Persistence & Iteration is the Name of the Game They say you just gotta keep pushing the boulder. Here’s the lore on how the uphill grind scaled Everclear’s volume 50x in just 3 months. Last year, I joined Connext as a BD (my first full-time crypto job btw), right as we were pivoting and rebranding to a whole new thing. Moving from a well-established brand like Connext, which already had its fair share of success, to Everclear was pretty huge. We had big shoes to fill and it wasn’t easy, especially launching a completely new primitive and proving a fresh thesis. We finally launched the private beta in October and started working on the improvements, as well as onboarding our first users. Things looked exciting. By February, 3 months later, we had cleared about $5M in monthly volume, a solid start for a brand-new primitive, but we knew there was plenty of room to grow. We knew exactly what needed to be improved, such as better pricing, faster settlement times, more chains and stronger user onboarding and retention. I think a lot about the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’ take reminds me that you just have to stay persistent and keep pushing the boulder, no matter how steep the hill. And that push paid off, the next month, March, Everclear 6x’d the monthly volume. With strong user feedback loops and constant iteration, we polished the product, improved pricing, sped up settlements, and kept existing users while bringing in new ones. It’s always hard to prove a fresh thesis, but it’s worth trying and giving it your best shot. Luckily, with an S-tier team, strong conviction, thoughtful leadership that keeps everything on track, a clear thesis, user-first improvements, and bullish persistence, anything is possible when you lock in with the right team. We managed to onboard awesome partners and made protocol improvements that helped us ramp up the volume, and in just a few months, we 50x’d the monthly volume, closing June with ~$250M cleared, the metric that really matters the most. We’re still a bit short of $1B monthly, but slowly and surely, we’re getting there. Today, we’re used weekly by most of the cross-chain industry - LiFi, Sprinter, Relay, Across, and many more, including individual solvers and other DeFi protocols. We also signed our first CEX integration (TBD), which will hopefully start a snowball effect with other CEXs and make the clearing mechanism more efficient than ever. I’m grateful to be working with such an exceptional team and leadership, people who keep delivering and keep the spirit high. Thanks to @arjunbhuptani, @dimakhanarin, @LayneHaber, @0xroboand and everyone on the Everclear team for pushing this boulder together. I truly believe things are only just getting started. With institutions entering crypto and new chains launching, the need for efficient rebalancing will only grow, and that’s exactly where @EverclearOrg excels. We’re in a far stronger position than we were and we’ve got some exciting news to share about what we've been cooking in the coming weeks. The future has never been so bright - and so CLEAR.