The Work Continues

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CommuniTea,

We want to address the launch directly.

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The first few days since $TEA went live have been difficult, and many of you have been disappointed by the launch.

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We hear the frustration. We understand it. We are not treating it lightly.

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The market backdrop last week was not just difficult. It was brutal.

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Reported market data showed Bitcoin and Ether on course for their biggest weekly losses since November 2022. BTCUSD Relative Strength Index on the same day was one of the lowest in history. The broader crypto market was reported to have shed roughly $390 billion in value, with nearly $7 billion of leveraged positions liquidated. Bitcoin was reported down around 17% for the week, while Ether was reported down around 22%.

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This was not isolated to crypto. Broader risk assets also came under pressure, with the Nasdaq reported down around 4.2% as technology and semiconductor names sold off sharply.

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In plain terms, $TEA launched into a market where liquidity had pulled back, participants were de-risking, and launch conditions were extremely unforgiving.

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That backdrop does not explain everything.

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But it matters.

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It materially shaped the environment $TEA launched into.

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There were also launch-specific issues.

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The Aerodrome route was selected to support open liquidity provision around $TEA through a coordinated onchain launch sequence. The goal was to bring $TEA into market through a clear structure around timing, liquidity, incentives, and market formation.

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That DEX route remains live.

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Aerodrome continues to provide an important onchain access path for $TEA, and we remain focused on supporting that route carefully as routing, liquidity, and participation continue to settle.

This is not a prediction about market outcomes.

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It is a statement of continued focus on the onchain route and the market-formation path that Aerodrome provides.

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However, before the intended DEX launch sequence had completed, onchain liquidity activity occurred ahead of the coordinated plan.

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In an open DEX environment, this is technically possible. But it was not part of the intended launch sequence, and it disrupted the structure planned around the go-live window.

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That early activity, combined with external liquidity conditions that were materially thinner than the launch plan was built around, created a fragmented and difficult start.

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We are reviewing the onchain sequence carefully, working with our venue and infrastructure partners, and taking the lessons from what happened.

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We also want to be clear about something else.

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Not everything can be explained by external conditions.

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The market backdrop was severe. The onchain launch sequence did not develop as intended. There were also decisions, timing factors, and execution details that we are reviewing internally.

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The right response is not to pretend the launch went the way we wanted.

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It did not.

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We know this was not the launch experience many of you wanted.

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It was not the launch experience we wanted either.

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But tea is not defined by launch-week market activity.

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$TEA is a token for accessing and participating in the tea network and supporting open-source software. The purpose of tea is not a single market moment. The purpose is to build economic infrastructure for open source in a world where our utility and position its extremely timely, for instance on Github the total number of repositories on the platform has nearly doubled in just 36 months to 800 million, an explosion driven almost entirely by the rise of AI-assisted coding and automated workflows.

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That work continues.

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Our focus is now on improving and expanding the tooling, bridge access, project and repository functionality and the practical features  that allow the community to use tea properly.

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tea was built to support the software graph the world depends on. It was built around open-source contribution, provenance, dependency context, project identity, claims, rewards, and governance.

That mission has not changed because the first few days of market activity were difficult.

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Right now, the team is in response mode.

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We are reviewing what happened, coordinating with venue and infrastructure partners, continuing to execute, and preparing further updates for the community this week.

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We will continue to communicate as there is more to share.

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To everyone who has stayed with us, challenged us, supported us, and continued to believe in what tea is being built to do:

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thank you.

We are here.

tea is live.

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The work continues.