Nuffle Labs began as a spinout from NEAR Foundation infrastructure. It aimed to improve finality for Layer 2s using NEAR’s fast settlement layer. The tech was smart. The execution was solid. The business model didn’t exist.
So Altan took one of the hardest decisions founders ever have to make. He pivoted.
MoreMarkets was the successor. A clear, market-shaped answer to a question most people in crypto weren’t asking: why are trillions in idle assets like XRP and DOGE doing absolutely nothing?
Altan’s journey wasn’t built on a whiteboard. It started with a partner engineering role at NEAR, where he helped lead the development of NEAR DA, got internal recognition from NEAR leadership, and built strong relationships across the stack. One of those connections turned into a seed cheque. Another led to an introduction to Electric Capital. He didn’t cold-pitch his way into a $13 million raise. He spent years quietly building until the right people came to him.
The team came together through NEAR as well. His co-founders weren’t random hires or co-founder matching service strangers. They had already shipped real things together. Altan was the external communicator. Sam handled operations. Firat and Don built the product. When the company took shape, the structure was already there.
The pivot to MoreMarkets came from a series of uncomfortable truths. Nuffle was technically strong but commercially unviable. There were no clear monetisation paths and no real demand for what they were building. Meanwhile, high market cap assets like XRP, DOGE, and Bitcoin were massively underutilised. The team saw a gap between the DeFi rails being built and the trillions in capital still sitting idle. That gap became the product.
MoreMarkets lets users deposit large-cap assets and earn yield through on-chain strategies. It looks like an exchange earn product, but under the hood it is self-custodial, transparent, and built entirely on DeFi infrastructure. Assets are deposited through an MPC network, wrapped and bridged, paired with stables, and deployed into strategies across ecosystems. Yield is traceable. Withdrawals are fast. Trust is replaced with visibility.
Altan is upfront about timing. The fundraising happened quickly, and the narrative at the time helped. But it was built on years of credibility and work inside NEAR. If anything, he says, it felt like the momentum hit too fast. It only made sense in hindsight.
The goal now is bigger than yield. MoreMarkets is designed to be a foundational earn layer for crypto. It could expand into swaps, staking, lending, or even decentralised versions of exchange infrastructure. But the core idea is simple. If assets are sitting idle, there should be a way to put them to work, without hiding how it works.
The pivot was a correction. And it gave them something most projects in crypto never get: clarity.
