Fenix Finance · A Recap
We built Blast's #1 DEX.
What we shipped.
The cumulative footprint of Fenix Finance on Blast.
Why we chose Blast.
We deployed on Blast because of native yield — the first L2 where every ETH and stablecoin deposit earned a baseline return from ETH staking and Sky (formerly Maker).
As a DEX, that meant we weren't just splitting swap fees with LPs — we were stacking DEX revenue on top of DeFi yield. A structurally better economics layer than any other chain.
We believed native yield would become the default. We were early, and we built for it.
Innovations.
Breaking the 4-year orthodoxy.
Every ve-token protocol since Curve demanded 4-year locks. We argued that was theater — nobody knows what DeFi looks like in 4 years. We shipped the first 6-month lock: short enough to be honest, long enough to mean something.
The shorter window also meant voting power decayed faster — which forced lockers to actively re-lock, making Fenix one of the highest-locking-ratio protocols in DeFi.
Hundreds of thousands in incentives.
The RISE program distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in Blast incentives directly to veFNX lockers — paying the chain's yield back to the people who showed up.
While Blast fell,
we built.
The Blast team stopped supporting protocols. The chain lost momentum. The farmers left.
We kept building because we believed in the native yield thesis. The principle was sound. The execution was ours. We bet that if we kept shipping, something durable would emerge over the long term.
It didn't. But while we waited, Fenix was the last protocol still working on Blast.
Why it ended.
Blast pivoted from a DeFi L2 to a mobile application. It still doesn't work, a year later.
We had a direct conversation with Pacman, saw where Blast was headed, and made the call: stop working on Fenix and start the next chapter.
That next chapter became nest.
Investors got a share of our new company, nest.
Most failed crypto projects walk away. We chose to honor the people who believed in us.
Every veFNX locker received a direct allocation in nest, the new protocol from Rise Labs.
Distributed at launch · May 2026
Fenix became nest.
Inside Fenix, we built a product called nest — a yield manager where users deposited $FNX and we ran the optimized strategy for them.
That product became nest exchange, the new protocol from Rise Labs.