--- title: "We didn't forget you [Wombex]" description: "Two years of radio silence on the Wombex channels. BTR is the DEX we built during that silence." date: "2026-08-26" tags: [wombex, protocol, aimm] category: "product" status: published invite: "W0MB3X" lang: en aliases: [we-didnt-forget-you] authors: [toni] thumbnail: "/blog/media/wombex-card.webp" banner: "/blog/media/wombex-banner.webp" og: "/blog/media/wombex-og.png" --- Almost two years since we last posted on the Wombex channels. We know what most of you thought: protocol dead, team gone. Given Wombat's slow decline, fair. That's why we're writing today. Wombex was an emissions business with no real power over the protocol underneath, and that was frustrating. BTR is the DEX we built during that silence. The last thing you heard from us was June 2024, the merge with Quoll. [Here's that post.](https://medium.com/@wombexfinance/wombex-x-quoll-the-merge-e5fe601b8e52) ## What killed the flywheel Wombex never had a product of its own. It had a position on someone else's. Convex works because Curve works; we were the same bet on Wombat, and a bet like that is only ever as good as the horse. When Wombat volumes collapsed and $WOM demand went with them, there was nothing underneath us to keep standing. Every ve-tokenomics flywheel ends the same way and ours did, but the ending was decided a layer down. We were riding the wrong horse. It wasn't only the emissions. Wombat priced off an invariant, with [coverage acting as a slippage modifier](/docs/foundations#3-asset-liability-management-platypus--wombat) along a curve the reserves still set, so a quote followed what the pool held rather than what the asset was worth. Expansion to new chains came before the home market was settled. Emissions carried both, for as long as emissions lasted. Wombex governed emissions. It never governed the curve underneath them. Most of the story is in that sentence. We made the announcements. We asked people to withdraw. What was left on Telegram was spam and dubious ads. The protocol was in stasis and we had gone back to R&D, so the channel was promising activity there was none of. We halted it for that, and because the channel had turned hostile. Then we went quiet. ## Why we stayed quiet We weren't going to come back and offer you the same farm under a different name. Same lock-and-bribe machine somewhere else is still Wombex, and that flywheel was over. We didn't know how to run the trading side ourselves yet. ## Lock, vote, boost, bribes The model is what killed it. Voting power on Wombat, pointed at emissions, paid in bribes. We lived on that incentive budget. When Wombat stopped emitting, there was nothing underneath. The Quoll merge was to move our LPs onto a broader aggregator instead of one whose fate was tied to Wombat alone. Different team, different product. That chapter isn't ours to answer for. ## Can you manage LP on someone else's DEX We didn't spend two years patching Wombex back together. We went to check, one last time, whether an LP manager can win on a DEX it doesn't control. That's when we met [@AstrolabDAO](https://x.com/AstrolabDAO). They were building a cross-chain yield aggregator, and liquidity management was one strategy family inside it: positions routed through existing ALMs like Gamma and Ichi, sitting on Uniswap V3, Thena and other [CLMMs](/docs/glossary#clmm-concentrated-liquidity-market-maker). The numbers didn't work. Static ranges, no adaptation to the regime, fees stacked at every layer between the LP and the flow. So they started building their own ALM. Astrolab DAO stopped operating before it shipped; we built it together anyway, because by then we had the same question and the same taste for DEX internals. The question wasn't Wombex anymore. It was: can you manage LP properly when the DEX underneath isn't yours? ## What the numbers said At scale, from reproducible back and forward-testing, LP loss to [adverse selection](/docs/glossary#adverse-selection) scales with how tightly you provide on CLMMs. [On-chain prices lag the CEXs](/docs/glossary#lvr-loss-versus-rebalancing). Pools that look yieldy on paper take heavy arbitrage: most of the [flow is toxic](/docs/glossary#toxic-flow), and they lose more to arbitrage than they earn in organic fees. Whoever prices the flow takes the edge. Everything downstream picks up what's left. Uniswap V3 is already downstream on flagships (BTC, ETH). An ALM sitting on that DEX is downstream too. ## What BTR is We built the DEX. The asset-liability model was never Wombat's invention. [Platypus brought it on chain first](/docs/foundations#3-asset-liability-management-platypus--wombat), on Avalanche in 2021: deposit one asset, coverage tracked per leg, liabilities accounted independently. Wombat proved it scaled. Neither of them let go of the invariant, and that is the half BTR replaced. The mark comes from outside the pool, and coverage no longer nudges you along a curve; it sets where the price sits and how hard it leans. So the model you backed is still here, with the engine it was always missing. Liquidity isn't stuck in pairs. It's [shared across every asset in a core](/docs/2-3-pool-composition). Quotes follow [a mark](/docs/glossary#on-chain-mark) and they bend with the flow: when [inventory leans one way](/docs/1-1-1-inventory-management), the price improves for whoever puts it back, and it degrades for whoever pushes it further. That buys more volume per dollar of liquidity, and structurally less paid out to whoever is faster. What that means if you provide: - [single-sided](/docs/glossary#alm-asset-liability-management), fungible, maintenance-free: no pair to assemble, no range to babysit - depth [concentrates itself](/docs/1-1-2-liquidity-shaping) where the asset is trading, and moves as inventory and flow move - [toxic flow pays for what it takes](/docs/1-1-6-toxic-flow-mitigation) instead of being subsidised out of your position - provably one of the most capital efficient AMMs released, on the most efficient EVM [push-oracle](/docs/3-4-oracles#911-measured-gas-reference-implementation-2-of-3-signed) deployed - the mark is a contract, not a hardcoded source: anything implementing `IOracle` can price a pool. Today that is the signed keeper feed and the [internal](/docs/1-2-2-internal-oracle) par helper for cash collateral; a third-party pool, an ERC-4626 share price or an on-chain TWAP are adapters the interface admits, not adapters we ship - no APR that tells one side of the story while the other side leaks Our AIMM, Adaptive Inventory Market Maker, is built on the same foundations as the [PropAMMs taking share right now](/docs/foundations#195-propamms-proprietary-oracle-amms-the-solana-frontier) - a high-frequency oracle, tight inventory management, shared liquidity - and rivals them with the curve and the pricing logic entirely on chain, where a PropAMM keeps both closed. Wombex paid LPs out of an incentive budget. BTR pays them out of the spread, which is what a market maker has always lived on. Depth that sits where the flow is, a mark that doesn't lag, a pool that leans when it's long: get those right and the venue keeps the value that used to leak to whoever was faster, and hands it to the people who funded the inventory. That is the argument for not needing emissions. Not that incentives are bad - that they were covering for internals which couldn't pay their own way. None of this is novel outside crypto. Quote off a reference, size to inventory, widen with uncertainty: systematic market making has run on that for thirty years. What was missing on chain was the machinery to do it with no one at the desk, on a quote nobody has to trust. That is the part we built. These are the base maths we couldn't rewrite in 2024. This time we're the ones quoting. ## It's live on testnet It's running on testnet today, first on Arc. Far enough along that you can try it yourselves instead of taking our word for it. - [https://btr.markets](https://btr.markets/?invite=w0mb3x) - [Docs](https://btr.markets/docs) - [The AIMM in detail](/docs/1-overview) - [The numbers and the method behind them](/docs/foundations#18-capital-efficiency) Go look. [Break it](/docs/3-7-bug-bounty). That's what a testnet is for. Give us your brutal feedback. ## Why we kept this account We could've come back from a blank page: new handle, new logo, nothing in the bio pointing here. We kept this account. We're proud of Wombex and of this account, so BTR builds on both. Wombex wound down when the underlying protocol collapsed and the economics broke; BTR continues the same mission from the other side of the book: making an AMM worth providing to. It carries two lineages, not one. Wombex's, that liquidity deserves better than the token printed to attract it. [Astrolab](https://x.com/AstrolabDAO)'s, that you cannot manage liquidity well from on top of a venue you do not control. We learned the same thing from opposite ends - one governing emissions over a curve it could not touch, the other managing ranges on a DEX that set the price without asking. Both a layer above the thing that decides the outcome. So we went and built that layer. We're not going to dress this up as a reward for waiting. There is nothing to claim on the back of this post, and we won't imply otherwise to keep you reading. What we owe you is the work, and the same channel we used when it went wrong. ## What comes next There is no long goodbye here. Wombex is past tense in this post on purpose: the work moved, and we moved with it. BTR is what we do now, and it ships. What comes next, we say it on this blog. Not in a DM. Not on a fake site with our logo. Disclaimer: if someone sends you a claim link, a "verify", a migration, or a wallet to connect because of this post, it's a scam. We will never ask for that for this announcement.