Some startups begin with a market gap. Others begin with a founder who is forced to confront a broken system every day. Rethink Finance belongs to the second category. This is the story of how Rok Behin’s direct experience with the hidden fragility of DeFi treasury management led to a platform now trusted with over $10 million in assets.

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1. Rok Behin and the problem he could not ignore

Before Rethink Finance existed, Rok Behin was living the problem most people in DeFi only talk about.

Working hands-on with treasury management, Rok repeatedly ran into the same bottleneck. Every transaction required multiple signatures, endless coordination, and implicit trust in a small group of people to act in everyone’s best interest. The system was neither fully decentralized nor efficient.

For simple transfers, this was frustrating. For complex, time-sensitive strategies, it became a serious limitation.

Rok also saw deeper structural risk. Many DeFi treasury solutions relied on custom adapters, off-chain net asset value calculations, MPC wallets, and hidden central points of failure. What was presented as decentralized infrastructure often behaved like a tokenized wallet with added complexity.

Instead of accepting these trade-offs, Rok and his co-founder asked a fundamental question. Why does treasury management in DeFi still feel slower, riskier, and more fragile than it should?

That question led to the founding of Rethink Finance in late 2023.

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2. The solution: Rethinking vault infrastructure from first principles

Rok’s approach was not to rebuild DeFi from scratch. It was to assemble existing, battle-tested components in a safer and more coherent way.

From the beginning, Rethink Finance focused on minimizing new smart contract risk. The team relied on proven infrastructure wherever possible.

•  Safe is used for delegated execution.
  
•  OpenZeppelin contracts power governance.
  
•  Oasis infrastructure supports secure and verifiable computation.

Where no reliable solution existed, the team built one. The most critical piece was an on-chain net asset value calculation layer. This became the core of the protocol, enabling deposits, redemptions, and administration without relying on off-chain processes.

The result is a modular vault architecture that allows asset managers and builders to launch non-custodial vaults without custodians or administrators. Funds cannot be moved maliciously or by mistake. Vaults can be configured and deployed in under 30 minutes.

For Rok, this was not just about speed or convenience. It was about building a system that continues to function even in worst-case scenarios.

3. What Rethink Finance has achieved so far

Since launching its audited contracts, Rethink Finance has gained meaningful traction while still operating in close beta.

The platform currently manages close to $10 million in TVL and AUM. Sixteen asset management teams are actively building and operating vaults. Roughly half focus on manually managed strategies, while the rest are deploying automated, script-driven strategies.

A key breakthrough is that complex strategies can be executed off-chain and verified on-chain, without forcing builders to deploy fragile smart contracts or run into EVM constraints.

What began as a personal pain point has evolved into infrastructure that others are now using to build entirely new financial products.

4. soonami’s role in accelerating Rethink Finance

soonami played a critical role in Rethink Finance’s early growth.

The partnership worked because of strong alignment. soonami needed maximum flexibility with strong security guarantees, which matched Rethink Finance’s design philosophy from day one.

Together, they enabled a novel venture funding model. Users can stake ETH instead of selling it. The staked ETH generates yield, which is reinvested into the soonami ecosystem, while the principal remains protected. Contributors gain exposure to ecosystem upside without giving up their core holdings.

This use case became one of the largest drivers of early TVL on the platform.

More importantly, the collaboration deepened the product itself. soonami evolved from a user into one of the most important contributors to Rethink Finance, helping validate real-world adoption beyond theory.

Rethink Finance is still early in its journey. But Rok Behin’s story shows what happens when founders build from lived experience instead of abstract ideas.

From personal frustration to production-ready DeFi infrastructure, this is a clear example of how real problems, solved deeply, can turn into scalable platforms.

Another soonami alumni story, built on conviction and proven through traction.

Watch our interview with Rok on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nXhBbbtdyUo?si=1vpmEB-b6Fo6SfyT

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