Moonit started as Moonshot, a tab on DexScreener for trading Solana tokens on the bonding curve. When DexScreener decided to cut it and focus on their core product, we could see what they were walking away from. Pump.fun was blowing up, the market was moving fast, and the product still had life in it. We took it: spun it off, ran it ourselves, routed bonded tokens back to DexScreener. A partnership rather than a shutdown.
The positioning problem was immediate. Pump.fun was on the bleeding edge of social culture: aggressive, chaotic, very much of its moment. DexScreener were the opposite: reserved, institutional, fintech. We were in acquisition talks with MoonPay, so everything I designed had to hold up across three sets of stakeholders with three different appetites for risk. We couldn't be as reckless as Pump, but DexScreener had cut it because they didn't have the traffic. We couldn't be that passive either. The sweet spot was excitement without the landmines.
Another app called Moonshot had gained traction, so we renamed and rebuilt the identity while the product was live and traders were on it.
Time to transaction was the whole problem. These traders were competing against bots and riding social momentum. A position can double or disappear inside a minute.
It was a flash in the pan and we knew it going in. The meme coin frenzy was never going to last. Building a branded trading platform, turning it profitable and sunsetting it when the market moved on, all inside 18 months: you can only do that moving at the speed the culture does. We gave traders a fast, secure platform in a space full of rough tooling, an edge without the usual tradeoffs. When the moment passed, we let it go.
