Codex is the only stablecoin chain built on Ethereum today. Some have described us as “Ethereum’s stablecoin SpecOps team”. Others have called us “Ethereum’s Tron Killer”.
We chose Ethereum because it’s where most of the assets and stablecoins sit today. A decade of robust security, deep liquidity, and zero downtime makes Ethereum, not some alt-L1, Wall Street’s preferred choice.
There are multiple adversaries emerging that hope to unseat Ethereum as the default place for stablecoins. Plasma settles on Bitcoin. Circle’s Arc, Stripe’s Tempo are all alt-L1s. These are all attempts to supplant and attack Ethereum.
We’re confident that Ethereum and Codex will crush these competitors. We will complement and extend Ethereum’s dominance far into the stablecoin future. Ethereum L1 will be where most stablecoins will sit, and Codex L2 will be where they move.
We’ve achieved product market fit and are growing ~10x month on month. We detail our approach below.
A Business Development Team Hyperfocused Only on Stablecoins
Our sole focus is making stablecoin transactions as cheap, efficient and seamlessly integrated with the traditional economy as possible.
Our BD team spends 100% of its time speaking to fintechs, payment service providers and companies in the emerging world. We have a deep understanding of these markets. We focus only on stablecoin flows, nothing else.
For all the hype, stablecoins do not yet make economic sense for many corridors today. Pre-funding already enables fiat payment service providers to tradeoff speed and cost at will. This means to truly move all payments volumes on to stablecoins rails requires at bare minimum a mechanism to rapidly compress on/off ramp costs to make more corridors economic. Then there are the countless UX issues, which are too many to cover here.
We do not hesitate to spend time embedded on the ground in these markets to truly understand the needs of our customers. For example, to better understand the Southeast Asian lumber industry, we spent multiple days in the field with local operators.
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There was unfortunately no Uber available in this jungle. We had to travel by helicopter and river boat. Hands got muddy and boots got wet.
A Research and Engineering Team Hyperfocused on Stablecoins
We intend to leapfrog Tron. Our priority today is to make the boundary between fiat and crypto disappear. To do this we are willing to work through all of the painful banking, licensing and engineering issues no other chain team is focused on.
The ironic thing is many stablecoin flows today are bottlenecked by underlying bank transactions that move at the speed of SWIFT (multiple days). Our goal is to make the fiat <> stable swap friction / cost / time delay go to 0.
Codex attacks the problem through multiple angles. One key piece of our approach today is Codex Avenue, our new stablecoin facility that offers the cheapest, fastest, easiest stablecoin <> fiat and stablecoin <> stablecoin swaps globally. Over time we believe it is important to layer on other properties. Atomic off-ramp transactions, risk-free fiat deliveries, and so on.
Tight Feedback Loop
To win, these two components must be coupled together in a tight feedback loop:
- a dedicated BD team focused only on stablecoins, closing deals and feeding insight into
- a dedicated stablecoin research / engineering team, that is able to move nimbly and take risky bets
Naive observers of on-chain metrics may say that there are general purpose L2s today that seem to do plenty of transactions. Insiders know that the many of these transactions are DeFi related spambot transactions.
We have spent thousands of hours speaking to the facilitators, initiators and intermediaries of the emerging stablecoin system: very little true stablecoin payments activity occurs through general purpose L2s / most alt-L1s today.
We believe the speed at which we can run the feedback loop is paramount. Codex’s patron saint is John Boyd. We believe “the ability to operate at a faster tempo…than an adversary will allow us to fold the adversary back inside himself…so that he can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s happening.”
Teams historically have not operated this way and they typically do not have the interest or expertise to solve the boundary problems we have identified.
Solving these problems for users requires focus, on the ground presence, and vertical integration. Researchers and developers cannot intuit from thin air what customers want. Ideas must be tested quickly through an outbound sales motion. Does the customer actually want this? The stablecoin feedback loop must run.
Win Together
No other community in crypto has the technical sophistication, the liquidity, or the reputation of Ethereum.
To ensure alignment with the community, Codex will pay out dividends to Ethereum validators and client teams. We think our example will set the standard going forth on how L2s should work with Ethereum: concentrated industry focus, deep product expertise, and economic alignment. We hope the community will rally around our efforts to ensure Ethereum wins.
To us, it’s obvious that this is the winning approach, and that the future of stablecoins will be on Ethereum and Codex.