Case Study

How a 16-Person Team Grew Oku to 60,000 Monthly Users by Competing with Centralized Exchanges on User Experience

Enso

20 Aug 2025 • 7 min read

Between 80% and 95% of all cryptocurrency trading happens on centralized exchanges (CEXes), despite billions of dollars invested in decentralized finance. Oku Trade, the laser-focused team of 16, recognized this was not a technology problem, but a user experience issue, and took the challenge of making DeFi more convenient.

One thing was clear: users rely on CEXes for being a one-stop-shop with an easy, predictable, and centralized experience. In contrast, the DeFi user journey is fragmented, complicated, and presents a steep learning curve, despite being free from risks that CEX carries. As Getty Hill, Oku’s co-founder notes,

while the DeFi industry has been incentivized to prioritize innovation on the protocol and infrastructure layer, the front-end experience for users was left behind.

Oku’s mission became clear: they had to address this decision fatigue by creating a single, familiar, and effortless platform. By integrating Enso, the team was able to provide best quotes to users for managing their assets, and added extra convenience with zaps: deposits to vaults without manual swap steps.

Oku managed to integrate the 4 key DeFi verticals, while being in the arena with CEX giants that “probably invested more dollars into refining their user experience than the entirety of all DeFi projects,” as Hill remarked.

With this, Oku is on a path to bring convenience DeFi users need, while giving them best swap options, direct vault deposits (zaps), and improving platform reliability through service redundancy.

The Problem: Inconvenient UX Repels Users

DeFi is hard and this fatigues users, especially the early adopters and early majority. An average user is given an overwhelming number of protocols on different chains they have to put together to achieve a financial goal.

Instead of a single, efficient action, the user is forced to become a human aggregator, manually navigating to multiple platforms and asking, “Do I check 1inch? Do I check another project?” just to ensure they aren't getting a bad deal.

The friction is compounded by a lack of basic features. A trader might make a dozen swaps but find there is no simple order history to track their activity, a feature so basic that a centralized exchange without it would be considered "absurd".

Here’s what users are facing:

Compare dozens of platforms: They are forced to check multiple protocols and chains to find the best routes for swaps and bridging.
Vet countless applications: The user bears the burden of constantly researching and familiarizing themselves with a vast landscape of different tools, and deeply familiarizing themselves with complicated protocols.
Struggle with record-keeping: There is often no unified transaction history, a standard feature on any CEX but a rarity in DeFi.

This high-friction experience is the primary reason why, despite years of innovation, an estimated 80% of all trading volume remains on centralized, off-chain exchanges. Users have been voting with their funds, and they have chosen the simpler experience.

The Oku team recognized that to change the narrative from "DeFi is hard" to "DeFi is easy," they needed to "close this gap". Their challenge was to piece together all the building blocks the ecosystem has to offer, so users wouldn't have to.

The Solution: A Platform of Partners, Not a Monolith

Oku adopted a core Web3 principle: build with the ecosystem, not in spite of it. Instead of rebuilding every component from scratch, their strategy was to partner with best-in-class protocols, saving months of development time to create a unified front-end experience. Getty Hill described the approach simply:

Let's not reinvent the wheel anywhere that we can avoid it.

This "platform of partners" philosophy allows Oku's team to integrate the key 4 verticals in DeFi:

services for swapping,
bridging tools,
on/off-ramping solutions, and
borrowing/lending across 37 chains.

Their flagship product, a powerful swap meta-aggregator, was designed to solve the user's primary pain point: finding the best price without any manual effort. By creating a free market where the best routers compete for user order flow, Oku ensures users get a great price every time, and establishes itself as a robust distribution channel to their partners. In words of Hill:

Oku truly is a platform of partners: 50-60 integrated different protocols and infrastructure providers working in harmony.

This decision brought more than just speed; it freed up critical engineering resources. The team was able to reinvest that time into enhancing user security, by integrating additional transaction simulations with their security partners to protect users from malicious data.

User Feedback: Optimal Swaps and Direct Zaps

Within this ecosystem, Enso was integrated as a key swap router to enhance Oku's core goal of providing competitive quotes to end users. The decision was driven directly by performance and user feedback. As Trish Dougan, Head of Marketing at Oku, explains:

We're just heads down in what our users need and providing best customer service. People come to us and they know that they're not only getting a quality product but they're being heard and understood and sometimes it leads to evolving the platform.

But why stop at swaps? Oku was able to deliver an even better experience by relying on Enso’ vault zapping feature.

Additional UX Convenience: Zapping, not Swapping

The integration resulted in more convenience for users: vault zapping, which allows users to deposit assets directly into vaults or swap with underlying vault assets in a single transaction, a capability Hill noted as unique in the market.

Here is how the zapping process works to cut through the decision fatigue:

The challenge: A user wants to deposit funds into a specific investment vault (e.g., a Morpho vault), but they hold a different asset. Traditionally, this would require multiple steps: swapping their current asset for the one the vault accepts, navigating to the vault's interface, and finally making the deposit.
The "Zap" solution: Users can perform this swap-deposit sequence in a single click. The user simply selects the asset they have and the vault they want to enter.
The result: In the background, Enso "zaps" the funds by creating an atomic transaction that does the swap and deposits the resulting tokens automatically.

This allows a user to, for example, deposit USDC directly into a vault without actually having to even go through the vault flow. This creates a lighter, more seamless user experience and increases confidence in using DeFi.

This approach involves complex DeFi interactions, where multi-step processes are done by the infrastructure, not the users.

The Results: From Numbers to System Reliability

Oku's strategy of building a platform of partners has yielded significant results, allowing a small team to make a major impact on the DeFi landscape.

50,000 to 60,000 Monthly Active Users (MAU): Oku successfully grew its user base on the platform.
37 chains supported: The platform offers access to major EVM-compatible chains, giving users opportunities to manage their multi-chain portfolios from a single, convenient interface.
4+ DeFi verticals unified: This unifies core DeFi activities: swapping, bridging, on/off-ramping, and borrow/lend, saving users from navigating multiple applications and simplifying their experience.
Delivers multiple production releases per week with a lean 16-person team.

For the development team of 16, this approach and Enso integration brought manyfold benefits:

Access to 300+ pairs, zero integration effort: with Enso integration, the platform can immediately tap into the growing number of trading pairs, without any integration effort.
Zero downtime: By integrating several swap routers, the team unlocked redundancy for swap routing. In case some of the providers are experiencing downtime, the platform would continue to function as expected, leading to higher reliability, the cornerstone of good UX.
SRE efforts reduced by 1 FTE: By integrating reliable partners like Enso and focusing on a robust security architecture, Oku reduced its site reliability engineering load and improved platform stability by creating a platform of partners.

Beyond the Numbers: Enabling True "DeFi LEGOs"

The most significant result of Oku's partnership model is the impact on the broader ecosystem. By providing a robust distribution channel, Oku frees up its partners to do what they do best. Getty Hill explains:

We want to free up teams that are otherwise spending lots of resources building out distribution or building out their own frontends... Let us worry about that component and we can free up your time and resources to work on what you're best at.

This approach embodies the true spirit of "DeFi LEGOs," allowing protocols like Enso to focus on innovating at the infrastructure layer while projects like Oku handles the user-facing experience. This creates a more efficient and specialized industry that ultimately drives progress for the end-user.

Conclusion: Key Takeaways from Oku's Success

Oku's journey provides a powerful blueprint for building a successful DeFi application in an arena they share with giants. Their success highlights several key principles for the future of the ecosystem:

Partnerships are More Powerful than Monoliths: Oku’s strategy to integrate best-in-class partners rather than building everything from scratch allowed a small 16-person team to create a comprehensive platform. This "DeFi LEGOs" approach, leveraging innovators like Enso, frees up development teams to focus on their core expertise.
Solving User "Decision Fatigue" is a Critical Goal: The primary reason 80% of trading volume remains on centralized exchanges is a complex and fragmented DeFi user experience. By focusing on aggregating services and simplifying complex actions—like the "zapping" feature enabled by Enso—Oku directly addresses this pain point.
A Customer-Obsessed Approach Drives Innovation: The decision to integrate Enso was a direct result of Oku listening to its users who reported getting better quotes. This commitment to feedback, combined with rapid weekly deployments, ensures the product evolves to meet real user needs.

The Future of Finance Will Be Aggregated: Oku's vision is that as the industry moves toward integrating "real world assets" (RWAs) , the financial landscape will become exponentially more complex. In this future, the ability to efficiently move capital between thousands of tokenized assets will become "mission critical". This validates Oku's core strategy and highlights the long-term importance of its partnership with infrastructure innovators like Enso, who build the critical tools needed to navigate the future of finance.

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