In recent years, whenever we explain our building philosophy, it always elicits a familiar reaction: curiosity, skepticism, and then almost always a question:
“If this is such a big problem, why hasn’t it been solved yet?”
The answer is not that the industry hasn’t noticed, nor that the technology isn’t mature enough, but because correctly fixing the access issue requires a complete restructuring of coordination, execution, and settlement, while maintaining the status quo is relatively easy and profitable.
Throughout most of industry history, access has been viewed as something users must obtain through effort or purchase. Assets must be listed, and wallets must support these assets.
Once an asset is listed, access can be directly monetized. If an asset is not listed, users still need to trade using local assets, which can also be monetized. Regardless of the user’s intent, the detour process always generates economic returns.
This phenomenon creates a broad yet invisible value redirection in practice. Today, significant on-chain transaction volumes are not executed directly for the assets users want, but primarily through locally controlled assets mediated by intermediaries.
The scarcity of access has evolved into an economic relic.
As the creation of on-chain assets accelerates, platforms encounter real constraints. No exchange, wallet, or custodial channel can realistically showcase all assets. Scarcity does not appear in liquidity or settlement but in distribution.
Listing has become a threshold. Routing decisions determine accessibility. Once these detour paths prove profitable, they are no longer temporary solutions.
This is not a moral failure but a result driven by incentives. The coordination, capital, and risk required to monetize access are far lower than redesigning how users directly engage with on-chain assets. Once intermediaries realize that the detour itself can be priced, there is no reason to remove it, especially since doing so requires deep architectural changes that many teams cannot afford.
Over time, users have been conditioned to accept this detour as the norm, acquiring locally controlled assets unrelated to their intent, bridging value across chains, and approving opaque transactions. These steps gradually ceased to be seen as friction and became inevitable.
What follows is a silent economic tax, where participants do not pay through explicit fees but through necessary assets, additional steps, delayed execution, and the abandonment of intent.
Execution has matured, but access remains unchanged.
Despite access still being economically constrained, the execution layer has rapidly matured. Automated market makers, permissionless liquidity, and composable smart contracts have transformed execution into an almost solved problem.
These systems should not be viewed as destinations but as infrastructure. In the early days, users needed interfaces, so decentralized exchanges became the places users “went,” and access points became the channels. Over time, the industry began to confuse these interfaces with infrastructure.