To our community,
Over the past few months, we’ve made some difficult but necessary decisions. These include downsizing our team, streamlining operations, and refocusing our strategy. As CEO, I take full responsibility for these moves—and for the clarity, conviction, and execution required going forward.
Agoric was founded to bring smart contract power to millions of developers. In pursuing the grand vision of a platform for an entire new economy, we did build a lot of important pieces—such as Hardened JavaScript, Offers, the Orchestration kernel—that we can now put to work.
But as the market evolved, some of the projects we focused on underdelivered or simply required a disproportionate amount of resources and focus. I acknowledge the original vision of recruiting JavaScript developers into Web3 proved overly optimistic within the shifting market context of 2022. And while we’ve seen an exciting uptake for Orchestration, the same builder adoption go-to-market proved to be too long and indirect.
We’ve learned, listened, and adjusted.
So, despite these challenges, Agoric has developed genuinely unique technology built upon a strong, sustainable tech stack. We are building a first-party product that reflects this. It’s designed to automate and optimize crypto actions—staking, yield, payments—across chains, seamlessly. The early feedback is promising, and we’re launching featurettes over the next several months to gather real user data and iterate fast to get to product-market fit. This work will culminate in a public beta later this year.
At the same time, we’re evolving the economics of the network. We’re starting with transitioning IST to BLD. We’re doing this deliberately, with care and community input, because it matters to us that this evolution creates long-term value for BLD holders.
We’re evolving the network’s economics by transitioning BLD to be the primary gas and fee token. This simplifies the user experience, links orchestration success to demand for network resources, and enables stronger value accrual for BLD holders. We’ll roll out additional value-alignment steps through Q2, and refresh the whitepaper in Q3 to reflect our product-led roadmap—all with care and community input.
There’s no sugarcoating it: the last few months have been hard. I assure you all of us are impacted by the noticeable decline in BLD’s price, the general market uncertainty and the changes we have to make to prudently address it. Like many of you, I’ve personally felt these impacts—from financial loss to having to reset strategy for Agoric and saying goodbye to talented team members.
But I believe we’re turning a corner. We’ve extended our runway to over two years. We’ve reset the company to focus entirely on product traction. And we’re bringing clarity to what we’re building, how it will work, and what success looks like.
On a tactical note, I look forward to sharing updates from our current Spikefest, where teams are prototyping real user-facing orchestration applications. It’s one of the many steps we’re taking to turn powerful tech into meaningful value.
Thank you to everyone who’s stuck with us—through the volatility, through the shifts, and into this next chapter. We’re building something we believe in. And we’re excited to show you what’s next.
Onward,
Dean Tribble
CEO, Agoric