“Valantis' HOT-AMM shipped and settled volume on @CoWSwap” “AMM infrastructure was a low-take-rate business” I don’t think we’ve ever really addressed our pivot here before - there exists a totally alternative reality where Valantis kept refining prop AMMs on EVM. But why we are where we are today. A few things changed our thinking: 1. A surprising amount of AMM liquidity was ultimately being subsidized by asset issuers. Instead of competing for a few bps from fee-sensitive market makers on majors, it made more sense to build products for the entities already paying to bootstrap liquidity. For us, that became LST teams. It’s much easier to capture value when someone has an incentive to pay you outside of PnL. Markets we had more advantage in quoting. 2. infrastructure wasn’t where most of the economic value accrued—it was the market makers. If we kept building increasingly sophisticated AMMs, eventually we’d have to run strategies ourselves. We truly considered - but thesis broke down for us when it became obvious firms like Wintermute had structural informational advantages (OTC flow, distribution, relationships) that we simply couldn’t replicate. ETH-USDC pvp with Wintermute is not the best ROI on your time. 3. Even if you don’t run strategies, building a durable moat is difficult. MM Liquidity is extremely fee-sensitive, so competitors can undercut you. Your defensibility becomes order flow (integrations) or smart contract quality. Both are real moats, but they’re incredibly hard-earned. Security and execution become the entire game (high cost, constant upkeep) for a low pay out. Could we have made it work? Maybe. Should we have? Probably not. Has the market reached its final form? Definitely no. Game not over.