Making on-chain finance feel as simple as texting
Turning Chats to Cashouts
In 2025, Azza processed over $10M in onchain volume, entirely through WhatsApp. Azza enables everyday people and businesses to buy, sell, hold, and transact crypto without downloading an app or navigating complex trading interfaces.
For the 10K plus users, their first onchain interaction didn’t happen in a traditional crypto wallet, it happened in a chat, on an already familiar interface; WhatsApp. Our goal was to turn a familiar messaging experience into a trustworthy, usable financial interface, capable of handling real money at scale.
Solving a problem we had first.
We (the Blocverse team), were already receiving and spending money in crypto, but existing tools felt fragmented and unnecessarily complex. Managing wallets, tracking balances, and completing transactions often required jumping between multiple apps and interfaces that assumed a high level of crypto knowledge.
What we wanted was simpler: a way to buy, sell, hold, and transact crypto from the same place we already communicated. The place was WhatsApp.
In 2024, we entered the Base Around The World hackathon with an early version of Azza, focused on making onchain transactions feel as easy as sending a message. Our submission (called Azza DeFi), alongside 22 others won the hackathon, validating both the problem and the approach.
After the hackathon, Azza began to gain organic traction. People adopted it because it felt familiar! The traction pushed us to evolve Azza from a hackathon prototype into a production-ready WhatsApp crypto bot used by thousands.
How do we design for WhatsApp?
Designing Azza meant creating a financial experience entirely within WhatsApp’s native interface. With no custom components, navigation, or visual hierarchy to build from scratch, we had to work within the constraints of messages, buttons, spacing, order, and timing.
This meant every message had to be clear enough to stand on its own, safe to act on with real money, and capable of guiding users without relying on extensive visual context.
We couldn’t assume users would scroll back, remember previous steps, or understand crypto-specific patterns.
Building for real users
Winning Base Around The World 2024 validated the idea and showed that WhatsApp could support real financial flows. From there, we focused on designing the experience for real users, refining each flow to make transactions clearer and easier to navigate.
Mapping the core flows
As usage grew, we had to design for real user behavior, including unexpected inputs, skipped steps, and unfamiliar crypto terminology.
We mapped hundreds of scenarios across onboarding, security, trading, deposits, withdrawals, confirmations, and error states to make the experience reliable and easy to follow.
Designing Azza was a team sport. Product, design, and engineering iterated together, often staying up all night to test decisions, solve constraints, and refine flows.
Testing, Iteration & Building Trust
A large part of Azza’s growth came from learning directly from users. We tested the bot at events, handled customer support ourselves, and reached out to users who never completed their first transaction. This helped us uncover concerns around security, crypto terminology, and confidence during transactions.
We used these insights to continuously refine transaction flows, error states, confirmations, and user education. At the same time, we focused on making Azza feel more human through small but important touchpoints like receipts, rate cards, and post-transaction summaries.
This thinking extended beyond the bot to the landing page, creating a consistent visual identity that helped users understand and trust Azza before making their first transaction.
Results & Impact
Azza grew into a product users trusted by combining familiar UX patterns with continuous iteration.
In 2025, Azza processed $10M+ in onchain volume, reached 10,000+ users, completed 46,000+ trades, and expanded across 4+ countries. We also collaborated with ecosystem partners including Base, Lisk Africa, and Solana Superteam NG.
More importantly, users described Azza as simple, trustworthy, and easy to use, validating the experience we set out to build.
I had the privilege of working alongside an incredible team who brought different perspectives, skills, and ideas to every stage of Azza. We had people multitasking and taking on wildly different roles at the same time, and it was so amazing to see.