I was going to let the recent @hyperdrivedefi FUD slide, thought I'd give more context given some people seem to think 30 seconds of trawling the web is counted as research. For the record, we've spoken ad nauseam about our journey over the last 4 years, on ama's, pods and literrally to anyone who wants to jump on a call. Prior to founding Hyperdrive, myself and my co-founder were building Anchor Protocol on Terra. We saw that scale to over 20bn in TVL, the 3rd largest protocol in DeFi and then watched it all come crashing down when UST depegged. We saw the highest of highs and the lowest of lows... and the lows were low... death threats to the point where you cant even log into your socials. In the aftermath of the Terra collapse, Binance approached us and wanted us to build Anchor Protocol V2 on BNB with BUSD as the cannoical stablecoin. This was mentioned in the Binance press-release; https://t.co/kC9EXEJUog At the time, BUSD was going through a rapid expansion and Binance wanted a yield-bearing BUSD to be a key primitive on the BNB Chain ecosystem for all protocols to leverage. This was an opportunity that excited us, so at the end of 2022, in the depth of the bear market, we raised as seed round from Binance Labs and started to build that vision and that was the birth of Ambit Finance. Given that Terra was a Cosmos chain and the BNB Chain was an EVM, it meant that we had to write everything from scratch and that was was going to take time, but after 6-7 months (around July of 2023) we deployed version 1 on the testnet and kicked off the audits (3 seperate audits that took around 4 months to complete overall). However, just as users started playing with the testnet and we were getting feedback and iterating, we got hit with a bombshell announcement from Binance... they were shutting down BUSD and it would be phased out completely by Feb 2024. This announcement came at the end of August of 2023, right around the time that we were gearing up to launch. We had just spent the last 9-10 months building a product with a clear vision only to be told that the product it is current incarnation was no longer possible. We had two options, give up, or iterate. We chose the latter. We spent a few months working on some other ideas on what Ambit Finance could become and eventually settled on the idea of creating our own yield bearing stablecoin that was backed by other stablecoins, initially starting out with just USDT. Our yield bearing stablecoin was called Ambit Money/AUSD and the idea for that was to be a shared source of liquidity for other protocols that would have access to the liqudity and in exchange for the liquidity, would provide yield back to depositors. Ambit Finance (the lending protocol) was the first whitelisted protocol that would be granted access to the shared liqudity of AUSD. We launched this new vision in March of 2024 and initially gained some traction, reaching around 20m in TVL at the peak, but it was mostly just from airdrop farmers on the back of us being a Binance Labs funded protocol. The harsh reality was that after 6 months, we didn't get traction and failed to find any pmf. There was probably a whole range of reasons why, but the results were undeniable. So once again we had two options, give up, or iterate. We chose the latter. In mid-late June of 2024 we started looking around at what the different ecosystems had to offer and there was alot of options at the time. Monad was iterating on the EVM from the ground up, building a new and fast L1. Berachain was iterating with their Proof of Liquidity mechanism. Fantom was relaunching as the Sonic blockchain and promised to have the highest throughput and performance of any evm chain. But that wasn't all, there was also this little known thing called the HyperEVM. Neither myself or my co-founders are traders, but we were using Hyperliquid's HLP vault to earn some stablecoin yield so we new about Hyperliquid. When we thought about the HyperEVM, our initial thinking was "what if we could tokenize HLP and allow it as collateral on a lending market?" That was something that we would use ourselves and we thought that surely others would too. Around the same time, @crypto_adair posted a tweet as he was doing his bit to bring awareness to the HyperEVM. We responded to his tweet, and that become the start of our Hyperliquid journey. https://t.co/SKYsdMpFOP We spent the next few weeks thinking through the HyperEVM and what composability with the HyperCore could offer, speaking to top traders, the Hyperliquid team, and other early builders and then decided to go all in. Without sharing the contents of private messages, @crypto_adair messaged me on the 21st of July last year to ask what we had decided about the HyperEVM and whether we we going to be building, and the response was a Yes. At the time almost no-one was talking about @HyperliquidX and the HyperEVM and we even had people advise us not to do it because it was too small and risky. We didn't see it that way. We saw unbounded potential. If the Hyperliquid team could pull off their vision of allowing composability from the HyperEVM to the HyperCore then they would be the first chain since Ethereum that we beleived would be truly innovating. By August, we had already deployed to the HyperEVM testnet, one of the first protocols to do so, and had already built a working prototype of a tokenized HLP without the use of precompiles. Over the next few months we started to refine our vision for what we wanted to build on the HyperEVM and that was Spot Lending + Tokenized HLP + Liquid Staking... all packaged into a single DeFi hub that could become the home of DeFi yield on the HyperEVM. It was definately an ambitious vision as other protocols were dedicated solely to just one of those verticals, but we strongly beleive that by being able to offer them natively integrated into the one app it will offer a much better user experience. And we are certainly up for the challenge. This new vision was vastly different from the product we set out to build on BNB and it was heavily focused on Hyperliquid, so we decided to rebrand to Hyperdrive. The rebrand also meant shamelessly picking a more Hyperliquid aligned color, but the logos remained the same. We renamed our X account, Discord and TG group, created a new @ambitfinance X profile with a pinned post indicating that we had renamed and held an AMA for the Ambit community to talk about why we had rebranded, and our vision going forward. It was a new vision and a new product, but we didn't leave behind the past. We committed to the initial Ambit Finance airdop (a fact that has been conveyed countless number of times) and Binance Labs is still the seed investor. Binance Labs dont do follow on's and thats why they weren't included in an announcement specifically about the Series A. Over the last 10 months of building in the Hyperliquid ecosystem; - we've been active in the builders channel in the discord - published several articles about Precompiles which I know has helped other builders build their protocols https://t.co/wxEX30vcxk https://t.co/SRYjlW1SE1 - open sourced our testing framework that we use to help build isolated test with smart contracts that require precompiles - attended several Hyperliquid focused events to network and meet other builders and users Another fun fact is that I was the first person to find a bug in the HyperEVM back in October and declined the bug bounty. This isn't a thread designed to convince anyone to use Hyperdrive, but when people refer to you as scammers or sus actors, then I think its important for the discourse to have as much context as possible before making up your mind about the quality of the teams character. In the immortal words of @chameleon_jeff ... Those who can, do, Those who can't, fud.

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