Tascha Punyaneramitdee

Tascha Punyaneramitdee is a Thai entrepreneur and one of the most significant female founders in decentralised finance. She co-founded Alpha Finance Lab in 2020 — the protocol that created Alpha Homora, the first leveraged yield farming product in DeFi — enabling liquidity providers to take on borrowed capital to amplify returns from liquidity mining positions. Before entering crypto full-time, she worked in investment banking at Jefferies Financial Group in New York, giving her an institutional finance perspective that shaped Alpha's product design.

Alpha Finance Lab was founded at the intersection of DeFi's 'yield farming summer' of 2020 and the emerging appetite among sophisticated users for more complex financial instruments on-chain. Where most DeFi protocols of the era offered simple single-asset staking or basic liquidity provision, Alpha Homora allowed users to borrow ETH from a lending pool and use the borrowed funds to increase their position in yield farming strategies — effectively bringing the concept of margin trading to yield farming.

Alpha Homora launched on Ethereum in October 2020 and quickly became one of the most widely used DeFi protocols of the bull cycle. Users could borrow up to 3x their equity position in ETH, deploy the combined capital into Uniswap, SushiSwap, or Curve liquidity pools, and earn amplified farming rewards. The protocol automatically managed the position — reinvesting rewards, adjusting collateral, and liquidating positions that fell below minimum collateral ratios.

The protocol's rapid growth attracted both users and attention: within months of launch, Alpha Homora had accumulated over $1 billion in total value locked, and the ALPHA governance token reached a market capitalisation exceeding $1 billion. The protocol expanded to Binance Smart Chain (Alpha Homora v2) and later to other networks, extending leveraged yield farming to Pancakeswap and other DEX ecosystems.

In February 2021, Alpha Homora suffered a significant exploit: an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the protocol's interaction with Iron Bank (a lending protocol by CREAM Finance) to drain $37.5 million in various assets. The exploit was technically sophisticated — involving multiple flash loans and complex state manipulation — and became one of the most studied DeFi hacks of the 2021 cycle. Tascha and the Alpha team responded with transparency, published a detailed post-mortem, and began a structured repayment process.

Alpha Finance Lab's response to the 2021 exploit reflected a mature crisis management approach: immediate communication, full disclosure of the attack vector, and a repayment plan that prioritised user recovery over team economics. The protocol's continued operation and subsequent growth in TVL demonstrated significant community trust in the team's competence and integrity.

AlphaX, the protocol's perpetual swap product launched in 2021, extended Alpha Finance's philosophy of leveraged DeFi instruments into the derivatives space. Unlike traditional perpetual exchanges, AlphaX allowed users to take leveraged directional positions without the funding rate mechanics of traditional perps, using a fixed-leverage token model that simplified the user experience for retail traders.

Tascha's personal brand within DeFi grew substantially during this period. As one of the few prominent female founders in the space and one of the most visible representatives of Southeast Asian DeFi development, her profile attracted attention beyond the protocol's technical achievements. She became a regular speaker at major crypto conferences and an advocate for DeFi adoption in emerging markets.

After stepping back from Alpha Finance Lab's day-to-day operations, Tascha founded INFINIT — a DeFi infrastructure platform aimed at bridging institutional capital with on-chain finance. INFINIT focuses on the compliance, risk management, and execution infrastructure that institutional allocators require to participate in DeFi yields, addressing the gap between the high yields available on-chain and the risk management standards required by professional fund managers.

INFINIT's product suite includes institutional-grade yield optimisation, on-chain compliance tooling, and multi-protocol position management — designed for the treasury management needs of DAOs, family offices, and crypto-native funds. The platform represents a continuation of Tascha's thesis that the next wave of DeFi growth will come from institutional rather than retail adoption.

As of 2026, Tascha continues to lead INFINIT while maintaining her role as an advisor to Alpha Finance. Her contribution to DeFi — creating the first leveraged yield farming product, navigating a significant exploit with integrity, and subsequently building institutional infrastructure — spans both the retail and professional segments of the market and makes her one of the most complete builders in DeFi's founder generation.