Trading terminals in crypto have always mirrored the maturity of the market Back then trading felt like two separate worlds: cryptography and spreadsheets. If you wanted to trade, you boxed yourself into UIs or tacked spreadsheets and gut-feels onto charts. That fragmentation defined the first era Exchanges then brought retail into a new reality with sophisticated tools like leverage, complex orders, on-chart indicators. These platforms set the standard for usability and access, and they’re the reason trading scaled the way it did One of their biggest contributions was the ecosystems they built around trading. Custodial and non-custodial wallets, integrated DEXs, bridges, and multi-asset infrastructures that gave traders a sense of continuity. They proved that a terminal could become the center of an entire trading life A new era followed with crypto-native terminals. Aggregators, multisig wallets, on-chain analytics, DeFi dashboards that stitched AMMs, oracles and block explorers into single views These platforms showed us what was possible when you combine on-chain truth with real-time tooling. Yet even here there was a gap: composability was being celebrated as a developer concept, not a trader’s asset The power to own your trading stack, monetize your edge, and build a persistent value layer around execution, that was missing That’s why we built @LABtrade_ because the terminal itself should be more than an interface. It should be the value layer $LAB is the connective tissue that converts activity into real, shared economic value. Think about what actually matters to traders and builders From my pov, the obvious lesson is this: the infrastructure you trust should reward you for using it We turned the terminal into a persistent economic layer: every trade, every strategy, every analytics contribution becomes a thread in a fabric that accrues value back to contributors and users If you’ve been in this space long enough, you know the majority of improvements come from aligning incentives LAB is our answer: a clean value layer between execution and economics that finally makes the terminal itself a flywheel I started this because I was tired of watching value walk out the door. I wanted a terminal that respected traders’ time, honored builders’ sweat, and distributed upside fairly. That’s LAB’s promise If you care about ownership over your trading life, not just the illusion of it, come see what we’re building The tools have always existed. Now the tools finally belong to the people who use them

the interesting part starts when your product works and you begin to see what else it could become

one thing i’ve realized about building something is how easy it is to get distracted by what everyone else is doing there’s nothing wrong with learning from others, but i think the best ideas come from understanding what’s missing, and having the conviction to see things through not everything needs to be a race, build something you believe in

been wanting to say this for a while LAB is becoming much bigger than just a trading terminal we’re bringing trading, discovery, opportunities, and the social side of crypto into one place there’s a lot more coming down the pipeline that I’m really excited about

it’s been a while since I genuinely enjoyed reading an investment piece this one stood out because it goes beyond the usual AI narrative and asks a much more interesting question: what happens when demand for intelligence runs into the physical limits of infrastructure? power, compute, data centers - not exactly the sexiest parts of AI, but probably some of the most important a thoughtful read on where value could accrue as AI moves from training models to running them at scale

we’re at an exciting place with LAB the core product is working, and we’re now focused on expanding what LAB can actually offer that means bringing new ecosystems into the platform, continuing to improve the product, and creating more ways for users to participate and benefit from being active on LAB we’re going to keep pushing on that

the faster you can improve an existing product, the more ambitious you can be with where it goes

small improvements make a big difference Google Pay on android makes getting into a trade faster, simpler, and one step closer to instant more of this to come

when the market gives you speed, you have to match it with execution

this is basically how we should look at building you rarely know exactly what people will want on day one ship. watch what gets used. listen to the feedback. kill doesn’t work and double down on what does date the idea before you marry it

Quick update on where LAB investors actually stand, since there’s been a lot of discussion around whether early investors really got a good deal. Early investors came in at 16.6M FDV. The public round was 25M FDV. So far, we’ve done 1 unlock out of 6. From that first unlock alone, early investors got back 100% of what they invested. Public investors got back a majority of their full investment, and there are still 5 unlocks ahead. At current prices, the average investor is up around 4x. Were paper gains higher at the peak? Sure. That’s every token in this market. But being around 4x up, with most of your principal already back after just one unlock, is a result I’m proud of. $LAB is currently #2 on Echo’s leaderboard. If our Nozomi allocation had been listed on the Legion leaderboard, LAB would be right up at the very top of that leaderboard as well. A lot of early believers also received $1,000-$2,000+ simply for showing up early and believing in LAB. Are we perfect? Of course not. Can you make everyone in this market happy? Also no. But from day one, we made a very conscious decision to take care of the people who believed in us early. I’m not here to debate anyone or convince people to take my side. I just wanted to put a few thoughts out there and make sure the full picture is being considered. We’ll keep building and let the results speak for themselves.

$LAB claims are live besides giving tokens to users at TGE, something only a small number of projects have done, we wanted to share value with the people who have helped create it more rewards and more ways to benefit from being an active LAB user are coming we’ll continue rewarding the people who keep showing up and helping LAB grow the claim is just a small step; there’s more ahead

we believe value should move in both directions users create value for the platform by trading, referring friends, providing feedback, and participating in the ecosystem as LAB grows, we want that value to flow back to the people who helped create it this week's claim is an expression of that idea it won't be the last

people often mistake more tools for better software usually, the opposite happens the winning products absorb workflows instead of creating new ones that's the direction we're taking with LAB instead of asking users to stitch together five different apps to manage their portfolio, we'd rather build one product that quietly handles the entire experience there's still a long way to go, but I think that's where crypto is headed

Another week, another few steps forward > LAB AI Summary is live > Debit card deposits are live too Two small additions, but both solve problems we kept running into ourselves More soon

seeing this play out only reinforces why we introduced tokenized stocks to LAB the opportunity was about giving users access to global markets from a single trading experience as more capital moves into tokenized equities, the products that already support them will be in the best position to capture the next wave of adoption

one thing I've noticed about crypto is that it slowly convinces you to be online all the time checking charts at dinner. looking at your phone during conversations. feeling like you can't step away i don't think that's a great experience a big part of what we're building at LAB is to make sure you don't have to choose between living your life and staying on top of the market we've got plenty more coming, stay tuned

over the past few weeks, we’ve: • integrated @RobinhoodCrypto on LAB • introduced ecosystem buybacks • launched our burn initiative • increased our staking rewards • continued shipping product updates more people know about LAB today than they did a month ago we’ll let the product do the talking from here