During the Wanxiang Hong Kong Web3 Carnival in early April, BlockBeats had the honor of inviting the CMO and co-founder of the BNB Chain ecological project Ve(3,3) project THENA 0xApollo for an exclusive interview.

Although the BNB Chain ecosystem was greatly affected by the Binance regulatory turmoil last year, the final settlement and the subsequent bull market development have ushered in a strong recovery of the BNB Chain ecosystem under the leadership of BNB. THENA is an interesting project that originated from the community and is deeply rooted in the community. It initially raised $1 million in financing from the community without VC participation, and all five founding team members were co-founders of the project. In 2023, THENA created a total of $11.4 million in revenue for veTHE and theNFT holders. Currently, THENA's total on-chain revenue is about to exceed $18 million.

Today, when memes are rampant, FDV of new projects in popular tracks is inflated, and first-tier projects are listed on exchanges as soon as they issue coins, THENA is still building with a relatively low market value, developing a very comprehensive product ecosystem, and has never stopped. BlockBeats focused on project planning and project development in this interview, and invited Apollo to give a comprehensive interpretation of THENA. The following is the full content of this interview:

THENA is the team's second venture, and they see the development potential of BNBChain

BlockBeats: Before talking about THENA, we would like to hear about your experience in joining the crypto field. Everyone has different opportunities to join. What made you enter the crypto field?

Apollo:This is a long story, and there are many things worth talking about. I first learned about Bitcoin 10 years ago. I learned about Bitcoin on a Finnish online forum Muropaketti. At that time, you could even mine with a laptop, and I tried it. From then on, I was convinced that Bitcoin would become a world-changing thing. This sparked my interest in the blockchain industry, and I have been learning continuously since then.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hold onto my Bitcoin for long, and I lost a small amount of it in the Mt. Gox hack. And if you look at the prices of BTC and ETH now, they are incredible compared to what they were back then. Still, I am thankful that it all led to THENA.

At the time, ChainLink was proposing a vision to tokenize everything, and I was very interested in it. My brother, who was much more senior than me and became a LINK Marine, also shared a lot of knowledge about crypto with me, which further stimulated my interest in crypto. Crypto has always held a very special place in my heart, and I saw the future here, even though it was still too far away.

Until two and a half years ago, I was still working for a Japanese company in the traditional field, managing a team of more than 20 people. I noticed that the Fantom ecosystem was very hot and the community atmosphere was very good, so I started to join some Discord servers to learn about DeFi. Suddenly one day, Dr.Liquid, the founder of Liquid Driver, posted in the community that they were looking for someone with marketing experience who could use software such as Photoshop. I thought about it. Although my many years of experience in management had no direct connection with the crypto industry, my years of research and thinking about the crypto world gave me the confidence to meet this new opportunity and challenge. I didn't want to miss the opportunity, so I quickly replied to him. Three days later, we had an interview and he started working a few days later.

At the time, Liquid Driver only had one or two colleagues doing marketing, and they were exhausted by then, and they left one after another soon after. It was crazy that I had to take over as the head of marketing immediately, even though I had almost no marketing experience at the time, and I had to take on huge responsibilities. But what's even crazier is that with the full cooperation and efforts of the team, we achieved amazing success. The price of the project token soared from $2 to $50 in a short period of time, and Liquid Driver became a legendary OG DeFi protocol. Even the chef of PancakeSwap knew us. This is how I officially entered the crypto industry two and a half years ago.

But there were many problems with the Fantom ecosystem. In fact, before Andre Cronje, the "Father of Fantom", proposed the vision of Solidly, we had gathered a group of top Fantom ecosystem DeFi protocols to plan to build a project together. We even made an animation called ATHENA for this (which later became the inspiration for the UI design of THENA's official website). But Andre soon released Solidly, which completely disrupted all our plans.

Solidly was a huge success, with TVL exceeding $1 billion a month after its launch, proving how powerful the ve(3,3) model is. However, Solidly's code had some unfixable problems, so it quickly collapsed and everything went up in flames. In addition, Andre even announced his withdrawal at a critical moment, causing all projects on Fantom to fall into a trough.

A few months later, Velodrome improved the Solidly model and launched on Optimism, which also achieved remarkable success, which gave us a lot of inspiration. We realized that THENA could do better than Velodrome and the original Solidly. At that time, we could choose any chain, but after careful consideration, we were convinced that BNB Chain was the best choice. Because BNB Chain has the largest active user base, and many OG-level figures believe that BNB lacks outstanding DeFi projects and there is a lot of market space. So with the support of 20 top protocols, we launched THENA on BNB Chain.

Note: The picture shows Apollo being invited to participate in the roundtable discussion at the BNBChain Dubai event

BlockBeats: Solidly was indeed the most popular at the time, so what do you think is different about THENA compared to other Solidly fork protocols?

Apollo: We started with the innovative ve(3,3) protocol, but soon realized that although the vision was good, it was far from enough. We need to build on this foundation to compete with strong competitors such as PancakeSwap on BNB Chain and provide users with the best trading experience. Last year, THENA introduced many new features to improve the platform and strive to create the best product.

In the spring of 2023, we partnered with Algebra and Gamma Strategies to pioneer a centralized liquidity (CL) solution for regular users that was as easy to use as traditional Uni-V2, greatly improving the capital efficiency of DEXs, generating more fees with less TVL, which was a big moment for us. Although other projects have followed suit, THENA is the pioneer.

Last summer, THENA launched a series of decentralized algorithmic trading features dLIMIT (decentralized limit order function) and dTWAP (time-weighted average price algorithm) with its partner Orbs, allowing users to easily DCA (fixed investment) various tokens. Orbs highly recognized THENA and added a strategic investment of $600,000 at the end of the year.

In addition, we have also cooperated with SYMMIO to launch a new perpetual contract trading platform (beta version) with far higher capital efficiency than GMX, namely "ALPHA", which is also an important moment for the THENA ecosystem. Although it is still in the experimental stage, we will prove that this model is indeed feasible. We will further upgrade ALPHA later.

Based on the perpetual contract platform ALPHA, we jointly launched the liquidity aggregator "Liquidity Hub with Orbs, allowing spot trading users on THENA to trade all tokens on BNB Chain, including CAKE, without having to use multiple DEXs. This is cool and lays a solid foundation for the new features we will release this year.

At the end of last year, THENA also added support for opBNB, which is a cheaper and faster chain than BNB Chain. This allows user groups that were previously unable to participate in DeFi because of their small asset size to participate. Even if you only have $10, it is very cost-effective to interact with DeFi on opBNB. Although opBNB is still in a very early stage, this is a milestone for both parties.

THENA currently has spot swap functions and perpetual contract trading functions. In addition, we will release the social trading center "ARENA" within two weeks and launch the Launchpad Accelerator "WARP" in the second half of the year. Our next step is to launch the Web3 debit card "THE Card" and other products to give users a truly bankless experience. Currently, more than 40 top DeFi protocols are using our platform services, including well-known projects such as Frax Finance, Ankr, ListaDAO, etc. We will continue to do our best to serve users and project parties.

Note: Thena Ecosystem Partner Information

These are the special features of THENA compared to other similar protocols, and we are about to release something that makes THENA even more special, so please stay tuned.

The success of AERO and VELO proves that ve(3,3) is recognized by the market, and THENA is waiting for its value to be truly discovered

BlockBeats: This year, VELO and AERO, both ve(3,3) models, have performed well. After reading the relevant data and research reports of THENA, we learned that THENA is currently second only to Aerodrome and Velodrome in terms of the fees allocated to users. As far as I know, THE holders of THE are very much looking forward to seeing the value of THE being truly discovered by the market. So, what do you think are the obstacles that THENA is currently facing in its development? Or what kind of opportunity is THENA waiting for its outbreak?

Apollo: When we saw Coinbase invest and list Aerodrome (AELO) and Velodrome (VELO), it was also an important moment for us, because it meant that the ve(3,3) model was recognized by top trading platforms, demonstrating its democracy, allowing ordinary users rather than VC institutions to benefit from it. This will become one of the mainstream trends in the future.

THENA does not have any institutional supporters yet (THENA only raised $1 million in funds through the community before launch), but this year, THENA will introduce some VCs. This is not only for financing, but more importantly, to use their resources to promote THENA to the world. Some things that happened last year had a great negative impact on the valuation of THE token, including the FUD of BNB Chain and a series of regulatory actions by the US government on Binance. The ecological support was not as expected. We did go through a difficult period at that time. But we did not stop building because of this, but continued to improve the product. The launch of opBNB at the end of last year rekindled the community's hope and almost played a key role in reversing the situation.

This year, THENA will also release a series of new features to attract more users. We are making every effort to prepare for the Tier 1 CEX listing to expand brand awareness, strengthen marketing efforts, popularize DeFi education, introduce new investment institutions, make DeFi so simple that even my mother can participate (haha), and finally make THENA a popular protocol.

BlockBeats: THENA is about to launch a crypto wallet product. So, with mature wallet products such as MetaMask and OKX Wallet already on the market, what are the considerations for THENA to launch such a product, and what kind of effect does it hope to achieve?

Apollo:We found that many users want to participate when they open the website, but they still have any wallet. They are often discouraged by the cumbersome steps of creating a wallet and backing up the mnemonic at the beginning, and it is difficult for them to take the first step into DeFi.

Therefore, THENA has partnered with industry-leading Particle Network to integrate the account abstraction wallet directly into the THENA official website. New users only need to log in with Web2 social accounts such as Facebook, Google accounts, etc., to create a DeFi wallet in seconds, and then easily recharge through Apple Pay or credit cards without keeping private keys. This greatly simplifies the onboarding process. As I said just now, even my mother can easily participate and become a DeFi player.

And this is just the first step. Account abstraction can also simplify all aspects of DeFi. For example, just providing liquidity involves many complex steps, which often makes it very difficult for beginners. With the new solution provided by THENA, even advanced strategies such as depositing funds into the Venus protocol and then staking LP to THENA can be simplified to a solution like "BTC annualized 10%" that ordinary users see, where users only need to sign once and don't need to worry about any complicated operations being performed behind the scenes. In this way, the door to DeFi will truly be open to everyone.

In addition to the wallet "THE Wallet", THE will also launch a Web3 debit card "THE Card". I have many friends who have only traded on centralized exchanges and have never been involved in DeFi, but they love to use Crypto.com debit cards to spend and earn cash back. I am curious why, so we plan to provide similar on-chain services. Users can complete all operations on THENA and never have to withdraw money to the bank. This is true Bankless, and we are very excited about it.

Note: THENA 2024 Roadmap

Wen CEX?

BlockBeats: From Nansen's report, we can see that BNB Chain is still the network with the most daily active users in the crypto field. But since this round of bull market, there have been no phenomenal projects on BNB Chain. Many people think that THENA will be a star project on BNB Chain in the future, but THE has not yet launched any CEX. I would like to ask what do you think of this situation?

Apollo:Wen Binance? Hahaha, I think BNB Chain has spawned many star projects, but many people don’t know that they all started here, but they may not be able to name any particularly outstanding BNB Chain native projects.

BNB Chain does have a large number of active users, but many of them do not participate in DeFi, but trade Meme coins, AI concept coins, etc., and do not participate in advanced strategies such as liquidity mining and lending. This is why THENA is committed to simplifying DeFi and helping these users better utilize BNB Chain ecological resources.

Regarding the listing on CEX, I think it is crucial for THENA to go global. Interestingly, a few months after THENA was launched, Bitget suddenly launched THE token trading without permission, which shocked us all. Later, CoinEx did the same. We had to ask Bitget to delist the token because the project was not mature enough at the time. We wanted to polish the product first and then choose the right time to actively launch on CEX. Last year's bear market was too tragic, so we felt that it was not the best time.

But now with the release of the new UI and Logo, the new website, and the new features, we are very confident that the time is ripe to launch on CEX. We are going all out to prepare for the launch of the first CEX, and more Tier 1 CEXs will be launched this year. It's just a matter of time, but we can't reveal the exact timeline yet.

BlockBeats: Yes, THENA has indeed been getting better and better this year. Do you have anything else to add or say to Chinese users?

Apollo:Our biggest update this year is the launch of a plug-in similar to Uniswap's "hooks" in cooperation with Algebra. This is a core component of THENA V3, which will increase the number of projects we serve by 10 times or even 100 times.

For example, RWA is a very popular narrative at the moment, but due to infrastructure limitations, it was difficult for us to serve such projects before. With Algebra Integral, we can easily build a KYC fund pool for institutions or RWAs. As more and more physical assets are put on the chain, the activity of DeFi will increase significantly, which is a revolutionary change. PancakeSwap and Uniswap are also about to launch similar features recently, which shows that such features are changing the landscape of DeFi.

In addition, I would like to add that for users, you can participate in the THENA ecosystem in a variety of ways to obtain passive income. For example: holding veTHE tokens, you can obtain voting rights and earn income from assets such as BTC or BNB; you can also earn THE tokens by providing liquidity; in addition, we will also regularly hold Zealy events to provide users with a way to obtain rewards without investment. It is worth emphasizing that holders of veTHE tokens will also be eligible to participate in a series of airdrop events in the ecosystem.

Of course, the best way to learn about these opportunities is to follow THENA’s Twitter account. You are also welcome to join THENA’s Discord community to view the various strategies shared by Thenians, and the team will answer your questions as soon as possible.

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia