Arbitrage is not a shared market. One coin, every chain, one price. It's one of the most exciting ideas in crypto right now, and plenty of teams have tried to build it. So far, none of those attempts has lasted. Here's who tried: • OmniCat: the first omnichain memecoin. Down ~99%. • Printr: "deploy on any chain." Shut down, airdrop cancelled. • Crossr: one token, several chains. Went dark within a week. • Twine: a shared price kept by arbitrage. Gone soon after launch. • MultiPools: one launch, three chains. Silent within a month. • Multichain: the bridge behind much of this. $126M gone. • Pangea: the most recent attempt at this exact model. Some went out loudly. Some just went quiet. They all share the same design, and that design has the same weaknesses every time. If you're excited about shared markets, you should know what's under the hood before you choose where to trade. Look under the hood and you find: > A separate pool on each chain > A bridge to move the token between them > Arbitrage bots expected to keep the prices in line That's not a shared market. It's five separate markets and a hope. Why it keeps failing: → Prices drift. A buy on one chain only moves that chain's pool. Prices line up again only when a bot decides the gap beats the bridge fee, trading fees and gas. Until then, "one price" is five prices. → Holders pay the bots. Every gap an arbitrage bot closes is profit taken from someone who bought too high or sold too low. Holders fund the mechanism that's supposed to protect them. → Every chain is thin. Buyers spread out, so every pool is shallow. Hold on the quiet chain and your exit is the quiet chain's pool. Nobody brings you the liquidity from the busy one. → The bridge is a single point of failure. If the whole design depends on minting tokens from cross-chain messages, one bad bridge day breaks everything. Bridges have lost billions, $292M from a single bridge this year alone. → There's nothing to run. Pools, a bridge and bots can be stood up in weeks. That's why so many launch, and with nothing to maintain, why so many go quiet. → The small coins break first. Bots only show up when a gap pays more than their costs. A $20 gap on a small coin isn't worth two chains of gas and a bridge fee, so nobody closes it. That's most memecoins after the hype: small pools on every chain, prices drifting apart, and sellers on the quiet chains with no fair exit. The coins most people launch are exactly the coins this model stops working for. → Gas spikes freeze the bots. When gas jumps on a busy day, arbitrage stops paying for everything but huge gaps. The bots go quiet right when the market moves fastest, and the chains drift further and further apart. Arbitrage is a patch over separate markets. You can't build a real shared market on it. A real shared market across chains isn't a smart-contract trick. It takes engineering and infrastructure most teams won't build. That's what we're building at Braid. → A market engine. Every Braid coin has one market. Every trade from every chain goes into the same sequence, ordered by when it lands. Every chain sees the price of that one market. The chains can't drift apart because there is only one price, not five markets being pushed back together. → Zero arbitrage. No gaps to close, so no bot sitting between holders. That's a founding rule, not a side effect. → Sells paid from the whole coin. Sell on any chain and you're paid from that coin's buyers on every chain, in your own chain's coin. The quietest chain gets the same price and the same exit as the busiest. → Your money stays with your coin. Sells are paid only from that coin's own buyers. No house money, no other coins' money, no lenders. → Independent signers. Settlement on each chain needs large majority of signer keys to agree. No single key, including ours, can move a coin's money. → The engine runs on dedicated hosted infrastructure. If Braid ever went silent, every coin winds down into ordinary DEX pools after 14 days. Holders never wait on us. → Engine, venues and payouts have run on testnet across every chain under many-user load: burst buys, sells on quiet chains, restarts and recovery. The trade-off: The arbitrage model has fewer dependencies. It leans on existing pools and bridges instead of a team's own engine, signers and infrastructure, so there's less you have to trust any one company to keep running. That's a real advantage, and it's appealing. It's also exactly why the model is so easy to launch and so hard to keep alive. Building a shared market that actually holds one price, pays every seller fairly and lasts through bad days takes real engineering, and someone has to own it. Most teams take the shortcut. We chose to do the hard part, and to put guardrails on it: independent signers so no single key moves funds, and a wind-down so even our infrastructure can never trap a holder. A note on where we are: Braid isn't on mainnet yet. We're in testing, and we're not asking anyone to take our word for anything. We're not telling you what to buy or where to trade. That's your call. We just want you to have the full picture. When Braid launches, hold us to the same question we'd ask anyone: If I sell on the quietest chain, who pays me, and at what price? With arbitrage: that chain's pool, at whatever price is left there. On Braid: every buyer of that coin, on every chain, at one price. Plenty of teams have tried to build this product. We're building the infrastructure it actually needs. One coin. One market. Every chain.

Testnet update: we’re working on trading speed. Each braided trade is cross-checked by independent data sources and confirmed by multiple signers before it settles. Now we’re speeding those steps up: faster data feeds and fewer on-chain steps per trade. More soon.