With heavy hearts but clear minds, we have decided to place Adrena Protocol into maintenance mode, effective immediately. This means no new features will be developed by the founding team and Foundation, but the protocol will remain live: pools, vesting, staking, and the data pipeline will all continue to operate as usual for as long as necessary. We plan to open source the platform so that others in the community can continue to build on top of it and we hope someone might be able to continue the vision or take it in a new direction. In retrospect When we started working on this project 3 years ago, the idea was to launch an innovative PERP DEX where transparency and fairness were keys. We envisioned 100% revenue sharing, a versatile "one size fits all" token, fair tokenomics and distribution, and a product focused on excellent UX with never-before-seen features like trading competitions, profiles, achievements, LST pools, leaderboards, and quests. In a sense, we succeeded in creating that vision: in our first year, we generated $10M in fees, $8B in volume, and attracted 2,000 users. We ran successful trading competitions and saw our features copied across the ecosystem. We gave it our all, waking up every single day to work our hardest, and we never experienced a single exploit. Perhaps most importantly, we never paid for engagement or followers. This principle rewarded us with a legendary, S-tier community that we genuinely enjoy engaging with daily. Up and downs We have been chasing funding for more than a year. We’ve had some amazing angels step up to help us along the way to keep the team fed, but unfortunately we were unable to close a deal large enough to sustain a long term runway. The most recent shortfall: tariff Friday. We went to sleep closing a 2 week long deal and were ready to wake up to receive a year+ of runway, but unfortunately market conditions. Similar scenarios played out over the previous six months, totalling $5M in potential funding that never materialised. We worked tirelessly to acquire users and liquidity. While we were often successful, it was never enough to achieve liftoff. Each serious market movement decimates our user base and our marketing wasn't good enough to sustain the need for traders. All along, the question we ask ourselves to make the platform better is: why would I trade on Adrena rather than X? Lately, we are coming short of answers, and realistically of solutions; mainly because of the current airdrop meta and ultra heavy marketing, aspects on which we cannot compete. Ethical on an uneven playing field When we started 3 years ago, there were no GMX style perps on Solana, and Jupiter wasn't yet publicly working on perps. Right now it is the Perps Dex meta, the competition has been ramping up continuously, and the competitors are very well geared (team size, funding). We have heart and courage, but that alone cannot prevail: - Marketing: Without a performant marketing engine, we cannot sustain user acquisition (cf. users turnover mentioned prev.) - LPers profitability. We have a peculiar trader population, better in quality than quantity. That is due to us trying to strike a balance between traders/lpers (no size fees and such). This is what other platforms dub as "toxic flow", which most of the time are just regular traders. In our experience even these end up losing, although they don't consistently lose. Larger platforms have an inflow of smaller users with a much higher loss rate, which bolsters the profitability of their LP tokens. - Shenanigans: Hidden oracle spreads, Auto-Deleveraging (ADL), size fees, and enormous liquidation fees make it very hard to compete with other LP tokens that unlock the "UP ONLY" tech at the expense of half their user base. Many protocols take advantage of the complex mechanics of perp DEXes to bamboozle users, forcing others to either employ similar tactics or be less profitable. At Adrena we were fair from Day 1, no liquidation fee, no complex size fee but that didn’t bring traders as we expected it would. - The Competition: Bulk, Hyperliquid, Bullet, Lighter, Pacifica, Aster—just to name a few, with more still in stealth. They have large teams pushing every day to improve their trading engines, limit orders, and support for new pairs. Adrena with a limited team cannot compete there due to its structure/organisation (tokenomics, funding model). - Funding: Our tokenomics, though novel, ultimately hindered the protocol. Funding was difficult to secure because tokens were locked in vesting or staking contracts, making them unavailable to sell to new entities when we needed to grow. While our goal was to always have more ADX in the hands of our users, we ultimately should have reserved more token supply for the team/foundation to fund growth early on. We mostly founded the protocol ourselves over the past years, injecting over $2M of our personal funds. Conclusion For all the reasons above, we’re stopping active development of the protocol, and as mentioned, we will open source the front end and back end shortly after. We are proud to have birthed Adrena, it is the result of our sweat and blood as we poured everything we had into it. During this journey, we were inches away from greatness more than once — market timing + our own tokenomics held us back. Ultimately we fought against the odds for the past 10 months, knowing our trader population and issues to acquire LPers, hoping that our product would prevail. But we have come to accept that facts are facts, we’ve missed great opportunities and it is what it is. We don’t plan on going anywhere and we are here to have any open discussion people wish to have. Transparency was one of our core tenets after all ;). And one last bit of info that hopefully adds to the story of our commitment, the cofounders of Adrena never sold any vested ADX. 🫡 The Adrena Team