When the Alchemist project began its journey in February of 2021, it abided by a proverb that sought to guide the community on an adventure.
‘The only plan is there is no plan’.
While many found the very idea of having ‘no plan’ to be confusing, the ideals behind the motto were to build, create and experiment, without the strain of unrealistic demands that can burden builders. In an experiment during a fervent bull market, the logic behind the motto was even more profound.
Behind the scenes there has always been a plan. To build an open community where builders, talented individuals and passionate people can converge to push the boundaries of what’s possible in web3. To this date, with the release of three flagship products and many innovative features we can confidently say that part of our goal has been achieved.
Like any new experiment, there is an element of risk. As one of the initial flagship products of Alchemist, mistX sought to become the first DEX to use Flashbots technology, enabling users to have the added benefit of protection from sandwich bots. Additionally, instead of users having to use ETH for gas on transaction swaps, they were able to use another ERC-20 token used in the swap. Both key features, amongst others, were revolutionary in their own right and a testament to the innovation from within Alchemist and the mistX team.
As time wore on competition in the space heated up, while support for EIP-1559 resulted in a key feature being made redundant the mistX team explored new ways to re-capture market share.
Opportunities to further explore the Flashbots technology through varying use cases were discovered with a collaboration with the Flashbots team that enabled frontrunning protection via an API. The mistX team decided to focus their efforts on this endeavor, which led to the core business of the DEX receiving less attention than the new opportunity.
Unfortunately, the ability to capture the full potential of this opportunity in a beneficial way for Alchemist and mistX were never fully realized, and so a shift in attention was needed .
As part of this effort the mistX team focused their energy on launching the mistX v2 DEX, and worked towards introducing many new features such as an incredibly intuitive UI, gamification and cashbacks, multiple liquidity sources, and limit orders. However, the hard-fought battle to recapture the market share lost to large well capitalized players, while also striving to earn revenue, proved to be quite difficult.
Creating a community of builders who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible is of the utmost importance, but in light of current market conditions doing so in a sustainable manner becomes an even more important task.
With that in mind, as part of the Alchemist Council’s role to allocate funding, with a key focus moving forward on revenue generation and value accrual to the MIST token, we have in collaboration with the mistX team elected to end our incubation agreement and amicably part ways.
Throughout the last month and a half the mistX team and Alchemist Council have been exploring various ways to find a future for the mistX project outside of the Alchemist Incubator. Although no path forward was found, because of significantly lighter development efforts on the project the mistX team have honorably volunteered to return the MIST inflation stipends received during this period back to the Alchemist Incubator.
Although the mistX team will be moving on to new endeavors, their github projects will remain within the Alchemist Incubator for builders and projects to either revamp the project’s technology in the future or find new synergies with it. The mistX product and API will be fully sunset over the course of the next 2 weeks to give any dependent 3rd parties the necessary time to make any appropriate changes, after which all services will be shut down.
mistX has been responsible for incorporating some extremely influential tech across the web3 landscape. While this experiment hasn’t had the ending that we had hoped for, there is no doubt that the experiment has been a worthwhile endeavor and we sincerely thank the mistX team for their efforts.
For Alchemists, while there might naturally be some disappointment from our community, we are excited for what is ahead.
Our focus on revenue generating products and value accrual to MIST is guided to make our community more sustainable, and we believe this step is an important one to make. With that in mind, we are excited to share that we have secured two new projects to be incubated within the Alchemist ecosystem.
Revenue generation and value accrual to MIST is at the core of new incubations, and we are confident that, while they are still considered to be experiments, there is a significant opportunity for these projects to continually return value to the Alchemist ecosystem moving forward.
Lastly, an exciting update regarding tokenomics is just around the corner to further support our community and ecosystem.
We thank you for being with us on this journey. The best is yet to come.
Alchemist Forever ⚗️ ✊
