A financial operating system should be self-custodial

Most people do not have a financial operating system. They have a stack of apps: a bank, a broker, a payments tool, a wallet. Each one holds a fragment of the picture, and none of them is designed to be owned.

Kura started from a simpler premise. Money should be visible in one place. The person who holds it should control it. Custody, in other words, is not a feature to be bolted on later. It is the architecture.

That is a product decision and an investment decision at the same time. If the rails of modern money are going to be rebuilt, they should be rebuilt in a form that does not ask the user to trust an institution they cannot inspect.

We built the first version ourselves because the thesis was not something we could underwrite from a deck. It had to be used.