Lume soon

May 02, 2025

Hey everyone — this is our first post, and we’re incredibly excited to kick off this journey with you.

I’m SV, and along with my co-founder and CTO, Reny, we started Lume just four months ago.

Reny and I go way back — over a decade. We previously co-founded Sonic AMM, a decentralized exchange on the Internet Computer (ICP), where we built everything from scratch:

  • Gasless swaps

  • Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools

  • AI-powered token launchers

  • Wallet connectors

  • Token minters

  • NFT frameworks
    …and more.

Before Sonic, I worked with IOHK (Cardano) on the Midnight Protocol, and prior to that, I was part of NEM blockchain — one of the OG chains from the wild west of 2013 crypto.

Reny led the tech team at Innov8, a startup that was later acquired by SoftBank-backed OYO Rooms, before joining me full-time in the Web3 space. We’ve had our fair share of failures, but also hard-won lessons that have shaped how we build today.

Why Lume?

We started Lume because crypto is still too complex for everyday people — even though it’s come a long way.

Banks are seamless. You don’t need to watch YouTube tutorials to move your money. But in DeFi? That’s still the norm.

Let me tell you about Brian.

Brian is a retired electrical lineworker who lives near my home. He buys tokens on Coinbase. He’s curious. He wants to explore staking, liquidity pools — real DeFi. But every step feels like a research project.

Six months ago, Brian and I were chatting while mowing our lawns. He told me how he’s trying to learn DeFi — alone, confused, piecing together answers from Reddit threads and blog posts.

That conversation hit me hard.

I realized I’d spent years building products for people like me — people with technical backgrounds or crypto-native knowledge. But I wasn’t building for Brian — or the nurse, the teacher, the farmer — people who should also have access to powerful financial tools.

Lume is for Brian.

It’s for people who’ve been left out of the DeFi revolution.

We’re focused on clean design, frictionless onboarding, and one-swipe actions.
Because staking shouldn’t take 6 clicks. Swapping shouldn’t feel like debugging software.

Lume is DeFi — minus the complexity.
Something your dad could use.

Let’s build it together.
— SV & Reny