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
revolution will be
open source.
Every leap in memecoin infrastructure has widened access and bolted a new extraction layer on top. 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 or conviction. They were competing on bytecode scanners, honeypot filters, relay routing, server placement, and five to ten thousand a month in infra. The edge lived behind expensive paywalls or serious dev work.
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02 Banana Gun onward
Fee-gated execution
Banana Gun and the bots that followed sold 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: Pump.fun, Photon, BullX, Axiom, an army of Telegram bots. Each one stacked a new 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. At memecoin scale, that extracts billions of dollars from users every year.
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. Some users don't have the time, setup, or technical appetite for it. For them, hosted instances are coming. 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.
0.1%–0.2% per trade.
Coming soon. Account-based access, running on our infrastructure. 5–10× less than the current average platform fee. Enough to fund hosting and keep building, nothing more.
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. The floor stays open for anyone building above.
What's next
The next break belongs to everyone.
Clone the repo. Run it locally. Or plug in when hosted lands.