Fees have to match value.
Platforms can't keep pricing a flat cut of your volume as if it were a product fee. With an open alternative on the table, what stays ends up matching what's actually delivered.
Vision · A short manifesto
The next memecoin
The next memecoin
leap will be
open source.
Every leap in memecoin infrastructure has widened access and bolted on a new extraction layer. Trench.Tools exists to break that pattern — open the tools, compress the fees, and hand the rest of the ecosystem a base to build on.
The pattern
Three eras. The same pattern.
Every leap in memecoin infra has lowered the barrier to entry and stacked a new rent layer on top. Today that rent sits directly on your trades.
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01 ETH · 2020+
Private infrastructure
Gas alone filtered most people out. Serious participants weren't competing on ideas. They were competing on bytecode scanners, honeypot filters, relay routing, server placement and serious monthly infra spend. The edge lived behind expensive paywalls or serious development work.
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02 Banana Gun onward
Fee-gated execution
Banana Gun and the bots that followed productized serious execution through a percentage-fee model. You no longer needed your own multi-region setup to compete at 0-block launches. The old private-infra moat was replaced with a productized fee moat.
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03 Solana · today
Fee-gated terminals
Solana made everything faster and wider — launchpads, terminals, sniping tools, Telegram bots. Each new wave stacked another rent layer: a percentage of every trade flowing through the UI. The rate has little to do with what the UI costs to run. A light user and a heavy user get the same product and pay wildly different amounts, and the drag compounds into a meaningful tax over time.
The old moat was private infrastructure. The new moat is fee-gated execution, fee-gated convenience, and fee-gated tooling.
The break
Open source makes the fee cabal optional.
Once a credible open alternative exists, the rest of the market has to respond. Fees compress. Tools keep improving. Users own more of the stack. Builders stop rebuilding the same private infra every cycle.
Users own the stack.
Providers, routing, fees, execution: yours to tune. The Trench.Tools Extension already does this. Keep the terminal you like, route the trade through your own engine.
The ecosystem compounds.
Open base layers mean new products ship on top of existing work instead of rebuilding the same private stack. The floor rises for everyone.
Platforms should earn money. The target isn't fees. It's extraction.
The plan
Self-host. Or plug in.
Not everyone wants to run their own engine. For lower-volume traders without the time or appetite for self-hosting, hosted instances are on the roadmap — priced to fund the product, not extract the flow.
Free to run.
Clone the repo, run it locally, own every variable end to end. That's how the execution engine, extension and LaunchDeck ship today, and that's how the core will always ship.
A fraction of the going rate.
On the roadmap. Account-based access running on our infrastructure for users who'd rather log in than self-host. Priced to fund hosting and keep building — well below the current average platform fee.
Plus new trading tools that currently aren't accessible at any price. Some will land open source under Trench.Tools, some will run only on the hosted side. Either way, fair prices for real products — with the floor staying open for anyone building above.
What's next
The next break belongs to everyone.
Clone the repo, run it locally, and own your execution. Or plug in when hosted lands.