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Nodar Janashia
Nodar Janashia is a fintech and decentralized-finance entrepreneur known for co-founding DeFiZap, later renamed Zapper, and for developing products that connect users to on-chain financial services. He is also the currenct CEO of Hookr. His work has included one-transaction access to DeFi protocols, automated liquidity strategies, and more recently bounded on-chain automation.[1][2]
Early Life and Education
Janashia was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1990 and moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 2002. While in high school, he joined an Academy of Finance program and completed a financial-services internship at Ernst & Young (EY).[1][2]
He studied applied accounting and finance at Fordham University from 2008 to 2012, focusing on financial planning and services. During college, he worked in BDO’s corporate tax department and spent a semester studying international economics at City University of London; his professional profile also lists a 2011 bachelor’s degree in international economics from City St George’s, University of London.[1][2]
Finance and Business Career
After college, Janashia worked as a financial-modeling analyst at a small budgeting and forecasting software company, where he also took responsibility for sales and marketing and worked with businesses and certified public accounting firms. He later worked as a financial advisor at AXA Advisors from October 2012 to September 2013.[1][2]
From September 2013 to April 2015, he was sales director at PlanGuru. His work included collecting user feedback for product and interface changes, tracking financial and marketing metrics, managing events and partnerships, and training sales staff. Janashia founded CountUp.io in January 2015 and led it as founder and operations director until October 2019. [2][1]
At CountUp, Janashia advised early-stage businesses on accounting, legal matters, formation, business models, sales processes, automation, bookkeeping, and taxes. He also ran marketing campaigns and managed relationships between clients and accountants. Before these ventures, he worked as a tax associate at BDO USA from October 2010 to September 2012, preparing corporate and individual tax returns and advising international clients. His earlier experience included an EY financial-services internship in August and September 2007.[2][3]
DeFiZap and Zapper
Janashia has described Ethereum as a way to democratize the creation of financial instruments, comparable in that respect to the internet’s effect on media. He began writing tutorials about decentralized finance (DeFi), aiming to show both opportunities and risks, and observed that prospective users wanted to test tools before committing their own funds.To address that interest, he built DeFiStrategies.com, a no-code DeFi trading simulator using Glideapps. Users could select positions to open, and some expected to execute strategies through the app. Janashia said he kept development lean, released a minimum viable product to early users, and iterated in response to their feedback.[1]
Janashia co-founded Zapper in October 2019 and has described himself as an inventor of “Zaps,” a co-founder and advisor at Zapper, and a builder of OpenZaps. Zapper’s introduction in May 2020 presented it as “DeFiZap+DeFiSnap=Zapper”; the company profile describes Zapper as founded in 2020 and reports $18.5 million in total funding across two rounds.[2][4][3]
In December 2019, Janashia announced a major DeFi Zap user-interface update and cDAI Unipool, a one-click tool for adding liquidity to Uniswap’s cDAI/ETH pool using ETH. He said liquidity providers could earn a share of the pool’s 0.3% trading fees while continuing to earn interest on cDAI. Uniswap publicly praised DeFi Zap’s work to improve the experience of interacting with its pools.[5][4]
Other Ventures and On-Chain Products
From October 2021 to October 2025, Janashia co-founded DeFrag Finance, described as a beta lending protocol. Users deposited crypto assets as collateral, borrowed USDC, and could repay at any time to withdraw their collateral; the service was presented as being used at users’ own risk.[2]
Janashia’s later work has included OpenZaps, which he describes as “bounded onchain automation.” He has advocated limiting and making inspectable the authority granted to agents that trigger DeFi actions, rather than giving them unrestricted access. His profile states that 0xZAPS launched alongside OpenZaps on Robinhood Chain.[2]
In October 2026, Janashia discussed Revenue Tokens as tokens representing a fee stream that could be deposited to mint “time shares.” He contrasted this model with betting on transaction volume alone. He also described Pair Tokens as programmable assets that combine two assets and carry the Uniswap v4 hook of the liquidity pool from which they are created; he said he was developing them with SimpleFarmer.[5]
Hookr, where Janashia identifies himself as “Chief Hookr,” collaborated with What The Hook on a “King of the Pool” mechanism announced as live in October 2026. Under the mechanism, the largest buyer in each 24-hour period receives 50% of the arbitrage recapture for that period.[5]
A later post described a launchpad being halted after immutable contracts had been deployed on Robinhood Chain. An adversarial review of the deployment found four issues.[2]
Writing and Public Work
Janashia has published writing on DeFi, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and blockchain topics. His work includes an August 2019 introduction to DeFi, a Q3 2018 analysis of Bitcoin velocity, and a March 2018 interview with Vitalik Buterin about scaling Ethereum. Janashia said he attended the Asia Pacific Ethereum Meetup in Bangkok the month before the interview was published, where developers from Ethereum, OmiseGo, MakerDAO, and other projects were present.[4]
In 2018, Janashia said he was studying token economics and building financial-model frameworks to help early-stage crypto projects understand the long-term effects of token-distribution strategies. His other writing includes a Russian translation of Naval Ravikant’s blockchain manifesto, published in March 2018, and a November 2021 history of “Zaps,” originally published on DeFi Tutorials and Twitter.[2][4]
He has also written about Leveraged Hooks, describing them as a way to use Uniswap trading liquidity as lending liquidity.[4]
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