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@CadeMarket turned 1 a few days ago.
I want to reflect back on the last year that i've been working on this and share some of the lore for the many new eyes we have on the project now.
A year ago I deployed the token on Pump Fun for what was then a very VERY different project. I took a ROM of 2048 and let users play collaboratively via typing commands in a Pump Fun livestream chat.
Shortly after, I made a dozen or so arcade games with the same sort of premise. You typed "play" in the chat and you'd join the minigame and it would simulate the game outcome. Over a week or so, I gave out creator fees from the token to players on the leaderboard. Every few days, I turned on the livestream and people would play. This went on for a few weeks.
At this point, I was still employed full time as a smart contract engineer, and Cade was just a fun side project i'd work on late at night.
I had a random thought pop into my head one night. What if I could let people bet on the outcome of the games, and I built a system to let users control a wallet via live stream commands.
This one idea made me so delusionally optimistic about building Cade that I made the (at the time) crazy decision to quit my job. Mind you, my wife and I had just had our first child, and he was 2 months old.
For the next 6 months, I was working full-time on the project... for free. Didn't want to touch the creator fees of the token.
During this time, the idea began to evolve. I dropped the livestream aspect to the project, and realized that the tech that I had built was quite literally picture perfect for resolving markets programmatically. Because I could resolve a market programmatically, this opened up the possibility to offer very short prediction markets.
This was where the modern day idea of Cade was born. Quick markets, on only things that can be verifiably resolved, paid out instantly.
In March, I was selected as a winner of the Pump Fun build in public hackathon. The hilarious part of this is that
@kosgoood ran the hackathon, and later joined Cade as my Chief Operating Officer.
A day after winning the hackathon, I had already closed a pre-seed fundraising round. Less than 2 weeks later, I closed a seed fundraising round.
At this point, we were ready to hyperscale the tech. My first 2 hires were
@gnarzilla as CTO and
@steoniy as CPO, both of which i've known and worked with prior.
Shortly after that, I brought on
@0xRookmate and
@scottybmitch, 2 more engineers that i've known for years.
Before the summer, we ran an open beta. This was to introduce users to the general premise of Cade. We intentionally put out a very raw version of the product. This resulted in users giving us VERY constructive feedback, and we listened to every single piece of it.
This has been a trend for Cade. We always build everything (that we can) in public, and it's been one of the best business decisions that i've made.
In July, it was time to introduce sports markets. We ran the Cade Cup, which was a short duration prediction market tournament on World Cup games. The traction for this was massive. Around 10,000 active users and nearly 200k predictions.
In mid September, we wanted to stress test the systems again. We launched Meme Madness, which would give us 22 hours of live platform activity. Once again, the traction was staggering. Roughly 14,000 users and over half a million predictions.
All throughout this time, we spent 3 months putting hours and hours a day into legal and research on what would be required to launch the platform in the most legally compliant manner.
At the end of August, we were able to obtain the necessary iGaming license that will permit our mainnet launch with real dollars on the platform.
That's all for now.
I'll see you all for the Cade mainnet launch.