DeFi-focused trading app Structure launches in El Salvador, plans further expansion

A new trading app from Structure.fi is landing in El Salvador as it hopes to expand access to crypto and traditional investing to people worldwide.

Structure.Fi aims to remove barriers to investing, Structure.fi’s president and co-founder Bryan Hernandez told The Block in an interview. The platform is designed to combine crypto assets with tokenized stocks and ETFs without any minimum requirements or transaction fees. 

The company, which says it is participating in the British Virgin Islands’ regulatory sandbox, closed a $20 million funding round in December that included seed funding from Polychain Capital and proceeds from a sale of its $STXR token. The company was founded in 2020 by alumni of MIT and Jump Trading, according to its website.

“El Salvador will be the first official jurisdiction that we go to, but our goal is to cover the globe in as many countries as possible, Hernandez said. The company is working on getting the regulatory compliance to operate in each country — it supports 98 so far — and working to get the word out about the app in key markets. It also mentions Mexico, Nigeria and India as countries it is prioritizing in its rollout. While the Structure app is not geo-restricted, it goes through KYC/AML protocols and cannot be fully used for trading in every country. 

The Structure app allows users to invest in crypto assets, and plans to roll out a feature in the next month or two that will allow users to "tokenize" stocks like Tesla or Apple on a blockchain. Structure.fi hopes this will make it easy to trade between stocks and crypto assets like bitcoin or ether. The Structure app supports 28 stock tokens and 37 crypto tokens, according to its website. 

According to the company, “every tokenized asset that its users access on the platform is backed 1-to-1 and held in Structure.fi’s custody.”

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has focused the country’s crypto ambitions on bitcoin, which he made legal tender in the country alongside the US dollar last September. However, Structure.Fi’s press release features a statement from El Salvador’s Presidential Commissioner for Strategic Projects Cristian Flores that highlights decentralized finance (DeFi). 

“The decentralization of finance is the next logical step for the crypto revolution, along with the access to the internet and the infrastructure provided by blockchain,” Flores said in the statement.“DeFi will bring prosperity to El Salvador and beyond," he added. 

Hernandez clarified in an interview with The Block that there is no official partnership between Structure.Fi and El Salvador’s government at this time. Rather, the app is now available for people there to use. The startup has been working on blockchain education initiatives with the government, a spokesperson told The Block.