Fensory on The DeFi Drop

Guest: Alex von Mühlenen, Founder & CEO, Fensory
Host: Edward Ward, Portals

In this episode of The DeFi Drop, Edward Ward welcomes Alex von Mühlenen, founder and CEO of Fensory, to explore how Fensory is redefining crypto capital markets infrastructure. Built as a "super app for crypto wealth," Fensory is designed to become the operating system for investors seeking smarter ways to allocate and manage crypto portfolios.

Alex shares his experience at Celeste, an agency lender based in Zurich, where he worked with over 150 crypto-native institutions managing hundreds of millions in BTC and stablecoins. His team deployed nearly $1 billion into a wide array of lending and structured credit strategies across DeFi and CeFi.

Following the collapse of FTX, institutions lost confidence in unsecured markets. Specialized intermediaries like Celeste, once relied on for vetting and benchmarking opportunities, disappeared. The absence of curated intelligence led Alex to build something better.

"If you take away that super specialized intermediary, LPs are entirely left on their own. I realized that with just Google and my network, discovering suitable solutions is extremely hard."

The Origin of Fensory: From Pilot to Pull-Based Business

Starting with a prototype built using Replit Pro and AI tools, Alex developed an early version of Fensory that indexed investment products across DeFi, CeDeFi, RWAs, funds, and structured strategies. He onboarded 60 allocators in a four-month pilot to test usability and demand.

Unexpectedly, users came inbound. Funds wanted access. One hedge fund even asked to subscribe before the company formally existed.

"One of the hedge funds said, ‘Can we become a premium subscriber?’ That’s when I realized it was time to turn this into a real company."

From Amber Markets to Fensory: Rebranding for the Long Term

Fensory began as Amber Markets, but with many existing crypto projects using similar names, Alex rebranded to signal credibility and approachability for more serious allocators. Fensory now positions itself as a terminal and infrastructure layer for global crypto capital markets.

While the front end operates as a super app for investment discovery and management, the backend is becoming a full-stack aggregator for liquidity, data, and intelligence.

Who Fensory Serves: Mandates, Not Memes

Fensory is built for structured allocators. While it lists a wide range of opportunities, the user experience begins with a mandate-based approach.

Examples of mandates:

• Retail: liquid, risk-attested, and audited strategies
• Family offices: permissioned products, jurisdictional compliance
• Degens: high-risk, high-reward opportunities

This structure guides discovery, benchmarking, and presentation.

"There is no one-size-fits-all. Whether a product is showcased really depends on the ICP and your corresponding mandate."

AI as a Research Copilot

Fensory integrates natural language search and AI tools to reduce the time required to evaluate investment strategies. Users can ask questions like:

• What drives the yield?
• What are the liquidity constraints?
• What are the risk factors?

As Fensory evolves, AI will ingest third-party data (risk ratings, reserve attestations) and enable portfolio-level intelligence: automated alerts, risk monitoring, and optimization.

"Nobody should make a full investment decision just using an analytics agent. But it should take you from five hours of reading to two minutes."

Neutral Infrastructure for Listings and Risk

Fensory is neither an issuer nor a custodian. It acts as a neutral layer that aggregates and analyzes, while relying on external rating providers for risk classification.

Listings follow conservative rules:

• Must have audits or third-party attestations
• Must meet minimum TVL
• Must not have anomalous yield spikes

These guardrails are tailored to the user’s risk profile.

"If you’re a degen, you might love those outliers. If you’re a retail participant or a family office, it’s going to be much more stringent."

Go-to-Market: Product-Led and White-Label Ready

Fensory targets advanced retail and smaller institutional allocators, especially family offices. Many are shifting from basic crypto understanding toward more structured portfolio demands.

Fensory does not aim to become API infrastructure, but B2B2B use cases are growing. Advisors and sub-advisors are interested in offering Fensory under their own brand.

"We want to focus on distribution and usability, not building an API business. But advisors and sub-advisors with family office clients see a lot of value in a white-label single sign-on solution."

Moat and Vision: The Terminal Users Never Leave

The long-term ambition is for users to remain within the platform from start to finish: discovery, research, execution, monitoring, and secondary markets.

"If in 12 months I go on Reddit or X and people say, ‘I don’t actually ever leave Fensory,’ then I’ll be extremely proud. That’s the moat."

TVL Predictions: A Birthday Forecast

Alex offers his take on where DeFi TVL is heading:

• By June 21, 2026: $172B
• By December 31, 2026: ~$250B

"I think by summer we’ve recovered to the peak of 2025… and by end of next year we’re probably around 250ish."

About Fensory: Fensory is the super app for crypto wealth, aggregating the global crypto capital markets universe into a single, mandate-driven terminal. It helps advanced retail, family offices and institutions discover, analyze and allocate across DeFi, CeDeFi, RWAs and funds, powered by natural language search, AI research agents and integrations with leading risk and data providers.

About Portals: Portals is the DeFi Super App. A one-click gateway to the entire on-chain economy. Powered by real-time data and seamless execution, Portals connects traders to over 20 million assets, thousands of protocols, and every major blockchain.