Thread by @a3voices

1/ @AlgodexOfficial - where did it go wrong and why didn’t it take off after the Mainnet launch?

Here’s my thoughts on my first attempt into crypto entrepreneurship: 👇

Many others were involved too but I am not sharing everything out of respect - so can’t give the whole story

2/ I started the project last April in 2021 because #Algorand had no DEX, and as an avid fan I was impatient to fix this. There was clearly a *ton* of pent-up demand for a DEX - this was quite obvious.

After I launched the project, we soon tons of community and VC interest.

3/ Keep in mind prior to this project I had no management or fundraising experience.

For a while the project had no money.

However, I very quickly enlisted people via Twitter to help out and were “paid” in IOUs basically. Without going into details, people came and went.

4/ However, I quit my (well-paying) job to work on it full-time after hearing we would receive the Algorand grant.

I ambitiously decided to make a “unique” order book DEX instead of an AMM.

I think this was the first bad decision. AMMs are much easier to build.

5/ Plus, you can very simply add liquidity to an AMM, while orderbook exchanges require market makers to continually provide liquidity.

This concept was for a while lost on me, as I assumed random traders would just place lots of orders - which did actually happen on Testnet!

6/ So anyways we eventually got the DEX working well enough and released on Testnet late August

Despite my best efforts, the backend didn’t scale.

Fortunately @PhearZero joined the team and saved the day - we changed it to a pub/sub model and got it fixed, after many efforts.

7/ However, Testnet was a big success! There were 10s of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of trades.

But were most of them actually interested in the project, or just hunting future airdrops? 🤔

8/ I also still didn’t know how to properly legally structure the company internationally in order to sell tokens, and in August a VC deal (which would have structured it) fell apart.

So I entered into an international merger deal, with people who could help - another mistake.

9/ It took the accountants and lawyers several months to complete it.

Meanwhile we couldn’t use money we had raised ($6-7mm total) since the merger with @AlgonautCapital was still pending.

And meanwhile, other DEX’s launched on Mainnet!

This in turn reduced demand for Algodex

10/ So delays kept piling up, we had hardly any money for a while, and finally in February we completed the deal and then launched on Mainnet. To very lackluster results.

We also didn’t have the SDK completed, a good rewards model (turns out everyone is obsessed with rewards).

11/ And we still didn’t have a way for anyone to easily provide liquidity on the DEX! Like I mentioned previously, order book models are much more complicated to provide liquidity on.

12/ Then the crypto bear market hit.

And after much internal debate, we still released our $ALGX token.

We needed to release it in order to have rewards incentives for the platform.

The price soon tanked after the launch after some early investors dumped the token.

13/ Back to the present, I wanted to mention we do have a very strong team now and are doing our best to improve on all this!

Pera Wallet support is launching this week, we launched the SDK, tons of progress on the new backend & rewards system, and the market maker bot is coming

14/ The team is very committed to turning @AlgodexOfficial into an awesome product that provides a lot of value to the ecosystem - whatever it takes!!