Dexible: The Humble Beginnings
Reminiscing on pivots in crypto, how Dexible emerged from BUIDLHub
The Dexible team launched under a company called BUIDLHub in late 2020.
“We founded BUIDLHub because we wanted to make it easy for my Web2 buddies to play in blockchain.” — Mike Coon
BUIDLHub still exists today, with practically no resources tied to maintenance. The website has over 30 thousand users, primarily using it for automated notifications
“We started off in Web3 automation, which means taking on-chain signals and applying some off-chain action or vis versa. When we started, the market was really immature. It was prior to NFTs coming back to life, it was prior to DAOs needing documentation and collaboration tooling.” — Mitchell Opatowsky
Today, even some independent developers use the engine for their own infrastructure management. It exists as a testament to the team’s engineering capabilities as a free resource for the web.
“I actually didn’t want us to go into DeFi, it’s not about the market we wanted, it’s about the market we had” — Mike Coon
“I’m happy that I had an open mind and an open heart, and we’ll learn as much as we can.” — Mike Coon
The team embraced failure throughout 2020, early after it’s angel funding, which propelled it to find a deeper use case.
“We were part of an accelerator that made us realize we had a general engine that lacked a deeper use case”
It wasn’t immediately obvious what that use case would be—chatbots? Notifications? One-off integrations? It was uncertain what was going to be the scalable growth model for the business.
But then this happened…
“One morning, I tried getting into a stock at 4:30am, but couldn’t. Apparently, I didn’t meet the criteria to be able to set orders in pre-trade orders. In that moment, it really solidifed the meaning of DeFi. Suddenly, there’s no censorship, lockout, or rules. That’s the beauty of this thing.” — Mike Coon
“Notifications were a pretty big thing. Getting ENS reminders, for instance. We were also the first Discord bot.” — Mitch
The ENS integration drove a significant amount of traffic to the BUIDLHub web app and playground. So moving beyond that business model introduced a lot of complexity.
“It was very tough for us. We had to reassses what our infrastructure was capable of, we had to design a whole new frontend, we had to do a whole bunch of new customer discovery.” — Mitch
“Dexible is the result of us exploring the path of automation. That means making DeFi simpler, more accessible, and abstract to users” — Mitch
Anyone on the web can use Dexible today to place automated trading orders. Those capabilities didn’t exist anywhere else for over a year.
“The purpose of Dexible is to make a more equitable and accessible early stage investing envornment and its true for institutiosn and true for retail.” — Mitch
What is known as DeFi today is likely to be the nurturing ground for future innovation, where projects can achieve funding through community interest and fascination, rather than rely on bulkier processes for exposure. It’s much faster to get to market in this world, so long as there’s end user investors ready to meet you there.
“Abstraction in middleware is needed for large net capital inflow into the Web3 ecosystem.” — Mitchell
And that’s what it’s all about, growing the size of the total pie.
About Dexible
Dexible is a trading platform that combines dex aggregation and algos for DeFi execution. It routes across 57 liquidity sources and has processed over 12k transactions and $400m in cumulative trading volume.
The platform is best place to start for serious portfolio managers or deep traders to add risk on dexes. You can minimize slippage and automate liquid positions based on price movements.
Traders can use both the Dexible web app user interface or the low-code SDK for programmatic order submission, available in both Javascript and Python versions.
You can find our updated user documentation here.
Reach out to us on Telegram or Discord for general inquiries or questions.
