Part 2 - Ok, now to dive into the “why” of USA(.)fun and $aol As I mentioned, I’ve been in crypto for over a decade, and have watched the launchpad landscape evolve over the past few years. There are three core issues that I (and others) have identified that need to be resolved for the launchpad space to have staying power, and the CTO team at $aol is laser focused on fixing these. The issues are the following: 1) the current model is largely net-extractive. Most launchpads are, in essence, designed to extract value from users and creators in order to enrich the platform itself. This is why you have situations where certain launchpads - I won’t name names - have been able to generate almost $1 billion in revenue just from fees, with none or almost none of that going back to the creators and users. Essentially, the house always wins, and a "fair launch" is mostly a facade - in fact, some reports say that 98% of launches on those same platforms are literally fraud. I believe the community should itself benefit from the success of the platform, as opposed to just fund it. Bonk (via Letsbonk) has had incredible success lately due to the fact that they focused heavily on making sure that those who are actually using their platform are being rewarded for doing so. I think that Bonk does an excellent job of that (in fact, $aol was launched on Letsbonk…), and I also think there’s space for a different kind of user, too, which I’ll explain later. 2) The prevalence of “cabal coins” who bundle launches, steal other creators' good ideas, etc, then dump on the public is a significant issue experienced with launchpads. Sometimes “bundling” is done for reasons that are not meant to be harmful, but the vast majority of the time it’s harmful, very quickly. This turns the token launches into games of chicken basically, where investors have to be hyper-paranoid and very attentive to charts, because it could be the case that they go from a positive investment to losing everything literally with one person’s click of their button. This makes it very difficult for legitimate projects, and for investors, to actually do well for themselves. Sometimes, you even have legitimate and decent teams launching a token - only for a “cabal” to launch the exact same $ticker and logo a few hours later, pump it up, and everyone who was in the “real” and original token get harmed. Not because the original investors weren’t there early, or investing in a way that made sense - but because small groups of others simply decided to screw retail to benefit themselves. This way of doing things obviously violates the principles of a fair system. Our platform has answers to these issues that should resolve the majority of them for the retail users, and make it actually hurt those bad guys trying to blatantly extract from retail. 3) Hard-working, good creators and investors aren’t rewarded enough. Letsbonk was and is a massive step forward in creating a more collaborative environment - I think they’ve done and will continue to do an incredible job of making sure people who make projects and tokens that have success are rewarded for doing so. Meanwhile, they have done a very good job of building an ecosystem around $bonk (and to some extent $gp), which is helpful in building support by people already invested in those projects, such as myself. That said, we do see opportunities to improve the model for a certain type of creator and investor - one who is perhaps a little less focused on 10 minute trades, and more focused on protecting their downside, and investing in tokens that are more likely to get huge. In other words, there is a market, we feel, where the focus is on quality vs quantity too - and we believe these will be net-new users, not cannibalistic to the Bonk ecosystem. These are the three core issues we’re tackling head on. In part 3, which I’ll be sending in a bit, I’ll start to go through some of the specific solutions and features of the usa(.)fun ecosystem (not just launchpad) that are designed to solve the aforementioned problems.