We’re entering the third quarter, and it’s been a difficult six months for the web3 space. Gradient has felt this pain especially. We cater mainly to traders of lowcap tokens, and that’s the corner of the market that always gets crushed hardest in a bear. I’ll start by saying the problem we built Gradient to solve is still very much alive. Declining volume has made it hard for an emerging startup like us to establish a presence. It’s set us back, but it hasn’t ended us. When Gradient launched, it proved how effective the platform could be. Users saved an average of 6–8 cents on every dollar they traded— over $700k in savings on low eight figures of total volume. It worked exactly as intended, and we were growing week over week at a huge rate. Then adoption slowed. The core projects we started with began to decline, and as they faded, so did their communities. People who no longer traded had no reason to use Gradient or tell a friend, and that quietly took our growth plan apart. It left us active only where we’d started, in our own community— which was no longer a path to scaling. Gradient is permissionless. Any coin on ETH, BASE, and BNB can be traded here, price-impact free, against either a counterparty or a market maker. The trouble is that both are hard to find right now. In this market, the incentives simply aren’t there. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably spotted the chicken-and-egg problem: Gradient is incredibly useful when people are actively trading lowcaps that last longer than a few days, and not very useful when they aren’t. $GRAY has suffered alongside, it captures fees, and fees track volume- so when volume dried up, the token followed. That isn’t a side effect we’re hiding from; it’s the mechanism working as designed, in a market that stopped giving it anything to work with. I won’t pretend there’s a lever we can pull to change that on its own, separate from volume and mindshare coming back. There isn’t. What I can tell you is what we’re doing in the meantime. Solana integration: We’re bringing Gradient to @Solana the most active lowcap market in crypto right now, and an entirely new addressable audience for us. Rethinking how lowcaps launch and trade: Gradient’s mission has always been more efficient lowcap markets, swaps were the easy target. The deeper problems sit upstream in how tokens launch, how early liquidity forms, and how they go on to trade. We’ve spent a long time inside these mechanics, and we’re researching and developing ways to fix them. As tokenization takes hold, the venues where assets launch and trade will matter more than ever. - Douglas