Founder Notes — Chapter 4

An iPhone, a Rubik’s Cube, and a stapler are all useful. Put them in one case and you probably get something worse at all three jobs.

At one point, we nearly did the software version of that with intrade.bar. Our plan was to put the new trading platform inside the personal account on zylo.io. One ecosystem. One website. One account. Games, trading, and digital services would sit together, and users could move between them from a single entry point.

On paper, it looked elegant. We even spoke about it publicly, because we believed in it.

Then we began to build it. zylo.io is a new website. It still needs to earn familiarity and trust. intrade.bar already has an audience that knows where to find it and what to expect when it opens. Asking those users to enter through a different site would mean giving up an advantage we had spent years building.

More importantly, someone who comes to trade wants a trading platform.Not a game. Not a VPN. Not a guided tour of everything else we plan to make.

Imagine opening the address you know and being asked to understand why a space fox and a privacy service are standing between you and the product you came for. We might call that a connected ecosystem. The user might call it an extra step.

That distinction changed the decision.

An ecosystem should not force users to use the ecosystem.

A player should be able to go straight to the game. Someone looking for a VPN should reach the VPN. A trader should arrive at intrade.bar. If they become curious about the other products later, the connection should be there for them to discover.

So we dropped the idea that intrade.bar had to live only inside the zylo.io account. It should keep its own site and familiar entry point. We still want the products to be connected through Zylo and its shared economy, but that connection should make their experience better, not turn the front door into a test of how well they understand our diagram.

Can the Roadmap Be Trusted, Then?

It is a fair question. We described one structure, then changed it. Other mechanics and visuals have changed too. If the plans keep moving, what is a roadmap for?

I think of it like a route in a navigation app. It tells you where you are going and which roads you expect to take. If a bridge ahead has been dismantled, you choose another road. You do not drive into the river because a line on the map said to keep going straight.

Our direction is to build products that are useful in their own right and connect them through Zylo. The people who come for a game, a trading platform, or a digital service should not have to study the entire ecosystem before using the thing they wanted.

That is the strategy. The exact interface and entry point are ways to carry it out. When we learn that one of those choices makes a product harder to use, changing it is not a betrayal of the roadmap. Refusing to change it would be stupid stubbornness.

That does not make every new idea a strategy. We should be able to explain each revision. Here, we designed for a neat ecosystem when we needed to design for the person opening intrade.bar.

CosmoFox should remain a game people can enter and enjoy. Our next game needs to stand on its own, as we discussed in the previous chapter.

intrade.bar needs to be clear to the traders who already know it. ZYLO should earn a real role inside these products, not merely appear beside their names in a presentation.

Those commitments have not changed.

The original plans gave us a starting point. They should not stop us from making better decisions about the products we meant to build.

We are not changing everything every week. We are gradually replacing assumptions with knowledge.

We Tried to Combine an iPhone, a Rubik’s Cube, and a Stapler was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Founder Notes — Chapter 3

We had a concept for our next mobile game, a visual direction, the first mechanics, and our own idea of how development should proceed.

It looked pretty good.

Then we brought in an advisor and a producer with experience working on AA titles. Experienced people, it turns out, do not always join a project to confirm how well you have planned everything. Sometimes they show you how much could still be improved.

After that, a lot began to change: gameplay mechanics, visuals, the production process, and our approach to development itself. Decisions that had seemed almost final became provisional. Some elements needed more depth. Others had to go because they added work without making the game better.

We could have hired experienced people, listened to their feedback, and said:

Thank you. But we are still going to follow the presentation we prepared six months ago.

That would have been a rather expensive way to hire someone to compliment us.

So we started reviewing the product. Not all of the feedback was comfortable to hear. But hiring experience only makes sense if you are willing to let it change the work.

One distinction matters here: our advisor and producer’s experience on AA titles does not turn our game into an AA game at the push of a button. Those projects have very different budgets, teams, and production cycles.

What changed was the standard we use to judge our own work.

Does the character look good enough?

Is the core gameplay loop clear?

Do players want to start another session?

Have we overloaded the game with mechanics?

Does the Web3 connection feel like someone bolted a crypto wallet onto a regular game at the last minute?

A game cannot be fully invented in a document. A document can describe the idea. Playing it is how you find out whether that idea works.

That is why the game is changing so quickly right now. At one point, I genuinely stopped trying to remember every intermediate version. Two weeks later, some of those decisions could already be different.

This does not mean development has no direction. It means we do not treat every intermediate answer as the final one.

Our goal has not changed: to build a standalone mobile game that is interesting even to people who have never heard of Zylo, tokens, or Web3.

Its connection to the ecosystem should strengthen the game, not replace it.

We Hired People Who Hurt Our Feelings was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What CosmoFox taught us about the difference between community reactions and real product data.

The first version of CosmoFox did its job.

It gathered the initial audience, introduced users to the Zylo universe, and helped us test game mechanics, progression, and user behavior inside the product.

Before the launch, we had hypotheses. After the launch, we had data.

These are not the same thing.

With the introduction of $ZYLO we faced another challenge. The token had to become part of the gameplay, not just something displayed inside the game.

The easiest solution seemed obvious.

Add a $ZYLO balance to the old interface. Add a few buttons. Let users buy something. Write the word “utility” several times in the announcement.

Technically, the token would be inside the game.

In reality, it would not.

That is why Mine2Earn appeared.

The gameplay loop itself changed. Mining Drones were introduced, planets were divided into sectors, and players could receive rewards in $ZYLO.

The token became more than an image next to the balance. It became part of the actions inside the game mode.

The next step was understanding how this system worked outside our internal documents and spreadsheets.

That is where comments become useful, but insufficient.

One person may write ten messages about how much they liked the update, complete one planet, and never open the game again.

Another person may not write anything but return every day.

A third may leave a harsh comment, understand the mechanics a week later, and become one of the most active players.

Which one represents a positive reaction?

This is why we do not look only at the chat.

We need to understand whether players complete the tutorial, understand the mechanics, return to the game, where they stop, which drones they use, and when they decide to continue or leave.

Comments show opinions. Behavior shows patterns.

One loud message can tell us what a person felt at a particular moment. Similar behavior from hundreds of users tells us something about the product.

Mine2Earn is a working version of CosmoFox, but that does not mean every element of its balance, interface, and mechanics is final.

They can continue to change as we collect enough real user experience.

Not because we did not know what we wanted to build.

Because real people always stand between a good hypothesis and a good product.

Written by Alex ChekalovFounder, Zylo

What CosmoFox taught us about the difference between community reactions and real product data. was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Mine2Earn, Fox Survivor, and the new version of intrade.bar moved away from their original ideas — and why that may actually be a good sign.

The other day, Max suggested writing an article about how users reacted to the new version of CosmoFox.

I asked:

- What reaction?

There has been some. Some of it is positive, some of it is mixed. But analyzing a few comments and drawing conclusions about the whole product would be like predicting the weather for the entire year based on what your neighbor is wearing today.

Then Max suggested talking about Fox Survivor and how the game is changing during development. I replied that things there are changing so quickly that I lost track of the current version a couple of weeks ago.

Then I thought about the new intrade.bar and realized that almost the same thing had happened there. We originally planned to place the trading platform inside the personal account on zylo.io. We started implementing it, looked at the real user journey — and abandoned the idea.

At that moment, the topic of the article appeared on its own.

Almost none of Zylo’s products now look exactly the way we imagined them at the beginning. From the outside, this may look like a lack of planning. From the inside, it looks a little different: with every new prototype, specialist, and real user, we have fewer assumptions and more knowledge.

Roadmap / Reality

I like plans. Without them, a large team quickly turns into a group of people who are all busy doing something important, but each of them is doing something different. A plan gives direction, helps distribute money, people, and time, and at least gives us a rough idea of when one stage will end and the next one will begin.

The problem starts when a plan is treated like a sacred text. A roadmap is created before the product is fully developed. Sometimes, it is created before there is even a working prototype. At that point, the team relies on research, experience, and logic, but still makes a large number of assumptions. We assume that users will understand the mechanics. We assume they will click the right button. We assume that a feature that looks great in a presentation will be just as useful on a phone screen.

And then the real product appears.

And the real user clicks the wrong thing, ignores half of what we were especially proud of, and finds a way to use a mechanic that neither the game designer, the developers, nor the person who spent several weeks drawing the user journey had ever considered.

Reality has no respect for presentations.

In this situation, there are two options. The first is to keep following the original plan because we published it once. The second is to admit that we now have more information and change the decision.

The first option looks more consistent. The second usually leads to a better product.

“Everything Looks Great! I’ll Send the Revisions Now…” was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past few months, the word “TGE” has probably been heard in our community more often than the names of Zylo’s own products.

For those for whom this word is just three funny letters, the abbreviation stands for Token Generation Event. In simple terms, it is some kind of event where a token is created.

Sometimes it feels like there is a special “TGE” button somewhere. The team presses it, the token appears on an exchange, the chart immediately starts moving upward, and all project participants become a little richer and much calmer.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there is no such button.

For a user, TGE looks quite simple: at a certain time, the ZYLO/USDT trading pair appears on the exchange, and people get the ability to trade it. A chart appears on the screen. Someone buys. Someone sells. Someone takes a screenshot of the first candle and sends it to every chat with a number of exclamation marks directly dependent on the direction of the price movement.

For the team, everything looks a little different. Behind one trading pair are months of negotiations, legal documents, technical integrations, checks, audits, token preparation, a marketing campaign, liquidity, market making, user support, security, and dozens of other processes.

The user sees a ticker and a chart. The team sees several dozen tasks, each of which must be solved so that a year of work does not get flushed down the toilet.

That is why TGE is truly an important stage for Zylo. We have been moving toward it for a long time and have done a huge amount of work, but I would not call it a victory.

Victory is when you have built a working product, created sustainable demand, and proved that the token is needed not only so that people can trade it.

TGE is the moment when a project enters the open market. Before that, we were mostly judged by our own community. After TGE, the market joins in. And the market, unlike a loving community, is not interested in our feelings, the number of sleepless nights, or the complexity of the work done. It has only supply and demand.

Spend Your Pocket Money and Crash the Market!

The mere fact that a token appears on an exchange does not mean that it has a full-fledged market.

You can add a trading pair, open trading, and even proudly announce it across all social media. But if there are almost no orders in the order book, a small buy or sell can move the price by dozens of percent.

At that point, it is not really a market. It is a stripper. You can look, but you cannot touch.

Liquidity is needed so that a user can buy or sell a token without a huge difference between the expected and actual price. So that there are orders in the book. So that there is no abyss between the best bid and ask prices. So that one relatively small trade does not turn the chart into the cardiogram of a person who has just been shown the cost of a TGE on a crypto exchange.

Preparing liquidity is one of the most complex and expensive parts of a launch. You cannot simply “put some money on the exchange” and consider the task complete. You need to think in advance about asset allocation, order book depth, trading ranges, possible volatility, and market behavior in the first hours and days.

At the same time, nobody knows in advance how many people will come to buy, how many will decide to sell, and how many will simply open the chart, look at it for five minutes, and write their expert conclusion in the chat.

Vacancy: Chief Artist of Green Candles

Market making is a separate topic.

Many people have a rather interesting idea of how a market maker works. Supposedly, somewhere there is a person sitting with a large balance, looking at the chart, and pressing the “save everyone” button every time the price drops.

Unfortunately, market making works a little differently. The task of a market maker is to support a normal trading environment: to place buy and sell orders, provide order book depth, reduce the spread, and help users make trades without excessive slippage.

A market maker is not required to ensure constant price growth. It cannot cancel market supply and demand. It cannot forbid someone from selling tokens. It cannot guarantee that every TGE participant will make a profit.

And market making is definitely not a magic mechanism that turns any chart into a straight line pointing upward. If everything were that simple, projects would not be developing products. They would just be signing contracts with market makers 24/7.

For us, the main task is to create a working market, not to draw a beautiful first candle. A beautiful candle lives for a few minutes. Normal liquidity is needed by a project for years.

Perhaps many people, like me, did not know this, but it turns out that on a normal exchange, listing without a market maker is almost impossible. The exchange needs not just a token in the list, but a trading pair through which users can actually make normal trades.

Where Are My Xs?

Before TGE, most of the community discusses its date.

After TGE, it starts discussing every one-minute candle. Obvious progress.

Already in the first hours, there will be people writing:

“Why is someone selling?”

“Why didn’t the price go up ten times?”

“Why is the team silent?”

“Why isn’t the market maker buying everything back?”

“Why did good news come out, but the price didn’t react?”

“Who sold $47 worth of tokens and destroyed my faith in the project?”

This is a normal part of the open market. After TGE, the ZYLO token will end up in the hands of people with completely different goals.

Someone buys the token because they believe in the long-term development of the ecosystem. Someone came for a few hours of speculation. Someone has been involved in the project for a long time and will decide to lock in part of the result. Someone will buy emotionally and sell ten minutes later because the candle turned out not to be green. Someone will sell everything they received from the airdrop, while someone else at that same moment will buy some amount in order to purchase a mining drone and, a few days later, start mining the token from the very first minutes of the new CosmoFox stage.

We cannot control every person’s decisions. And we should not. The team is responsible for the product, infrastructure, security, liquidity, communication, and keeping its promises. But the team is not responsible for every click of the Buy or Sell button.

To Speak or Not to Speak, That Is the Question

After TGE, project communication becomes much more difficult.

Before the exchange launch, you can talk about development, partnerships, product preparation, and the next stages. After TGE, someone will definitely try to connect every word from the team to the price.

Talked about a new product — means we want to pump the price.

Did not comment on a drop — means we abandoned the project.

Commented on a drop — means we are making excuses.

Post often — creating artificial noise.

Post rarely — doing nothing.

There is no perfect option here.

That is why our communication must remain as careful as possible. We will talk about confirmed events, product launches, technical updates, ecosystem development, and new scenarios for using ZYLO.

But we will not promise a specific price, explain every candle, call on people to buy the token or forbid them from selling it, or pretend that we are able to control the market.

If someone promises you guaranteed growth after TGE, most likely they either do not understand how the market works, or they understand it too well and are counting on the fact that you do not.

Do Not Write Your Seed Phrase in the Comments to This Article!

The first days and weeks after TGE will probably be the most emotional period in Zylo’s history.

The team will monitor the technical stability of deposits and withdrawals, liquidity quality, the operation of the trading pair, possible user issues, and security. Another major task remains the integration of the token into products. Both the token and the products already exist. Now they need to be connected. Everything has been prepared for this.

Special attention will have to be paid to scammers. As soon as a token appears on an exchange, dozens of “official” channels, “support services”, “new contracts”, “exclusive presales”, and people ready to help you connect your wallet suddenly appear with it. Especially if you first send them your seed phrase.

All official information will be published only on Zylo’s official resources. Any contract addresses, exchange links, and instructions must be checked several times.

In the Beginning, There Was… CosmoFox

For many users, their introduction to Zylo began with CosmoFox.

The clicker helped gather the first audience, introduce people to the character, the mechanics, and the idea of the project itself. It became a simple entry point into the ecosystem and allowed us to test a large number of hypotheses.

But CosmoFox was never intended to be the final form of Zylo.

The clicker is the beginning. It is a door, not the whole building.

We are now finishing work on the second version of CosmoFox in Telegram. It will introduce a new mode with a pay-to-play model and access only through the ZYLO token. This will make CosmoFox one of the first clear use cases for ZYLO after TGE. Before the game starts, you will have the opportunity to try the changes completely free of charge and earn your first token.

I am sure you will appreciate the changes.

But this is not the final point either.

A New Audience for Zylo

The next major stage will be Fox Survivor.

This is no longer a clicker and not an addition to a Telegram Mini App. It is a full-fledged mobile game with its own gameplay, progression, and a wider audience.

Our task is to create a product that will be interesting to a person even if they have never heard of Zylo before and do not know how a token differs from in-game coins.

Fox Survivor should be perceived first and foremost as a game, not as a crypto presentation with a character placed inside it who drills planets while riding a drill.

Not as yet another way to tell users about Web3, but as an independent gaming product capable of attracting an audience through the quality of its gameplay.

The connection with the ecosystem and the token should be useful, understandable, and natural. The user should not have to study blockchain in order to enjoy the game.

ZYLO in intrade.bar

Separately, it is worth talking about intrade.bar.

Because if CosmoFox became the first introduction to Zylo for many people, then intrade.bar is no longer a test sandbox or a game mechanic. It is a working product that has gone through 10 years, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of trades, disputes, support, withdrawals, quotes, and everything that usually does not fit into a beautiful presentation about an ecosystem.

That is why the use of ZYLO in intrade.bar is especially important for us. We do not want the token to be just a decoration in the interface. We do not want to create a “deposit with ZYLO” button, put a logo next to it, and solemnly announce that now we have utility.

That is not how it works. If a token appears inside a trading platform, it must give the user a clear use case.

In the new version of intrade.bar, we have created a separate trading mode where ZYLO is used not as an external marketing element, but as part of the trading account.

The user has a choice. They can use a standard account. Or they can choose Zylo.

In ZYLO mode, the conditions will differ from the standard account: the token will become not only a method of deposit, withdrawal, and balance, but also part of a separate trading logic with higher payouts compared to the basic mode.

ZYLO should be connected not only with games, but also with intrade.bar — a product that has already proven it can live for a long time, work with users, and go through difficult stages without fairy tales about easy money.

For us, this is one of the key scenarios after TGE.

CosmoFox will provide the game mechanics.

intrade.bar will provide the trading scenario.

Fox Survivor should expand the gaming side into a full-fledged mobile product.

And together, this starts to look not like a token for the sake of a token, but like an ecosystem where each part has its own role.

So What Happens Next?

Insider information: after TGE, the chart will move to the right. I wanted to insert an old bearded joke at the end of the article.

Seriously, nobody can know the direction of movement with 100% certainty. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Sometimes logically. Sometimes completely illogically.

Good news will not always lead to immediate growth. Bad market sentiment will sometimes temporarily affect the price more strongly than months of the team’s work. That is normal.

The price shows the state of supply and demand at a specific moment in time. It does not always show the real value of all the work that has been done.

But the market cannot be ignored completely either. TGE is a public test of the project. It will show how well we have prepared the infrastructure, how strong the community is, and whether Zylo products are capable of creating interest beyond the existing audience.

We take this stage seriously, but without illusions. TGE does not automatically turn a project into a successful one. It only gives the token an open market. What happens next depends on what the team is able to build around it.

A New Chapter

We have been moving toward the ZYLO listing for a long time.

For the team, this is truly an important stage and the result of a lot of work. But calling it the final point would be too convenient. After listing, a more difficult phase begins.

We will have to work with liquidity, market making, new expectations, increased attention, and much more careful communication.

We will have to get through the first emotional days, when someone will look at the chart as if it is the meaning of life, someone will look for someone to blame in every candle, and someone will demand the impossible from the team: to build products, comment on the price, hold the market, answer in chats, and preferably also predict the future — all at the same time.

That is not how it works. The market will do its job.

Someone will buy. Someone will sell. Someone will discuss every price movement as if the fate of civilization depends on it. Our task is different. We must continue building the products for which ZYLO appeared in the first place.

Not just support the chart with conversations.

Not just publish posts saying that “the team continues to work”.

But develop what creates a real reason for the token to exist.

Game products.

The trading platform.

New use cases.

An ecosystem where ZYLO does not lie there as dead weight, but participates in action.

Listing creates a market for the token. But the market itself does not create value. Value is created by products, users, clear use cases, and the team’s ability not to lose its head when there is too much noise around.

CosmoFox was the first introduction to the ecosystem and is becoming a large-scale utility project.

intrade.bar has become one of the key mature use cases for ZYLO.

Fox Survivor should open the next gaming stage.

And listing is the moment when all of this faces its first open test by the market.

It probably will not be calm. But if we wanted calm, we would not be building an ecosystem with a token, games, a trading platform, and a VPN service all at the same time.

The new chapter begins at 12:00 UTC on June 23, 2026.

When the emotions calm down a little, the chart will keep moving, and the team will still have to do what all of this was created for.

Build Zylo Ecosystem.

Is TGE the Finish Line? was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the first part, I explained why intrade.bar was never built as just another digital options platform. We talked about support, withdrawals, hedging, verifiable quotes, open communication, and why we chose a more difficult path instead of the easiest one.

And now comes the logical question: if intrade.bar has all this time been built around transparency, fast withdrawals, human support, verifiable quotes, and a refusal to sell fake success, why do we need a new trading platform at all?

The answer is simple: because the old platform cannot be endlessly improved with patches.

It has done its job.

It helped us go from “just another binary options platform” to a company with its own philosophy, its own rules, and its own community. But any product that lives long enough starts carrying the traces of all past decisions.

Some of it is technical legacy.

Some of it is interface legacy.

Some of it is logic that made sense 7 years ago, but today already needs to be rebuilt.

Some of it is features that were added gradually and now need to be brought together into a more understandable system.

The old platform was not a mistake. It was a tool of its time. It did what it was supposed to do: it gave people a simple way to enter trades, a clear mechanic, and a working product without unnecessary theater.

But now we need a platform that can handle the next stage: new regions, new scenarios, faster trades, alternative quote providers, more convenient mobile trading, a personal account area, product integration, and new features that simply cannot be properly developed on the old base.

In short, the new platform should preserve what intrade.bar was created for, but remove what has accumulated over the years as technical and interface legacy.

We want to make the trading screen faster, cleaner, and easier to understand.

The trade should be visible before entry: asset, amount, direction, expiration, payout, and result. Without trying to hide important conditions behind beautiful words.

The user should not have to guess what will happen after pressing a button. They should understand the trade before entering it, not after it is already too late.

The new platform is not “we made the buttons prettier.” If the task were simply to modernize the design, we would have done it much earlier and much cheaper.

Platform 2.0 is a new base for the coming years. For a faster interface. For more convenient mobile trading. For new markets. For new payment scenarios. For proper product development, instead of endlessly attaching new parts to an old construction.

And yes, a separate part of the new platform is integration with the broader Zylo ecosystem and a clear list of scenarios where the token can be used.

But it is better to talk about that separately, because there is also a lot to explain there without marketing fog. I don’t want to turn this article into a collection of fashionable words about Web3, utility, token economy, and other terms that make a normal person’s eye start twitching.

I’ll only say the main thing: if we add a token to the trading platform, it should not be a decoration or a reason to put a logo on a landing page. It should have clear use cases. Otherwise, it is not utility, but a souvenir.

I could write about intrade.bar for a very long time. Ten years is a whole lifetime, and during that time there has not been a single calm month.

But this is the price we pay for wanting to be different from everyone else.

If you remove all the details, conflicts, arguments, technical crutches, sleepless nights, and my old articles that now hurt me a little to reread, one simple thought remains.

From the very beginning, we did not want to be “just another binary options platform.”

We wanted to build a digital options broker where the client does not fight the platform, does not fear withdrawals, can verify quotes, talk to human support, and does not feel like they are being pulled into a circus disguised as trading.

We definitely did not build a perfect company. Perfect companies do not exist at all, and if someone says otherwise, they are probably already preparing a presentation for you with a 300% bonus.

But we built a company that has been trying to keep its word for 10 years. Sometimes sharply. Sometimes clumsily. Sometimes through articles that later hurt to reread. But still trying to keep it.

The old platform helped us go through this journey.

The new platform should help us go through the next one.

New regions, new scenarios, a new technical base, more choice for the client, and integration with the broader Zylo ecosystem.

This is not the final point. This is a new chapter.

And if the last 10 years have taught us anything, it is only one thing: it still will not be calm, but we will do everything possible to remain the best.

But maybe that is exactly why intrade.bar is still alive.

Platform 2.0 is not a redesign. was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A couple of days ago, I asked our CCO, Max, what topic I could write an article about.

“You could do something like an announcement of the new trading platform for digital options — or, as people still call it out of old habit, the new binary options platform. And at the same time tell the whole story of intrade.bar, from its founding to Platform 2.0,” he wrote.

I thought the topic was interesting and, before starting to write, decided to look through my old articles from the first six years. To remember the past, so to speak.

A few minutes later, I realized one main thing — the old articles were either terrible or genius. You may not believe me, but I actually felt sick reading them. Not because they were written horribly, but because I remembered why I had written them.

Every article about intrade.bar is a free trip to a psychologist. Most often, they were written when I had some kind of internal worries, and now I found myself pulled back into those exact moments.

I’m not even sure I chose the right article, because originally I planned to write something as positive as possible, and instead I ended up in a concentrated archive of my own anxieties.

On the day intrade.bar was born, there were already more than 600 digital options trading platforms. But I knew we would not become “+1 more.” Before that moment, I had spent five years actively trading forex and other OTC derivatives, and I knew exactly what all traders disliked. Absolutely all of them. But not a single company was doing it differently.

We did it. It was difficult. It is still extremely difficult, but thanks to our actions, we moved away from the situation of “+1 more” to the situation of “intrade.bar and everyone else.” We separated ourselves from the general mass and competition, and in essence, started playing in our own league.

In order to become the best, we created a new level. But together with that new level, we also created a new level of problems for ourselves — problems no one else had to deal with before. I’ll try to explain a little of what happens on the inside and why nobody else does it this way.

Nobody before intrade.bar had built a “human” support service.

In reality, it’s not that difficult if you bring good people into the team — people who have trading experience and know how to write. From my side, all I had to say was:

“From the very beginning, every person is the best person in the world to us. Treat them exactly that way until they prove otherwise.”

And our support always replies within a minute. Not with template phrases. You won’t be kicked around between departments, and almost always, you’ll get help directly in the chat. All of this lasts until the moment you start acting like an asshole. Rudeness, blackmail, deception, and other violations of the client agreement erase all the good that existed before.

intrade.bar was never built only around the idea of “making money at any cost.” We wanted to build a company where you don’t have to be afraid that tomorrow your earned money won’t be withdrawn.

We do everything we can not to violate the agreement between us and our users. If you, the clients, demand that we follow all the rules, then we expect the same from you. In that case, neither you nor we will have problems, and we will be able to work for a long time in a mutually beneficial way.

If the last part of that previous sentence about mutual benefit made you uncomfortable, then you’ve probably already heard something about digital options.

In our industry, there are good companies and not-so-good companies. It’s the same in any industry. People judge everyone by the mistakes of individual companies.

In binary options, it was impossible to create a win-win situation. It was impossible until intrade.bar appeared.

From the very beginning, the question came up: “Will we actually make money under the conditions we give clients?”

Count it yourself. The potential payout on a trade is 83% on average + the cashier commission for deposits is 12% + 4% for withdrawals. That’s already 99% + servers + quotes + partner payouts + manager salaries + some amount to invest in development + and, well, I also wanted to eat something myself.

That comes out to quite a lot, it seems. Much more than 100%. Almost like presidential election results in countries without democracy.

It’s easier for other companies. They can set trade payouts anywhere from 95% to 5%. On average, it can be 50–60%.

For such a model to live at all, we came up with a risk-hedging system. Creating it was much harder than creating the trading platform itself.

The essence of hedging is risk distribution. For part of the client flow, we built a system of external trade coverage: individual trades or groups of trades could be duplicated with third-party providers, so that a profitable client would not become a problem for us.

This is an important point.

In the classic model, the broker and the profitable client often end up on opposite sides of the barricades. The client makes money — the broker feels bad. The client loses — the broker feels good. A very inspiring foundation for a trusting relationship, of course. This is where a “Sarcasm” sign should appear.

We wanted to get away from that logic. If a client knows how to trade, they should not become our enemy.

But how do you know in advance who trades well and who doesn’t? You don’t.

That’s why, during the first three months after implementing this system, we hedged absolutely everyone. Even demo accounts. Our monthly profit ranged from 70 cents to 27 dollars. Probably not the numbers you wanted to see.

“Are you bullshitting?”

After all, anyone can say anything. Never trust anyone’s word or online reviews!

One of the pains clients have had for probably 25 years is distrust of quotes. Every company, including ours, has always had clients who doubted the fairness of the opening and closing data of a trade. I’ll come back to this point a little later and explain what solution we came up with.

So, on one of the forums, a topic came up saying that “intrade.bar is just like everyone else. Look how they opened my trade, I’m sure this data didn’t exist.”

In reality, we had not planned to tell anyone about the hedging system. It just happened by itself.

On that same forum, I attached a screenshot to his message with exactly the same amount and expiration on the side of the external provider. There were no trust issues with that company. Their main downside was lower payouts, but from time to time, we opened trades with a slightly higher amount.

And I attached screenshots like that to every angry comment.

After several such posts, people understood the power of this functionality. They realized they no longer needed to fight the broker. We were no longer enemies. We were like-minded people.

I promised to return to the quotes.

In the first years of work, we constantly faced messages like: “Look, this resource has these quotes, and yours are completely different.”

This is actually a normal thing. There are hundreds of quote providers, and the data is different everywhere. They cannot be identical. There will always be slight differences.

But if a user’s trade closes in the red, they will no longer see what you are trying to explain. Anger creates “white noise” in front of their eyes. But when the trade closes in profit, of course, they will stay silent)))

We thought for a long time about what we could do to remove this distrust.

The idea came from my children. When they destroy something at home, you always hear the phrase: “It wasn’t my idea, it was his!”

What are they doing? They are shifting responsibility away from themselves. “I didn’t come up with this, I just did what someone else said.”

For several months, I spoke with quote providers about a future partnership. We needed several rules to be met:

• the quote provider already had a known name and was not created a month ago;
• there had to be open data that anyone could check at any moment;
• we had to be able to integrate them into our trading platform.

That’s how we connected FXCM — a well-known provider of market data and brokerage infrastructure that has been operating in the market for many years.

We receive their data, broadcast it as a chart for currency assets, and additionally record it in our database. So if a client doubts the fairness of a trade’s opening and closing, they can go to the FXCM trading platform and compare the data.

Additionally, we created a “Quote Verification” page to make this easier.

Nobody before us had done this. And nobody will. It’s difficult and expensive.

This method has one main downside — a trade does not always open instantly, because it takes a few tenths of a second to additionally verify the accuracy of the quote.

We tried reducing the number of additional checks, but in that case, once or twice a day, trades appeared where, with a difference of one-third of a second, there was a minimal discrepancy in the data. And we don’t need that.

And this is where an important bridge to the new trading platform appears.

The new platform is not an attempt to abandon what we did before. It is not replacing honesty with speed, and it is not a story in the style of “it used to be this way, and now we suddenly changed our minds.”

It is an expansion of choice.

The current logic with verifiable quotes remains an important part of intrade.bar. But over the years, we have seen that different traders evaluate the trading process differently. For some, the ability to verify every value is critically important. For others, the speed of opening a trade matters more, especially when they trade short expirations and react to market movement here and now.

That is exactly why the new trading platform will be an alternative for existing clients. It will have a different quote provider and faster trade opening. This does not remove our honesty in providing data. We are simply creating an additional scenario. The choice remains yours.

We also noticed that when a user doubts something, they start looking for information on the internet. And as we all know, the internet is a giant trash heap where it is very difficult to separate truth from fiction.

That’s why we created an open chat between intrade.bar clients. You can write good things or bad things there, ask questions, argue, or send pictures of cats.

We tried making this chat completely rule-free. It went badly, so rules did eventually appear.

In short: be polite, don’t advertise your own projects at our expense, don’t insult other participants, don’t drag politics into the chat, and if you want to accuse the broker, the cashier, partners, or clients of something, support it with evidence.

In reality, there is nothing extraordinary here. These are the rules of communication among well-mannered people, but often, people think that “if it’s not forbidden, then it’s allowed.”

We do the same on our side, so sometimes there is a situation where an outwardly white and fluffy user, who wants to manipulate the chat into getting some leniency for violating the rules, receives public evidence of their guilt in response.

Some people like these shows. I don’t.

By the way, other companies in our industry tried to repeat our experience with an open chat, but, as the saying goes, they “got their hat filled.” Their chats closed after a couple of weeks.

Let’s take one step back to the moment where I wrote that the internet is a giant trash heap.

You can, after all, avoid open chats and not build trust in the company through openness. You can simply throw money at everything. More precisely, the appearance of money.

You search for information, and immediately stories of successful success start appearing — bloggers withdrawing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars and living their luxurious lives, posing next to rented Lamborghinis in Dubai.

Let’s tell the truth.

There are no millions. At least not in the trading account.

Any blogger can ask a broker to draw a trading account for them. It’s not difficult at all. And then gullible people will think that if this donkey could do it, then I definitely can too.

No, he couldn’t, and neither can you. At least not until you understand that you need to learn. Not for a day or a week. Often, it takes months or even years.

There is no magic pill, robot, indicator, or signal. Bloggers will not teach you how to become millionaires. You will have to learn that yourself.

intrade.bar is the worst possible company for creating fake content. We do not create fake trading accounts for our partners, and we also monitor the truthfulness of the information they provide.

We know that partners are the engine of client acquisition. That is exactly why we don’t have tens of millions of clients. We still have around one million registered users. But we are honest with our clients, with you, and with ourselves.

Let’s put a pause here for now. Otherwise, an article about the new platform will completely turn into my autobiography with elements of workplace drama.

In the second part, I’ll get to the main point: why intrade.bar needs a new trading platform, what will change for clients, and why Platform 2.0 is not a rejection of our principles, but their continuation.

We Never Wanted to Be Just Another Trading Platform was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I always have dozens of questions for any crypto project.

Questions about its utility.
Its functions.
Its product quality.
And what actually stands behind all the beautiful words on the website.

The obvious reasons for poor quality are easy to understand: weak software, incompetent developers, inexperienced management, poor architecture, lack of proper testing.

But when you work inside the industry for a long time, you start noticing other reasons. Less obvious ones. And maybe even more powerful.

These are the reasons why a product may not necessarily be bad, but still end up very different from what users expected.

1. Standards

Every industry has its standards. Companies are constantly trying to meet them. Or at least look like they do.

There is always some phone manufacturer releasing a new model every year, while the most visible innovation is that the camera moved a few millimeters to the side. Formally, it is a new model. In reality, well… that is debatable.

The crypto industry works the same way.

For example, exchanges often require a project to have its own market maker before listing. Why? Because that is how the market standard works. The market maker is supposed to create the required trading volume, support liquidity, and help the exchange look competitive compared to other exchanges doing more or less the same thing.

Everyone creates volume.
Everyone looks at metrics.
Everyone compares numbers.

Another example is social media.

For a listing, a project usually needs a certain level of activity on X / Twitter, Telegram, and other channels. There is even a specific metric called Twitter Score.

We have active social media, around 7,000 followers on Twitter, and a Twitter Score of about 340. Is that a lot or a little? Honestly, I do not know. But I do know that our score is higher than that of many launchpad companies with audiences of over 100,000 people on paper.

Why? Because an audience can be big only on paper. Bots, fake engagement, dead accounts, artificial activity.

We do not use bots. But for some platforms, it seems that the size of the number matters more than the quality behind it.

Because there are standards.

You need many users.
You need a lot of activity.
You need everything to look “the way it should.”

Quality matters, of course. But sometimes it feels like it is not exactly in first place.

2. Roadmap

A long time ago, I watched an emotional interview with a major businessman. He said something along these lines:

“I will never publicly talk about the company’s plans again. Once I said that we would release a mobile phone under our own brand, and after that people kept bothering me every month asking when it would finally come out.”

I understand him very well.

Usually, I try not to name even approximate release dates for a product or a specific feature. Because real development almost never goes perfectly according to plan.

But in the crypto industry, a roadmap is considered mandatory.

And in my opinion, this is a terrible practice.

I hope that one day the industry will abandon it, at least in the form in which it exists today.

Because the logic often becomes absurd: you have a specific date, and by that date you must show a specific result. It does not matter how raw, buggy, or unfinished the product is when it comes out. The main thing is to fit the roadmap.

But why?

If you release the product too early, quality suffers.
If you delay it, some users say: “Well, of course, you are just like everyone else, postponing your promises.”

In the end, everyone feels bad.

Users feel deceived.
The team lives under constant pressure.
The product develops according to deadlines, not quality.

And that almost never helps.

Just remember product presentations from companies worth hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. Even the biggest technology companies do not always have everything working perfectly on the first try. There have been failed demos, devices that did not work properly, and moments when founders later admitted that the product could have simply failed to turn on during its first public presentation.

That is the normal reality of development.

But a roadmap turns this reality into a public promise that people will later use against you.

Final Thought

That is all from me for this article.

I hope something from the above helps you look at crypto projects more carefully and better understand what stands behind their timelines, metrics, and public activity.

And I would like to finish with what I consider the ideal roadmap for Zylo:

Everything will be fine.

2 Non-Obvious Reasons Why Crypto Products Often Lack Quality was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Eighteen years ago, when I was just starting to build my first business, I came across a phrase in some smart book:

“Smart people build networks…”

I remember thinking: what nonsense. If I can barely handle one company, and even that is already a constant headache, why would I need a whole network of problems like that?

Apparently, I was young and stupid. It took many years before I started to understand what that idea was actually about.

You can launch separate products and solve local problems.
Or you can build a system where each product doesn’t live in a vacuum.

We chose the second path. It’s harder, but stronger in the long run.

This understanding didn’t come from beautiful presentations, business books, or smart speeches by Tony Robbins. Unfortunately, I had to feel it myself.

In the fall of 2019, I had a binary options trading platform intrade.bar and a small roadside hotel with 7 rooms, which we had just bought with my wife and my father.

Around the same time, we were looking for a payment solution that could give good conditions for intrade.bar clients. One day we had a conversation with a large organization that worked with multi-million companies. They refused to give us the conditions we asked for, for a simple reason:

“We work with a betting company that has deposit volumes 60 times higher than yours. We can give those conditions to them.”

Three or four months later, the whole world went into a hard coronavirus lockdown, as you remember.

Yes, the hotel was standing unused, and of course it was неприятно. So much money and effort invested, and your asset just stands there and collects dust. But at the same time, sports also stopped: no football matches, no usual excitement for betting audiences. People who were looking for adrenaline and alternative ways to earn started to look into other directions. Including binary options.

Just one month passed, and that same company that had refused us before was now ready to work with us almost on the conditions we would say.

This is a very simple story from real life. But it clearly shows why it’s important to build wider, not think in just one vertical. No one knows how the market will change in a year. No one knows which trend will die, which one will suddenly grow, and what event will completely change user behavior. We can’t predict it, probably no one can. But we can prepare better than others.

That’s exactly what we are doing.

When we build each new product, we focus on a few basic things. First, it should be a product we personally like and would want to use ourselves. Second, we carefully study the main pain points of users in that niche and try not to repeat typical market mistakes. Third, we look at whether the product can scale and if it has strong growth potential.

But with the development of Zylo, we added one more important question:

Does this product fit into the ecosystem?
And if it doesn’t, what needs to be changed so it fits naturally?

For me, this is a very practical question. I can easily imagine a person who in their free time plays CosmoFox or Fox Survivor, during the day uses Granny VPN to access needed resources, and in the evening plays Zylo poker or trades on intrade.bar. Honestly, I myself am in some sense the ideal user of this model: when I travel for work, I sometimes end up in countries where access to poker or trading is restricted, and then only VPN helps. So I use products from our ecosystem almost every day.

But would wholesale red bean trading fit into this ecosystem?

Maybe in many years — who knows. But right now it’s hard to imagine.

And this is exactly the key difference between an ecosystem and a random set of assets.

An ecosystem is not when you just collect different things and put them under one brand. An ecosystem is when there is logic between products, shared user scenarios, and a clear transition from one context to another. When products strengthen each other, not just exist next to each other under the idea of “it’s also a business.”

But this is where the hardest part begins.

The more products there are, the higher the risk to overload the user with context. The more complex the system inside, the simpler it should look from the outside. That’s why we pay a lot of attention to making interaction with the ecosystem simple and clear for the user, despite all the internal complexity.

At the same time, there is another important direction: long-term development, not chasing any hype that is loud today.

In the last couple of years, tens of thousands of AI projects appeared. How many of them actually survived? Dozens. And even many of them look frighteningly unprofitable. Of course, technically you can jump into any trend right now and succeed. But at what cost? Sometimes it’s much more reasonable not to run with the crowd, but to calmly watch from the side, like a hawk from a tree.

Because later you can enter that market differently: fresh, in a suit, with free capital, when around there are already many immobilized projects — those who rushed too fast.

We are not building an ecosystem to sound loud in headlines. We are building it for the long distance. We have a pretty clear understanding of what it should become in the next 12–18 months. But for an ecosystem, logical transitions between products are not enough. It also needs an economic layer.

That’s why the next milestone is so important for us — launching our own token.

The token is not “just another nice news” and not an attempt to make quick money on a trendy topic. For us, it is the connecting element between products, the layer that turns several directions into one system. Right after TGE, we move to the final stage of combining products inside a single account on zylo.io.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to do all of this fully in advance. But we have done the maximum possible at this stage.

At the same time, it was important for us to approach the token launch not like most of the market does — in a rush, hoping that “we’ll figure it out later.” We took tokenomics, legal opinion, smart contract, and utility mechanics very seriously.

For us, the token is not a tool for short-term profit. It’s an opportunity to build a stable economic environment for the long term, minimizing the impact of external crises as much as possible.

No company in the world can be 100% ready for a collapse. That’s not the point. The point is how prepared a company is in general.

While building products, we had dozens of consultations with market makers to build a balanced long-term strategy. And in my opinion, we approached the creation of our token better than 99.9% of crypto companies.

At the same time, we don’t have illusions that we are special and everything will go perfectly. It won’t. Somewhere it will be hard, somewhere it will take longer than we want, somewhere it will be more expensive than expected, somewhere we will have to make unpleasant decisions.

But we have the main thing: a strong foundation.

We already have four products that we constantly develop and improve.
We have a loyal audience that has been with us for many years and went through COVID, the bear market, sanctions and many other things.
We have a strong team.
We have reliable partners.
We have free capital that is not from investors.
No one forces us to show miracles for the next round. We are not under pressure of financial obligations.

Which means we have something rare for this market: the ability to build an ecosystem honestly, calmly, and for the long term.

I have now fully understood the meaning of that phrase about building networks and I’m looking forward to the next stage of Zylo Ecosystem.

Are you?

Products Fade. Systems Endure was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And that word was “F*ck.” Such a short word, yet it carries so much meaning and depth. Most often it sounded in my head when the economics of an idea stopped making sense after several hours of calculations and inventing formulas. When you create something from scratch, words like this accompany you throughout the whole journey. That’s exactly the journey I want to talk about today. But since we all still need some time for sleep, I’ll tell only a part of the story — just the last 12 months, and only about the creation of the game.

It was February 2025. I had delegated part of my responsibilities to other employees so I could have more time to spend with my daughter, who was about to be born. There was about a week left before that moment, and without work I quickly started getting bored. That’s when an old idea resurfaced in my head again — creating a token. And in order to have more users for the token, besides intrade.bar we planned to create a very simple game — something that both my youngest daughter and my mom, who isn’t exactly on friendly terms with smartphones, could play. And what could be simpler than flipping a coin? Just guess heads or tails. The idea was simple, the implementation was simple, my business partner approved it. So we started recalling our university lessons in probability theory and calculating the game economy for about 30 levels, adding progression elements. We calculated everything — everything worked out. We found an outsourcing company to build it, paid the first part of the contract, and they started working.

Almost immediately a CMO joined our team, and in his team there was also a game designer. A week later, during a discussion about the future development of the game, with a loud “F*ck” we realized that a coin-flip game had very limited room for growth and, honestly, the era of tap games was already fading. So we decided to create a cosmic universe where a fox named Onyx would travel between planets, mining cosmic dust and crystals. Mini-games would occasionally appear during gameplay. This would help the game stand out among other Telegram projects. Everything would be illustrated by a professional artist rather than AI, which would also add exclusivity. The idea was great. Let’s go!
How long will it take to build? Two months. So by July we would have the first version. Perfect.

July arrived. The wind gently lifting sand, pushing a tumbleweed across a desert somewhere in the Wild West. If our product could be described by a single image, that would probably be it. There was almost nothing — except for a pre-registration form in our Telegram bot. And we had bought ads in Telegram channels so that an audience could start appearing. Probably it was the perfect moment for our first project manager Kostya to say: “F*ck. We’re doing some shit.” We’re all experienced people. This wasn’t our first project. But for everyone it was the first play-to-earn project. Then we started seeing examples showing that in Telegram P2E projects, the good airdrops were mostly funded by the TON Foundation itself. Those were basically helicopter drops — money distributed for a big WOW effect. Tap games can’t keep paying money forever. That’s simply impossible.

After feeling a bit disappointed that the lifespan of our game might be short, we developed a plan: the current game would only be the first version, and its finale would be an airdrop. We called it the Genesis Airdrop Game. In other words, this part of the game, ending with an airdrop, would be the birth of a more advanced and fully developed mobile game with a completely different economy.

A little later we realized that many of our ideas were simply impossible to implement inside Telegram, so we had to abandon many of them. Instead of the outstanding project we had imagined, we ended up with a game that was just slightly better than most other Telegram projects.

Despite the fact that our motivation to keep developing the first game almost immediately faded, we decided we wouldn’t abandon what we had started. We would bring it to the stage we originally planned, even though it became more like a test of whether we had the endurance to see it through. And I’m very glad that everything that could be implemented, we did implement. We held on. We’re not ashamed of the result at all. For us it was a huge experience — the very beginning of our journey in the crypto industry. It can be compared to the launch of a rocket. We burned tons of fuel for what, from the outside, may look like a small result. Cosmofox will continue to operate until the moment it transforms into Fox Survivor, where the experience we gained will also partly carry over. You will still be able to earn monetary rewards in our challenges and contests. After the TGE, you will be able to stake your tokens for a chosen period, sell tokens, buy tokens, or use them in the game to purchase special lootboxes where you can find unique in-game inventory and Zylo tokens. You will also be able to use the tokens in our other projects.

As for the airdrop, back in July we decided that the largest share would go to the most active players, and then decrease accordingly. In other words, it won’t be a situation where someone plays for a week and receives tens or hundreds of dollars. Of course, there will be both positive and negative comments. That’s completely normal and understandable. We all like the idea of earning money without doing anything. But I know one thing for sure — the airdrop will be distributed fairly.

To sum it all up, I would like to say that despite the fact that throughout the year the word “F*ck” was repeated quite often, we kept moving forward thanks to your support. Thank you for sharing the journey of developing our first project with us. You are the best!

In the beginning, there was the Word… was originally published in ZyloEcosystem on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.