The age of grants is over. The age of builder codes is now

Grants don't work. Chains have spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, in awarding grants to get builders on their on their chain. The result: smaller treasuries of hundreds of millions, if not billions, with little activity and revenue capture after the grants were awarded. There's a massive graveyard of dead web3 projects that received upfront funding from chains.

The grant model is broken. A chain hands a team money before the team has proven anything, hopes they build something people use, and hopes they stick around after the check clears. We've seen so many teams take the grant, ship something terrible, and move on. The chain is renting builders the same way chains rented liquidity with emissions (I've spoken many times about this previously), & it fails for the same reason: paying upfront for activity you're hoping shows up with no incentive to stick around.

Enter builder codes. Instead of paying builders to show up, a composable platforms let them plug straight into their liquidity and earn by capturing fees on the volume they actually bring. The platform pays nothing upfront. The builder earns when they deliver real users & real activity, and earns nothing when they don't. Both sides win only when something real and revenue generating happens. Both sides risk nothing.

Builder codes, composable application, and pooled liquidity also solves the cold start problem. Most new well-intentioned projects would fail because they had to source liquidity, which most often meant pulling liquidity from more trusted platforms and convicning experienced crypto users to trust them with funds on an unproven, untested application. Nobody did this (reason: see the Block's latest report on $1B stolen in H1 2026).

Lending platforms builders failed because people will low-risk tolerances weren't about their funds off Aave and Morpho. Dex devs failed to attract liquidity providers because people trusted Uniswap. Vault curators failed because depositors trust Yearn and Gauntlet. Perp builders failed because.... oh wait, we have a solution.

Trading sucks when there's no liquidity. You get killed with slippage. A new perps app or trading frontend normally has to bootstrap its own liquidity before anyone will touch it, & nobody wants to be the first dollar in an empty pool. But with builder you launch on day one into liquidity that's already deep, your users get real fills from the start, & you spend all your time on product & distribution instead of begging market makers.

Most notably, we saw this with Hyperliquid and Tradexyz. They called it the AWS of liquidity: any frontend plugs into their books & earns. By ecosystem counts, roughly 40% of Hyperliquid's daily active traders come through third-party frontends, & builders have pulled in over $40M in fees. Tradexyz alone has done $7.74M in fees & $2.84M in protocol revenue in the last 30 days (DeFiLlama). There's also PVPtrade, which has earned around $7.2M in builder-code revenue without ever launching a token.

For new builders and projects looking to expand, I can't recommend Hyperliquid as the place to build as we see there are some incumbents and capturing fees will be a massive challenge, even if the product is superior.

However, one of the most exciting places to build is on Katana and Katana Perps. Katana Perps have the same builder codes program and Katana perps are one of the very few perp dexes that's actually growing in transaction volume, liquidity, and revenue over the last few months. In just 5 months, it's gone from ~$1k, ~$2500, ~$63k, ~$80k, to over $100k in monthly revenue.

Pro-tip: build in an ecosystem that's on a growth trajectory, not one that's slowly bleeding.

There are a few early stage projects like Planemo Trading (algo trading) Clash of Perps (Clash of Clans meets DeFi) and a couple other projects like a market intelligence & SocialFi app building, but the landscape is wide open for strong builders.

One thing that's great about Katana is that it's a full DeFi ecosystem, not just a perp venue, & it has no real incumbents yet. A genuinely good product launching on Katana builder codes right now can capture a big share of the market simply because nobody has locked it up. That window on Hyperliquid closed a year ago.

So the pitch to builders is simple. Stop chasing grants. The money is in owning distribution & capturing fees on real usage, and the platforms that let you do that without bootstrapping your own liquidity are where the next wave of products gets built.

If you've got a product and you've been waiting on a grant to fund it, you're playing the old game. The age of grants is over. Builder codes are how you build now. Find ecosystems like Katana and ship great products and provide value to users and you'll win.