Crypto promised freedom. Gatekeepers built walls. Launches built overhang.
This is how we decided to build the rails instead.
We didn't start with a whitepaper. We started in the trenches, shipping with teams that won the loudest day of their life at TGE and then spent the next year paying for it. Attention spiked; charts went vertical; then the hangover hit. Mercenary holders rotated out. Emissions lingered. Market-maker retainers and listing fees turned "access" into a tax. What looked like a liquidity event hardened into permanent sell pressure that every future milestone had to push uphill.
Crushed from within, taxed from without
Inside the castle, incentives trained users to exit. Outside, gatekeepers charged rent for the privilege of playing. We watched principled teams choose between diluting their communities or writing checks to middlemen. DeFi winter didn't create that dilemma; it exposed it.
The conversation that changed our direction
On one of those late-night postmortems, Guyi Shen tried to explain (again) why good projects kept losing to bad structure. Jan Pevzner listened. He'd seen a version of this before: in Japan's long bear market, when banks needed capital they couldn't "buy" with yield, they engineered instruments that protected principal and shaped upside. Ways to attract aligned, patient demand when the environment was hostile.
The question we kept circling was simple: could crypto do the same thing permissionlessly? Could we convert TGE-level attention into ownership, without creating an overhang, and let liquidity compound on-chain where communities live?
From shared frustration to a permissionless protocol
We decided not to build another tool. We set out to build credibly neutral rails: a protocol any already-launched token can use to run TGE-scale acquisition without the sell pressure, repeatedly, while spinning a liquidity flywheel that deepens, stabilizes, and keeps liquidity community-owned.
At the core are Exchequer Notes: simple ERC-20 primitives with transparent, on-chain collateral and a downside floor at maturity:
Protected Growth Token (PGT)
"floor + spot-like upside" at settlement (max 75% drawdown floor).
Power PGT
The same protection floor, with prize-linked upside to create campaign energy; every holder gets at least the floor.
They're not coupons or airdrops. They're a way to invite new users in with clarity—known floor, clear path to upside—and keep them, while each campaign strengthens the project's DEX depth. No CEX tolls. No opaque MM retainers. No spraying emissions to rent attention for a weekend.
What we believe
Acquisition should create owners, not overhang.
Liquidity should compound on-chain and be community-owned.
Incentives should be engineered, not sprayed.
The antidote to gatekeepers is transparent, permissionless structure.
Where we're headed
Our first step is getting these rails used in the wild, by teams who've lived the TGE high and the hangover and want a better loop. If this resonates, you'll find the mechanics in the docs, and you'll find us where most of this started: helping builders replace a broken market structure with one that compounds.