The future of finance had brought Evgeny Yurtaev to an unpleasant apartment in San Francisco. It was 2019. He and his co-founders were looking for investors, and the market was giving them little encouragement. Crypto was in a slump. The people willing to finance it were often more interested in the machinery underneath than the screen a customer would actually touch.
“We rented the crappiest apartment ever,” he recalled. There is something reassuring about this detail. A pitch for a financial future still had to survive the accommodations of the present. Yurtaev, Alexey Bashlykov and Vadim Koleoshkin had come to persuade people that making decentralized finance usable could be a business.
Today Yurtaev leads Zerion from London. The company has become a wallet maker and a provider of blockchain data to other products. Getting there required several changes of direction. Following those changes reveals a founder with a recurring concern: the distance between giving someone access to a financial system and making that access useful.
Before the wallet, a pack of student programmers
Yurtaev’s route into the subject began with programming and an interest in finance. He first heard about Bitcoin in 2013. Reading the Ethereum white paper in 2014 expanded his sense of what software could do with money. He began exploring smart contracts, the programs that execute on a blockchain, and attending Moscow meetups and hackathons with Bashlykov.
Their partnership had a practical foundation. They studied together at HSE University and worked on mobile software at the web studio Jufy: Bashlykov on Android, Yurtaev on iOS. A student hackathon brought a small prize and introductions to a community still small enough for such introductions to matter. Work on smart contracts for Waves helped bring further requests.
A Moscow conference attended by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin brought them together with Koleoshkin. They already knew him through Jufy. The conversation turned toward building a company together. The future founding team shared an interest, some technical ability and evidence that people would pay for their work. That was enough to begin.
Yurtaev also spent time as a software engineering intern at Google. A colleague credited his contributions to room booking and Spotlight integration in the Calendar iOS team. His public project list includes CryptoTrader, a cryptocurrency chart application, and Copy the Emoji, a face-recognition game. The list has the pleasing untidiness of someone who liked making things before having a single company to explain himself.
The small indignity of typing everything in
The business that became Zerion did smart-contract work before it became a familiar consumer interface. Its early experiments ranged from tokenized funds to a blackjack game written for Ethereum. The name changed, too, passing through Etherion on its way to Zerion. Even the company’s name seems to have been subject to product development.
Working around token sales exposed a mundane problem. People needed a way to see the tokens they owned without entering everything manually. The team began building a basic portfolio tracker in May 2018. A beta released in January 2019 combined tracking with trading through Uniswap; Maker and Compound followed.
The technical possibility mattered because the user experience was so fragmented. A person could have assets spread across several protocols and wallets, with no satisfactory picture of the whole. Yurtaev’s bet was that assembling that picture had value. It was a demanding kind of tidying up: the room kept acquiring new furniture.
In a 2020 discussion, he explained why Zerion wanted to support even assets held by relatively few users. If a holding disappeared from someone’s portfolio view, the product’s reliability was in question. Completeness was part of the promise. An account of your money becomes less useful when it quietly omits the part that was inconvenient to include.
“Access to financial markets is a universal right.”Evgeny Yurtaev, 2020
A reason to care about the missing balance
The interest in access was personal. Yurtaev has described growing up through repeated falls in the ruble and encountering restrictions on financial services because of nationality. He and his co-founders had experienced the limits of where they could invest. Those experiences gave the company’s mission a concrete starting point.
The resulting argument connected two jobs. Blockchain systems could make services available across borders. Someone still had to make those services understandable. The interface sat between a large political promise and a person trying to complete a transaction. It was a modest place to work on an ambitious idea.
That pitch eventually attracted funding. Zerion announced a $2 million seed round in December 2019, led by Placeholder with Blockchain.com Ventures and Gnosis participating. In July 2021, it announced an $8.2 million Series A led by Mosaic Ventures. Toby Coppel and Brad Burnham joined the board.
At the time of the Series A, the company reported more than 200,000 monthly active users across 150 countries and over $600 million in transaction volume for the year to date. Those figures describe a particular moment in 2021. They also explain why the interface had become easier to discuss with investors: there were now people on the other side of it.
Zerion’s reported reach in July 2021. Historical figures, not current totals.
When the customer calls you a wallet
The next change involved listening to the language of customers. Yurtaev later described users treating Zerion as their wallet even when the company thought of it as an aggregator. They were already using it as the place where their financial activity came together. Their description suggested a larger responsibility for the product.
Zerion launched its mobile wallet on May 26, 2022. The launch combined multichain support, trading routes, connections to decentralized applications and management of multiple seed phrases. It also included Zerion DNA, a generative NFT that changed with the user’s activity. A browser extension followed in 2023.
Moving into wallets brought the business closer to the moment when a user approves an action. Self-custody gives people responsibility for their own keys and assets. The experience therefore has to help them understand what they are signing. A tidy balance display is only one part of the work.
In his October 2023 conversation with Friederike Ernst, Yurtaev discussed wallet security, storing seed phrases, attack risks and moving between blockchains. These subjects are less entertaining than a prediction about token prices. They are also the subjects a wallet company must get right repeatedly. A customer’s enthusiasm for independence can be severely tested by an incomprehensible transaction request.
The evolution also complicates the usual account of a startup finding its category. Tracking, trading and signing belong to different technical tasks. To a customer, they may be consecutive steps in the same afternoon. The divisions that help a company organize its work can be awkward instructions for someone trying to finish theirs.
That is the tension running through Yurtaev’s decisions. Extending the product offers a chance to remove another interruption. It also gives the team another responsibility to maintain. Each improvement has to earn its place in the experience, long after the excitement of announcing it has passed.
Who pays for the next click?
Eventually the limits of improving the screen became part of the problem. A wallet could explain a transaction elegantly while still asking the user to acquire a network’s native token to pay for it. The explanation might be excellent. The interruption remained.
On November 12, 2024, Yurtaev announced that ZERO Network’s mainnet was live. The Ethereum layer-two network offered gas-free transactions to eligible users through Zerion Wallet. The system combined account abstraction and a paymaster with an eligibility mechanism called Onchain DNA, which examined an address’s transaction history to help distinguish people from automated abuse.
The proposal moved the company into another layer of the experience. Subsidizing activity also creates a practical question about who receives the subsidy. ZERO’s design addressed that question alongside the ambition to remove fees. Free use requires someone to do the accounting.
Meanwhile, the data underlying a consumer view had become a product for developers. By October 2026, Zerion was publishing accounts of its API being used by other wallets, including Kraken Wallet. The company’s September portfolio-app redesign and its work on developer data show two expressions of the same job: making activity across blockchains legible to the person or application trying to use it.
The people who survive the pivot
Repeated changes can make a company’s history look more orderly in retrospect than it felt at the time. Yurtaev’s own reflections leave room for the arguments. In February 2025, writing about nine years of Zerion, he emphasized the value of having the same two co-founders alongside him through disagreements and changing markets.
His advice was practical: choose difficult problems worth the effort, talk to users, and examine whether people return because they value a product or because they are being rewarded. An incentive can purchase activity. Understanding that activity requires another kind of attention.
There is a quieter version of the same idea in his account of a team offsite. The difficult exercise was deciding what to stop doing: work to let go of, habits to break. A business with several lives accumulates things. Eventually the next decision involves subtraction.
Yurtaev’s public GitHub biography supplies a lighter footnote, calling him a “chief vibecoder.” The programmer is still visible inside the executive. So is the old question behind the portfolio tracker. Someone has an asset, an intention and an interface between them. After a decade of changing the business, he is still working on what happens in between.