all three. Bembry’s complaint is that users are asked to carry too much of the system in their heads. The work is to decide which choices express real control and which choices merely expose unfinished software.
His public profile now says he is “working on something new,” without naming it. He also posts with the casual rhythm of someone who can step away from the industry and joke about returning after touching grass. One recent aside concerned a different market entirely: he argued that the Minnesota Timberwolves had been mispriced for three years. The computer science graduate still watches Minnesota.
Whatever comes next, the record so far is unusually legible. Bembry learned from a wallet, carried the lesson through an exchange, enlarged it into a trading app and sold that app to a company pursuing the same multichain future. The machinery kept getting bigger. His preferred interface kept getting smaller.