Dexible
Dexible was a highly flexible dex aggregator with an execution layer modeled to resemble OEMS in CeFi & Traditional Finance
At its heart, Dexible was more than just a DEX (decentralized exchange) aggregator. It was an execution management system (EMS), designed to optimize the full lifecycle of trades in decentralized finance (DeFi). Our core customer segment were professional, full time DeFi traders. We integrated advanced algorithmic trading strategies into the platform to empower both retail and institutional traders, providing them with tools to:
Dexible fundamentally simplified the fund manager or trader’s life. Its vision was to democratize institutional grade execution infrastructure for hedge funds and retail traders, so that they could orchestrate sophisticated DeFi strategies based on signals rather than simply use sniper bots, telegram bots, manually enter/exit positions, or use semi-custodial conditional trade protocols that leaked intention.
Dexible's proprietary order segmentation algorithm minimized market impact for large orders through essentially dollar-cost-averaging trade order's into illiquid microcaps. It served as a means to dissuade defective arbitrage actors running frontrunning bots to significantly worse execution price for traders.
Its vision was to democratize institutional grade execution infrastructure for hedge funds and retail traders, so that they could orchestrate sophisticated DeFi strategies based on signals rather than simply use sniper bots, telegram bots, manually enter/exit positions, or use semi-custodial conditional trade protocols that leaked intention.
One can’t understand Mitchell Opatowsky without understand the story of Dexible—the innovativeness, the unique challenges, the brutal obstacles, and the insane achievements during its 3 year lifespan.
The Dexible team emerged from its previous project, BUIDLHub—a general Web 3.0 <> Web 2.0 workflow automation platform intended for independent devs, startups, and enterprise. The team decided to fully pivot away from BUIDLHub in late 2020. By that point, BUIDLHub had amassed over 30 thousand users, with thousands using pre-built automated notification workflows.
Through a close relationship of mine, we got a strong referral to join the Creative Destruction Lab’s non-dilutive tech accelerator in mid 2020. Our experiences in this program would prove to be instrumental to our development as leaders, our understanding of business models, and to the way we would learn how to iterate and seek product-market fit.
During the course of CDL, we encountered a number of mentors who were pushing us to a more commercial, revenue driven business model. In hindsight, I think they were significantly underestimating the commercial viability and potential for BUIDLHub, as many successive businesses like Tenderly, Collab.land, and Hal have all proven to be successful—not to mention more NFT/DAO specific tooling. BUIDLHub’s problem was not that it wasn’t a viable business, but that it was early to the the market, and our existing network was only just beginning.
The mentors should have done a better job of identifying that BUIDLHub simply needed to commercialize. All of our interactions never pushed back against a growing desire to delve into DeFi, as the DeFi summer of 2020 was in full swing. We didn’t get the kind of perspective we needed that could recognize BUIDLHub as a strategic brand-building, ecosystem-forward product, growing into a sustainable cash flows business with paying enterprise clients, startup clients, and paying retail individual dev clients.
The experience at CDL—while extraordinarily informative to many of the foundations I have since cherished for being a successful founder—reinforced some negative traits. It’s important to the story, and to my experiences and challenges from the startup landscape, of understanding human dynamics. The interpersonal human dynamics on an early startup team struggling for product market fit are probably the most visceral that one could experience outside of running a major organized crime organization. Each way of thinking, the assumptions, the beliefs systems manifested into the realm of possibilites and into the types of decisions that could be made. The CDL mentor interactions significantly reinforced the inherent stubborn attitudes of one of my partners. This would create a multitude of successive problems, where he saw himself boxed in by his own expertise and skillset. He identified himself as a dev, and a builder, rather than someone adaptable and open to knocking it out of the park in multiple domains. This identity conflict became a key theme and insight from my Dexible experience, and would color many decisions made going forward.
Again, hindsight is 20:20. But it’s from this retrospective and reflective way of viewing the past that we can reshape our pattern identification.
During the course of CDL, one of my cofounders recounted this moment:
“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 solidified the meaning of DeFi. Suddenly, there’s no censorship, lockout, or rules. That’s the beauty of this thing.”
What started out as an experiment into DeFi-protocol based notification automations became an obsession with automating DeFi. The CDL mentors of the program became the key anchors to the way that we viewed DeFI automation—as trading automation through conditions.
In the process, we lost BUIDLHub. I think that external reinforcement made multiple mistakes and complicated our way of answering the question of whether we were a company, product, or feature. In hindsight, we were listening to a few influencers, each of whom we heavily weighed against our own intuition. Their beliefs significantly morphed and shaped us into testing a new set of untested assumptions by the rest of the market. However, it was all we knew we had to work with, so we delved in. They weren’t wrong, just that they didn’t appreciate our strategy, timing, and the things we really needed.
In 2020, we envisioned a decentralized trade execution network, a highly ambitious totally decentralized form of what we wanted Dexible to be. We called this architecture Autoswap, and presented it to the mentors from CDL in October 2020. The mentors in CDL were not as swayed, and I agreed with them, though I really wanted us to push toward this vision. In hindsight, this vision was powerful and compelling, but it needed to be decomposed further into a two to three year progressive decentralization roadmap. I also recognize the market—by which I mean investors with capital to support any future risky undertakings—rewards consistency and credibility working on incremental steps towards ambitious goals, proving that the team’s heart is in the game for the long run, and proving elements from a much larger vision are consistent with the longer term roadmap. Nonetheless, out of Autoswap, we made our first step toward that vision with New Pairs
Before Dexible, we simply were recording new pairs being launched to Uniswap on a frontend dashboard. We created a web app called New Pairs and started to put some feelers out there. It got a little bit of traction, but at the time, I didn’t know how to market in DeFi specifically, nor did I have the subject matter expertise or hindsight I do now. What we should have done with New Pairs was to create a paid telegram bot service. We should have allowed traders to get notifications and instantly deploy funds to those new microcaps, essentially through a sniper bot. After that sniper bot was developed, we should have developed what would become something like Photon.sol. We had all the infrastructure, plumbing, contracts, and the expertise to develop a platform with this capability. However, we were a bit naive and inexperienced in knowing the direction and market demand for DeFi.
So starting Q4 2020, we rapidly began exploring the path of automation in DeFi trading. By December of 2020, we announced the first live version of Dexible. Our goal was to make DeFi simpler, more accessible, and more abstract to users—whatever future direction it went.
The team and I’s belief was that anyone on the web should be able to lace automated trading orders. The market needed a way to compete with CeFi’s risk mitigation measures. Just think, institutions that were moving markets had the ability to set specific controls on trader limits, to have fallback behaviors in the case that markets collapsed, an ability to coordinate between analysts, quants, and technical traders to move positions, with teams established at offices around the globe. That infrastructure simply wasn’t mature enough when Dexible began.
Those conditions, the ability to move money in the case of sudden price drops or extreme volatility, or the ability to have conditional unstaking from vault positions or lending/borrowing lockups, were crucial and life-saving features that would be required for DeFi to gain traction beyond the hyper-obsessed enthusiasts. Five years later, the market still has yet to truly achieve this. If every day investors in DeFi were literate on the capabilities we envisioned, we believed it would be possible to make financial participation more equitable and accessible, increase innovation, and increase true wealth creation.
However, the DeFi world became fraught with an obsession with hyper-speculative products and maximized efficiency in speculating on speculation. It became a bit of a recursive feedback loop, that the lower the friction was to deploying capital in extraordinarily volatile and pump-and-dump prone schemes, the frothier the markets would be. In a way, this also served to Dexible’s benefits as trader’s thought they could maximize outcomes through setting take profits and stop limit orders and TWAPs entering/exiting the frothiest illiquid microcaps.
When we started down the Dexible path, we wanted DeFi to be the nurturing ground for future innovation, where individual innovators, small teams, scientific researchers, product creators, musical and artistic creators, and AI model developers could achieve grassroots successive rounds of crowdfunding. We imagined a better future for connecting crowdfunder incentives with the incentives of the products they supported through greater audibility and provable kickbacks based on contractual, rules-based milestones.
To achieve that, abstraction in middleware was needed for large net capital inflow into the Web 3.0 ecosystem.
Think of Dexible as a highly flexible dex aggregator with an execution layer modeled to resemble OEMS in CeFi & Traditional Finance. The platform scans all the available sources of liquidity on a particular blockchain to optimize outcomes for swaps. Dexible also checks dexes for their current pricing and available liquidity, among other on and off-chain conditions. When market conditions match the trader's criteria, orders get submitted through Dexible's Settlement Smart Contract, then calling out to one or more DEX contracts to execute the actual trades.
Dexible provided several powerful use cases for traders who sought to optimize their strategies:
Dexible provided several powerful use cases for traders who sought to optimize their strategies:
DeFi both made things easy and extraordinarily difficult, it was a bless and a curse. Investors had inflated, unrealistic expectations for what a scalable venture backed DeFi business would look like. ALL investors active in DeFi driven by token exits. ALL of them were highly influenced by hype, viral marketing, leading breadcrumbs that seduced retail and high value accounts with opportunities to get airdrops, governance tokens, or high value staking opportunities. We did not encounter a single investor who believed in products existing in the space without a clear tokenization go-to-market strategy if they were a trader oriented business model. This challenge of identity and of matching these expectations and of timing would be a consistent theme of challenges for us. Being a US-domiciled LLC entity (remember BUIDLHUb) playing in DeFi with doxxed founders was practically a non-starter, or at least raised flags in ways it should not have.
So raising money in DeFi required more than just a polished pitch deck—it required resilience, deep technical knowledge, immense levels of competitive and trend research, and the ability to address these investors’ concerns in a way they could understand. We had to cross the bridge to express our purpose and our identity. My mission was to lead this charge.
I successfully raised $150K in angel funding and secured $1.5 million in pre-seed capital. Each round was an uphill battle, as institutional investors approached Dexible with both skepticism and caution, particularly given the volatility of the broader cryptocurrency market.
I didn’t leave the funding strategy to chance or delegate it fully to a fundraising team. Instead, I became the face of Dexible, engaging directly with investors in countless meetings. I built whole pipelines and slaved away on decks. I honed my understanding of investor psychology. I lost my sense of fear or nervousness going onto calls. It meant learning to identify key objections, such as concerns around liquidity fragmentation, DeFi market risks, and smart contract security.
To give them the confidence in us I needed, I presented demos of Dexible’s smart order routing and segmented market order algorithms in practice on the platform. They were consistently blown away by what Dexible could do—they were mainly uncertain of the market’s adoption, or potentially the revenue margins.
In a stark rejection of the CDL mentor’s original idea for incremental improvements, many of the investors used Dexible’s existing trade orders as the anchor point by which it’s entire business model as a company should be evaluated. Our mission by the end of 2021 became very different—shift towards the full automation of yield, staking, farming, lending/borrowing deployments following the logic of risk mitigation, signal management, and more. We wanted to enable the full stack for small and mid-size hedge funds, and we wanted to significantly enhance the retail trader experience. But pitching that vision became insanely challenging when all these investors pinned us as our earliest versions.
Investors were not just buying into a product—they were buying into the leadership team. I made sure they understood the team’s deep technical background and hands-on leadership. Dexible’s vision wasn’t theoretical, it was grounded in a logical, market research driven future. However, the fact that investors saw as a technical team also became a crutch for the founders and I. These investors minimized my team’s capabilities to make the sorts of craft market plays and have the channel relationships needed for more viral go to markets.
Time and time again, the investor journey became loaded with Catch-22s.
I lost track of times I just wanted to bang my head against the wall from the same conversation happening time and time again. I just learned that investors are not this high and mighty omnipotent force. They just wield their LPs funds under the guise of the power to control the flow of funding. They are highly predictable, and frankly, quite sheepish. It’s seeing the games in their own lives that they are playing that gives you control over them.
Through this rigorous process, we secured the resources to bring Dexible’s vision to life—although it would not be all that we needed.
A project like Dexible could only be successful with a unified, disciplined team. I took charge of assembling and leading a 15-person cross-functional team, composed of engineers, designers, marketers, and sales professionals. This was no easy task—each team member came from a different background, with their own working styles, priorities, and challenges.
I implemented Agile Scrum methodologies, with two-week sprint cycles, to ensure that all departments were aligned, focused, and moving toward the same objectives. My hands-on leadership ensured that no team operated in isolation. From the engineers working on Dexible’s smart contracts to the sales team engaging with institutional clients, I was directly involved in every major decision, driving progress from all fronts.
I led the development of a comprehensive year long roadmap. You can read about that here.
I coordinated engineering efforts across the frontend, backend, devops/infrastructure, and blockchain teams. I learned to become more effective at my roles of Head of Product through delegating task completion capture. I would regularly return through our task management engine on Clickup to issue new tasks.
Learning to asynchronous standups saved us no less than 65% of time on synchronous standup meetings. It allowed us to have more consistent back and forths on individual issues and tasks. it also allowed the team to respond more concisely to the particular issues. We would then schedule supplemental calls to expand upon areas where we faced obstacles.
Dexible’s infrastructure proved incredibly complex. The infrastructure team had to develop cloud analytics and ingestion microservices spanning multiple chains. The blockchain team had the challenge of integrating more than 60 liquidity sources across the networks.
I personally led the effort to prioritize development tasks for each area—frontend UI/UX, backend scalability, and infrastructure stability—and ensured tight communication between all groups. This strategy allowed us to deliver four major product updates ahead of schedule, saving Dexible nearly $300K in development costs.
One of the keys to our success was my decision to prioritize and condense the product roadmap into two-week sprints. This agile structure allowed us to increase iteration speed by 35% and improve the overall customer satisfaction score by 30%. Direct user feedback was critical here, and I was always at the front lines, reviewing client side recordings, creating and maintaining relationships with community members, generating reports, and incorporating insights directly into the sprint backlog.
With Dexible’s technical foundation solidifying, I developed a strategic roadmap that spanned frontend UX, backend development, infrastructure upgrades, and smart contract updates. This comprehensive vision ensured that every team was aligned, working toward the same long-term objectives, and knew exactly where their priorities lay.
In no particular order:
Dexible’s journey from concept to acquisition was more than just a project—it was a mission. A mission that I led from the front, ensuring that every strategic move, every piece of code, and every customer interaction aligned with the overarching vision of creating a revolutionary DeFi trading platform.
Through personal leadership, deep technical engagement, and relentless focus, I helped guide Dexible to its ultimate success. Whether it was raising $1.65 million in funding, leading a cross-functional team, developing innovative economic models, or onboarding institutional clients, my contributions were pivotal in transforming Dexible from a fledgling concept into a platform that redefined DeFi trading.
Dexible may have been acquired, but its legacy—of which I was a central part—will continue to shape the DeFi space for years to come.
