To the Survivors of This Cycle: From the Casino Back to the New Ark, On the Occasion of SoDEX's Launch
- Core Viewpoint: The SoSoValue team believes the current crypto industry has deviated from its original purpose of "rebuilding trust," descending into pure liquidity speculation games. Therefore, they are launching SoDEX, aiming to build a transparent, fair, user-centric on-chain financial infrastructure, returning to the essential value of blockchain technology.
- Key Elements:
- Critique of Industry Status: The 2025 crypto market is characterized by internal competition, reduced to a high-leverage casino. Projects and exchanges chase short-term traffic, leading to short user lifecycles and hidden rules like "eating customer losses" that harm user interests.
- Solution Path: The team, through SoSoValue (information noise reduction), the SSI Index Protocol (asset allocation), and their self-built ValueChain Layer1, ultimately launches SoDEX, forming a service loop from cognition to trading.
- SoDEX's Core Positioning: A high-performance on-chain platform supporting integrated spot and futures trading as well as RWA assets, emphasizing transparency, security, and user experience, aiming to serve long-term investors rather than short-term gamblers.
- Historical Vision Analogy: Compares AI to the "printing press" of the new era (making the pie bigger) and Crypto to "double-entry bookkeeping" (dividing the pie fairly), believing their combination is key to driving social progress.
- Team's Foundational Belief: Firmly believes blockchain technology is the foundation for building a fairer, more trustworthy financial system. All their products serve the mission of "enabling global mass participation in crypto investment with ease."
Author: SoSoValue Team
To Fellow Travelers in the SoSoValue Ecosystem:
Thank you for your participation and attention. This is a ticket for early participants. We call it a ticket because we are not just launching a product; we are gathering fellow travelers to embark on a journey to rediscover the industry's original purpose.
About the 2008 Ark and the Drift Seventeen Years Later
The story begins with the 2008 financial tsunami. When trust in the traditional financial system collapsed overnight, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper, building an ark for the world. The original design of that ark was simple: no need to trust any intermediaries; everyone could hold their own private keys, control their own assets, and use blockchain technology to reconstruct how human society establishes trust. In the initial vision, this technology was a gift for ordinary people, not a tool for Wall Street. In the eyes of believers in technology changing the world, AI and blockchain are shaping the world's structure for the next 20 years from the two most fundamental dimensions: "productivity" and "production relations," respectively.
Yet, seventeen years later, this ark named "Crypto" seems to be drifting away from its original course amidst fog and noise.
Bitcoin has become a giant, but the industry's focus has quietly shifted. While AI is reshaping productivity at an exponential rate and continuously opening new value spaces, Crypto has gradually descended into a game of pure liquidity speculation. People are beginning to question the long-term value of blockchain technology for the world.
This rift became particularly clear in 2025: on one side, the tech-driven prosperity of the US stock market; on the other, the liquidity dilemma within the crypto market, constantly turning inward yet struggling to spread outward. In October 2025, the long-suppressed pure liquidity bubble began to burst in a chain reaction triggered by an occasional technical fault. Crypto assets entered their darkest hour over the past four months, diverging from the trend of all other global risk assets. People began to doubt and worry: can blockchain technology still be one of the main narratives for technology changing the world?
Figure 1: Since October 2025, Bitcoin has underperformed traditional assets and decoupled from gold's trend. Data source: SoSoValue
What Happened in 2025? The Collapse of a Mirage in the Fog
In the anxiety of lacking substantive innovation, the crypto industry as a whole slid into a purer, more naked liquidity game in the past year of 2025—exchanges began systematically promoting high-leverage products. The implicit goal of product design was no longer to improve trading efficiency but to increase liquidation probability. The attributes of a casino began to clearly outweigh those of a trading platform.
Simultaneously, the primary communication target for project teams shifted from users to exchanges, market makers, and VCs. User value was almost entirely absent at this stage. Launching a token was no longer an asset listing; it was opening a new gambling table. Asset quality was no longer the core criterion for listing; the sole requirement of this token launch game became whether more people could be drawn to place bets.
The original ideal of crypto technology—to reconstruct production relations, making the world more decentralized and equitable—was, at this stage, exploited to its extreme by the most primitive desire-driven business—the casino—as a fig leaf to evade regulation.
When "building" is mocked and "gambling" becomes mainstream, what we see is not value creation through technology changing the world, but, in the name of blockchain technology, accelerating the world's entropy increase. The ark began to drift. As the fog dispersed the mirage, it revealed the stark realities underlying the industry while also clearing away much noise, making the journey ahead clearer.
Precisely because of this, this might be both the worst of times and the best of times. In this morning as the fog clears, steadfast builders can more easily find each other. Only through the determined, forward progress of like-minded individuals can this ark resume its intended course and sail toward a brighter future. To truly use blockchain technology to reconstruct how human society establishes trust—and since the financial industry itself is composed of many modules that build trust—we believe the first stop for blockchain technology to change the world is to reconstruct the financial industry. To give more people globally, including various entities and AI agents, equal access to participate in financial life, making the flow and allocation of resources more efficient.
Looking Back at SoSoValue's Founding: Serving the Crypto Mass Investor
Initially, SoSoValue was not a "product" specifically developed for To C; it originated from our internal investment research needs. The original intention was very pure: As a team focused on investing in the tech industry, like many investment survivors with no Crypto Native experience but deeply educated by financial cycles and common sense, when we were called by the belief that blockchain technology could change the world and hoped to invest in crypto long-term, the chaotic and stark decision-making environment completely shattered the original investment research paradigm. Extremely fragmented and untraceable information dimensions, social media noise where facts and opinions were indistinguishable, and interpretations of the same concept from programmer/finance/marketing/gambling perspectives with completely different meanings made us realize the industry was still very early. We needed to build our own information filtering tools, and the birth of ChatGPT allowed us to quickly create tools based on our investment research needs.
This tool was initially only shared among friends. Based on the open spirit of blockchain, we made the tool freely available to the community. The tool's name came from a very chill discussion: "Jivvva, after screening with your investment research tool, we found most cryptocurrencies have no value, just soso." We felt the name SoSoValue could remind us to persist in filtering out the vast majority of noise through research. After all, true value is always in the minority in every era, requiring us to track, mine, and create it.
In early 2024, the opportunity for mass adoption first favored us. The team judged from an investment research perspective that Bitcoin ETFs were highly likely to be approved. Besides potentially reducing Bitcoin's volatility, they could also become a major channel connecting the stock market and the crypto market, fundamentally changing the entire crypto industry landscape. Therefore, we launched the world's first Bitcoin Spot ETF Dashboard, also the first platform to systematically propose and track the core metric of "net inflows and outflows." The market gave us feedback beyond expectations. By helping users truly "see" capital flows, we gained our initial million-plus real, high-quality users.
Our vision and mission became clear: Enable crypto investment for the global masses! Everything centers on the investor. Using AI and blockchain technology, we aim to build a platform that prioritizes investor interests, providing investors with noise reduction, efficiency enhancement, and convenient investment services.
As our vision solidified and our path became clear, more and more like-minded top experts in blockchain technology, DeFi products, trading systems, asset issuance, investment banking, and other fields gradually joined the team. The power of the community grew even stronger, turning this into a challenging but immensely joyful journey. Foundational knowledge from different fields, continuously discussed and collided based on first principles, allowed us to learn a great deal from our fellow travelers along the way. A less urgent desire for results enabled us to focus on continuously exploring industry pain points and user needs, and constantly refining infrastructure and products.
The full launch of SoDEX today finally allows us to complete the outline of SoSoValue's foundational product landscape.
Why Build SoDEX?
The birth of SoSoValue, SSI, and SoDEX did not stem from a sudden flash of inspiration but from logical deduction based on industry pain points.
First, the problem we wanted to solve for investors was information asymmetry. The SoSoValue Terminal achieved the first Product-Market Fit (PMF) and is our user foundation: Whether in traditional finance or Crypto, the core pain point is always that the "signal-to-noise ratio" is too low. SoSoValue's Terminal provides users with a free, professional noise-filtering tool, incorporating professional investors' analytical frameworks to screen and track information dimensions. It allows every ordinary Crypto investor to enjoy Wall Street-level information services, achieving information equality. From being the first globally to launch the ETF Dashboard to accumulating 10 million real users, it proves the market's thirst for "deterministic information."
Second, once investors understand, they need asset allocation. SSI once again validated the PMF for passive investment. With the research terminal, users gain understanding. The next step is monetizing that understanding—how to provide users with long-term, safe asset allocation services. Our goal is to grow together with users for 20 years. According to financial common sense, most users do not possess the ability to beat the market; they need Beta returns, not Alpha gambling. Therefore, based on observation indices from our data platform, we launched the SSI (SoSoValue Index) protocol, aiming to decentralize the power to "define assets" and allow excellent strategies to become tradable indices.
- For users: Like buying an ETF, configure asset portfolios constructed by top researchers with one click.
- For researchers: Use data and methods to publish your own index, becoming a Web3 "fund manager." Provide users with richer, more convenient, and transparent yield portfolios, acting as the Vanguard on-chain. Allow more intelligent and upright individuals to become on-chain fund managers through the trust infrastructure we build.
In less than a year: SSI gained nearly 500,000 on-chain holders, with over 250,000 users holding Mag7.ssi. We confirmed one thing: users want not just data, but assets that can weather cycles. Thus, we set our second goal: empowering users to allocate and manage assets on-chain and pursue long-term compound interest.
Finally, there was a need to solve the bottleneck in scaling on-chain asset issuance, which gave rise to SoDEX at the right time. When SSI operated only on a small scale, the L2 public chain + third-party AMM model was sufficient to be "usable." But once we wanted to expand categories, scale up, and truly deliver the product to more ordinary users, the shortcomings of crypto infrastructure were magnified. The convenience of user purchases and index synthesis, on-chain liquidity, market maker capital utilization efficiency, etc., all became scaling bottlenecks.
We needed a high-performance on-chain platform supporting order books (Orderbook). We initially didn't want to reinvent the wheel. But after in-depth research, we found no single chain could simultaneously achieve three things: high-performance order book, spot trading friendliness, and support for RWA (Real World Asset) issuance. We ultimately concluded that to sail far along our original intention, we must build our own Layer 1.
SoDEX's Mission: Rebuilding an Ark
If there's no road, build it yourself. But during the research process preparing for SoDEX, we saw an even more unsavory side of this industry. We found that the "difficulty of use" of infrastructure is just the surface; the deeper problem lies in the "misalignment" of business models.
1. Brutal Lifecycle — In this market, due to exchanges' pursuit of short-term traffic and profits, the average user lifecycle in this industry is less than 3 months. This "fast in, fast out" rhythm注定 users can only be passersby.
2. Hidden "Client Loss Eating" — We discovered a widely existing unwritten rule in the industry's shadows: the main revenue for some platforms is no longer transaction fees but users' principal losses. When a platform survives on users losing money, the relationship with users is no longer one of service but of a zero-sum game adversary.
3. Bad Money Drives Out Good — Exaggerated shilling KOLs occupy center stage, while truly serious researchers, unwilling to cooperate with "harvesting" and lacking monetization channels, face survival crises instead.
The "prosperity" under such rules is built on consuming the user base and industry conscience.
At that moment, we realized that facing this unsustainable industry status quo, merely building a "better user experience DEX" could not change the situation. Therefore, we decided to build ValueChain and SoDEX ourselves.
Satoshi Nakamoto built the first ark, allowing ordinary people to hold assets that cannot be diluted. We want to follow the original intention of Satoshi's ark and build an on-chain financial ark, allowing ordinary people to safely and efficiently invest and trade assets, lowering the barrier to participating in financial life through blockchain technology.
Adhering to the two principles of on-chain transparency and security, SoDEX has two major technical architectural features:
- Leveraging ValueChain L1's multi-subchain composite architecture, SoDEX integrates the account systems of the high-performance Spot and Perps (Perpetuals) trading subchains. This means users can trade crypto-native assets and RWAs (Real World Assets) like stocks, indices, precious metals, etc., in a one-stop manner without switching accounts, greatly enhancing capital efficiency and the convenience of asset allocation.
- Reusing the Mirror Protocol infrastructure system of the SoSoValue Indexes Protocol, adopting a combined solution of third-party custody and Bridges to improve the security of multi-asset cross-chain.
In terms of product positioning, we focus on two things:
· Integration of Spot + Perps, enriching high-quality financial products: We want you to be able to buy spot assets as smoothly as on a centralized exchange, use contracts for risk exposure management, and, relying on SoDEX's infrastructure, issue your own indices and participate in richer strategies.
· Continuously optimizing product experience, benefiting the masses: We pay tribute to professionalism while making institutional-grade performance and CEX-like smooth experience accessible infrastructure for every ordinary investor.
Today, SoDEX goes live. The blueprint in our hearts is finally complete.
- SoSoValue — Helps ordinary investors eliminate noise and see the truth clearly.
- ValueChain — Bears the performance, establishing trust with L1's openness and transparency.
- SoDEX, SSI, and more open tools — Builds a zero-barrier investment platform for users, providing access to rich on-chain assets and enjoying smooth trading experiences.
The future this new ark sails toward is a complete on-chain financial world; we built this chain not just for current cryptocurrencies, but for the free flow of various assets on the same transparent chain; SoDEX is the vessel prepared for that future.
Standing at a New "Renaissance" Moment
Finally, we want to discuss why we are so stubborn. On many late nights, we ponder: Why is the current market so fragmented? On one side, AI's rapid daily advancements; on the other, Crypto's liquidity drought. On one side, exponential productivity explosion; on the other, production relations still playing the most primitive "hot potato" game.
This sense of撕裂 reminds us of Europe 500 years ago. It was an era called the "Renaissance." At that time, the birth of two technologies彻底 changed the course of humanity:
- The Gutenberg Printing Press: It broke the church's monopoly on knowledge, allowing ordinary people to own books, igniting a liberation of cognition.
- Double-Entry Bookkeeping: It established the trust foundation of modern commerce, making cross-border capital cooperation possible, igniting financial prosperity.
History often rhymes. Today, we stand at a similar crossroads:
- AI is the new era's "printing press": It makes intelligence and productivity extremely cheap and普及, responsible for making the pie bigger.
- Crypto is the new era's "double-entry bookkeeping": It upgrades trust based on people (Trust) to verification based on code (Verify), responsible for distributing the pie fairly.
This should be the singularity for ordinary people to change their destinies. This is also the underlying belief that drew us into this industry—we believe this is a ladder to a fairer world. We are not just building an exchange; we are upholding a historical order of "technology for good."
One more thing.
SoDEX is a high-performance, high-trust, zero-barrier, one-stop investment platform, not a casino manufacturing illusions. If you seek short-term adrenaline刺激, this might not be the best place. But if you embrace "long-termism" and are willing to let wealth "compound" alongside the industry's genuine value growth, then we are fellow travelers.
What Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to introduce to the world was not speculation, but self-sovereignty. Everything we do aims to延续 this choice: securely managing your wealth in a transparent, fair system.
On this new ark, we are not adversaries but fellow explorers.
