1/ Crypto was supposed to be trustless. But in 2022, we watched everything we were supposed to trust blow up: centralized exchanges, overleveraged funds, opaque risks. It wasn’t a market crash. It was a betrayal. 🧵

2/ For those of us trading actively during that cycle, the hits came fast and brutal: • Luna's death spiral wiped out $60B • 3AC blew up after leveraged bets imploded • FTX collapsed with billions of client funds • CeFi lenders froze withdrawals overnight • Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager vanished Billions gone. No recourse.

3/ In the last cycle, @8BlocksCapital, a crypto HFT firm I started in 2018, had exposure to 3AC. We were actually the first to call them out publicly on Twitter. As a quant prop shop, we were cautious. We did our DD. But when a fund with a once stellar reputation ghosted everyone overnight, we realized: In CeFi, your legal team is your edge, not your trading. We eventually recovered our funds through legal action, but most weren’t so lucky.

4/ FTX was even worse. They mixed client funds. Frontran users. Manipulated books. Cozy'd up to regulators. And we all fell for it, because of the slick UX and celebrity endorsements. Now, many of us are still fighting legal battles just to recover what’s ours. How many trusted them just because it looked legit?

5/ The irony? The tools to prevent this already exist. DeFi gave us: • Self-custody • On-chain transparency • Permissionless access But most DeFi today is clunky, fragile, or farmed by insiders.

6/ That’s why we’re building @edgeX_exchange: • Built by traders • Prioritizing execution & transparency • No backdoors or private deals • That actually rewards those driving value

7/ It isn't just an exchange, but a permissionless liquidity network with 3 pillars: • Exchange - fast infra, deep liquidity, and a fair gateway for traders • Strategy Vaults - on-chain institutional grade asset management • edgeX chain - a secure, scalable foundation for DeFi-native infrastructure

8/ It’s a bull market now. But it won’t last forever. The next bear market will come. And when it does, history will repeat: Another blowup. More trapped funds. More disbelief. Unless we build systems that can’t rug.

9/ Our goal is simple: If you’re a general trader not backed by a fund or legal team, you should be able to compete. edgeX is built for that: • Fast infra • Real incentives for its users • No trust assumptions

10/ We’re not trying to replace CeFi with another black box. We want to build an exchange that earns trust and never asks for it. DeFi made that possible. Our job is to make it usable.

11/ In the next few weeks, I’ll break down how edgeX works: • Infra • Products • Incentives • Market Design Join us on our journey as we build the future of finance on chain.