What is your plan to win and sort of dethrone these sort of like enshrined institutions of the DEX space? And how do you plan to go about challenging these bigger incumbents?

I mean, it's a great question, and it's a question I think we've been answering from day one in many ways.

For anybody who doesn't know our history, we started as basically five guys in Discord, virtually all anonymous, even to one another.

When we got started, we got started believing in the power of this model, right? A model that redistributes value maximally, that can quickly bootstrap all this liquidity.

And we thought the power of the model could disrupt some of the biggest incumbents in the space.

But we didn't raise any money.

We didn't sell any tokens.

they've rolled out a plan to redirect some of the fees from liquidity providers back to the token holders in a token buyback program a lot of people have been very enthusiastic about this you've been sort of critical about this you touched on this a little bit but say a little bit more about why you think the approach aerodrome is taking is is going to win here and sharpen that distinction for me a little bit

So I'm curious from your perspective, what are you most excited about as the new unique opportunities that Circles Arc will host for you all?

I mean that's a great question.

And you nailed it, right? We have just gone through a period of, you know, two to three years where every other day you had some sort of new chain launching, creating more and more block space.

But it did not seem like the issue for chains, you know, at least since, you know, the whole tell one sort of explosion happened.

And certainly since the layer two Ethereum explosion happened, the issue was not lack of block space, right? The issue is, what is that block space being used for? So our thesis has always been that There will be a degree of consolidation within chains, and especially consolidation within any chains that you can describe as their fundamental value proposition as being a generalized type chain.

What we saw in the Layer 2 expansion was basically copy paste of the same type of ecosystem that you've seen on Ethereum over and over again.

You need a DEX, you need a lending protocol, you need and you need to spend a ton of money or tokens incentivizing liquidity to build a certain amount of infrastructure.

Yeah,

And then we'll get into some of like, like the bells and whistles here.

Yeah.

Um, I would even take a step back before, like, we even think about financializing tokens, right? Um, in our mind, and this is the first principle that we baked into the building of the Meta DEX, right? Tokens are the single biggest revolution to coordination since the very invention of the firm, right? And that goes back to what I was just describing, right? In that we can build something that is a competitor to the New York Stock Exchange, and we can do it without any intermediaries.

We can do it in these decentralized ways.

How can we do that? You do it with a token.

The token becomes the central coordination tool of the overall platform.

Um, you know, in our system, for instance, token operators, those who take and lock their token, participate, they control the allocation of capital across our system in immutable ways.

Yep