AIP-5: Building Alien Base 2.0

We are now approaching the next scheduled halving of the ALB emission schedule. In the last halving, we highlighted that we could and should cut emissions relatively soon, as farming rewards began outliving their usefulness, especially in the presence of real value-add by Mothership and Epsilon Router.

The idea was optimistic, and the market didn’t cooperate, but the fundamental idea remains: farming emissions are at this point negative for the protocol. They take the majority of the emissions budget and do not return value to the protocol, giving instead subsidies to farmers.

Rewarding farmers was the standard play for most DEXs. In previous years it made sense as the market favored flashy APRs and emissions. Right now, the broader sector is moving towards generating real emission-adjusted fees.

Halvings are great at maintaining a grip on emissions, but they’re a one-way street: if the protocol needs more resources to grow, it can’t tap into them. If the main priority is product development, halvings become an inflexible race against time that requires everything to go perfectly, which is rarely the case.

Since the past few months we’ve worked hard for a plan to transition ALB tokenomics to a new reality: supporting product development and growth first, stopping the leakage of value to the outside and creating the basis for stable future growth. The result is AIP-5.

Restarting Alien Base

AIP-5 is a completely new approach to Alien Base tokenomics. It ditches farming in favor of Protocol Owned Liquidity. It formalizes governance and the roles of Labs, team and DAO. And instead of the Bitcoin-inspired halving model, AIP-5 introduces flexible emissions coupled with persistent buybacks to be able to scale supply up and down as needed.

The proposal is comprehensive and comes from years of experience running Alien Base. In essence, it’s the answer to the question “how would we launch Alien Base today?”

This is especially important in light of the upcoming launches of Mothership and the Epsilon Router. The new systems are able to provide real value to the market, making farming only a secondary tool to advertise the product.

Introducing the POL Fund

To replace farming, we are proposing building up a Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL) fund, a basket of assets and LPs owned by the DAO. It’s a new approach for growing Alien Base that is sustainable from day one.

The POL offers a new narrative to ALB that leverages its position on Base. Now, instead of giving away emissions to mercenary farmers of all types, emissions will stay in the protocol as an allocation in major treasury assets. This includes stablecoins, blue chips, Base-native assets and Alien Base LP pools. This ties ALB intrinsically to the success of Base as a whole.

The POL is designed to generate yield, funneling it into ALB as a buyback and burn. It’s established programmatically by directing ALB emissions through its own special Line of Credit, in particular when ALB is strong. And it can be used for buybacks when ALB is weak, which has a stabilizing effect on the price.

The initially proposed POL allocation is split in 3 major tranches: ALB liquidity, Index treasury and active LP positions. After a year, this allocation can be modified based on market needs.

Lines of Credit & Dev Funding

Similarly to the POL emission system, we’re launching a new funding concept based on the Dev Line of Credit (LoC). Instead of asking for an allowance, funding to the Labs team will come as fully tracked debt that requires paying interest to esALB holders.

The debt is backstopped by grants split into price-based tranches: should the price go above certain thresholds for a consistent amount of time, each portion will unlock and cover any outstanding debt. The tranches are set at $0.4, $1 and $2, with a requirement for the price to hit the target consistently via a moving average.

The goal of this funding system is for the team to plan for the long-term, instead of living from month to month, while keeping the spend limited and tied to the success of ALB. The tranches also allow incentivizing existing and future team members to benefit from the success of the project.

These new Lines of Credit will be covered by an initial esALB inflation coverage, which ensures that any mint from the LoC is matched as a continuous APR to esALB holders (aimed at maintaining their existing share of the token supply). This is done to ensure dedicated holders don’t get penalized during the initial expansion phase, where the total yield generated is not yet large enough to begin clawing back supply. With the current parameters, the esALB yield is projected to rise to 30–35%.

Reforming Governance

To accompany the economic changes, we’re formalizing the governance processes and revenue flows to better align with the long-term future. Between the more complex nature of our future products and the obvious outside signals that unstable governance is a liability, we should grab the opportunity to set things right.

The general principle is simple: the Alien Base DAO governs the onchain part of Alien Base, including all its smart contracts, and it is responsible for their ongoing security and usage. Alien Labs, on the other hand, handles offchain products and their revenue (including the frontend). Items like the Line of Credit and POL mediate the financial relationship between the two entities, leading to a symbiotic partnership.

Alien Base DAO governance is to be procedurally formalized into proper onchain voting, instead of temporary multisig powers. As part of this formalization, we also need to make sure that voters are fully aligned with the long-term future of the protocol. To do this, we are introducing govALB, an additional form of a staked escrow token that has 10x the voting power and 1x the earning power of regular esALB, in exchange for an effective 2 year lock.

Making an Informed Decision

This proposal will require taking some hard, but necessary steps. One of these is migrating the ALB contract and increasing the supply cap. This is useful for the short term, but it also unlocks something that was never possible before: having enough supply to allocate for strategic investments, market makers and listings.

While the total cap increase is 1051M, we are only directly allocating an extra 200M max supply, with the rest going into the esALB protection program and potential strategic allocations to future partners. We expect that the total supply of ALB won’t increase to more than 800M at any point in time.

If and after AIP-5 passes, Alien Base will have all the pre-requisite items of a proper DeFi powerhouse. It’s a large proposal, and we recommend reading it in its entirety to understand the exact logic. We see it as the initial step towards building an Alien Base that prospers and becomes a household name. The work to get there is vast, but AIP-5 is probably the most significant change to the project that we’ll ever need to do.

The full document is available on Notion. We also built an extensive FAQ for simple and deeper questions about the proposal, which can be viewed here.

Voting timelines

The proposal has received extensive feedback from the DAO Council and active DAO members. We will be giving several days to gather thoughts and further feedback, with a public AMA scheduled for Tuesday, March 31st.

Shortly after that, the Snapshot vote will be launched, targeting to finish by the end of the week (April 3).

Today we’re unveiling Vaults, our new abstraction for providing liquidity on Alien Base built to be ready for Mothership. The new architecture dramatically simplifies user experience for regular users today, and sets the stage for introducing Mothership strategies seamlessly to our protocol.

Vaults are a generalization of the previous Farms. A Vault can be powered by a single static position, like now, or it can be managed dynamically via Mothership. Unlike regular V3 positions or wrappers, a Mothership vault could spread its liquidity over multiple ranges and multiple fee tiers.

The quality of the user experience for providing liquidity on Alien Base remained largely unchanged since our early days, as we focused on the swapping experience first and foremost. By using the Bunni V1 position wrapper, we were able to integrate the V3 positions into the usual flow of adding liquidity and staking the LP token.

This approach was familiar to seasoned DeFi veterans, but it was quite complicated for regular users. There were too many steps involved, and even worse, the users needed to manually calculate the proportions required to add liquidity (as they weren’t always 50:50 like before). Now, the Vaults flow does everything for you, and for certain smart wallets, it supports a fully one-click experience!

What’s New?

The Vaults page replaces the old Farms tab, now showing all positions earning fees on Alien Base V3. This includes both Classic V3 and Bunni positions. The new interface prioritizes showing direct swap fees APRs, as well as showing your accrued rewards immediately.

A new Claim All features you to collect all the applicable fees and rewards of your positions in one click (if supported). Remember that Bunni positions are currently auto-compounding, so they only support claiming ALB rewards and normal (Uniswap v3) LP positions.

The Vault detail page shows more relevant information about the position, including its TVL, other vaults in this pool, its price ranges and more.

Adding and Removing liquidity is now a fully guided process through the Zap feature. Wallets supporting Batch Transactions (Base App, Metamask) are able to provide liquidity in One Click. For other wallets, the flow computes and executes all the necessary swaps and transactions required to complete it.

What’s Next?

The Vaults release was a prerequisite for launching Mothership. That is now our biggest priority.

We recently open-sourced the contracts we built for our Next Generation ALM. Unlike previous solutions, we designed our system to have the same freedom of action as a regular wallet providing liquidity. This gives full flexibility for designing advanced strategies.

Now, the security work can begin. Our next item is a limited Alpha release with stringent supply caps to begin collecting more real-world information. In the meantime, we are securing audits and more security reviews to ensure a smooth launch.

In parallel, we will be deploying our customized Epsilon Router, which will support novel order types including Stop Loss, Trailing Stop, Stop Loss DCA and many more. In addition to all the new features, we also expect that the new system will be more stable and offer better rates than earlier.

The full release of Epsilon and Mothership will signal a new era of Alien Base as a novel DEX solution, focusing on those who matter: users.

Stay tuned for other updates as we continue our journey on Earth 👽

From the very beginning, Alien Base has been guided by a simple, bold vision: build the most advanced, trader-first hub on Base. Our public roadmap ( Mothership, Quasar, Nebula ) reflects that ambition. These were never just buzzwords or pie in the sky concepts. They were milestones we saw as crucial towards building the perfect DEX.

That said, roadmaps evolve in DeFi. Along the way, we’ve rolled out major additions like Epsilon and Epsilon Analytics, Limit Orders, and the Token Generator — plus countless smaller enhancements to the app that weren’t originally scripted. We’re constantly adapting to market shifts, emerging trends, and new partnerships. Now, heading into Q4 2025, we’re sharing a more detailed view of what’s ahead, including parallel workstreams while we push Mothership forward into Q1/Q2 2026.

As always, our roadmap is flexible. We’re often looking for opportunities and conditions to pivot.

Reflecting on the Year so far

2025 has been intense, even with a few months left. We started strong, targeting a “full-scale invasion”, but hit some roadblocks that shaped our path.

Early efforts went into our first multichain expansion with B3 (a Base gaming Layer 3). The partnership didn’t deliver as hoped, which reinforced our cautious approach to collaborations, especially those demanding heavy development investment. (Yes, we even built a multichain Alien Base that never saw the light of day.)

The halving was another key moment, prompting a deep review of Alien Base’s long-term sustainability and market edge. This sharpened our focus on Mothership, which is a huge change in scale compared to features like Limit Orders. For the first time, we’re building the backend ourselves, complete with robust security and significant resources, while ensuring a seamless frontend experience, rather than relying solely on partners.

This year we laid down major groundwork for developing our trading hub vision, highlighted by Epsilon Analytics, alongside foundational work on Mothership’s contracts and architecture. We also finalized the DAO constitution, established the Alien Foundation in its early form, and refined existing features for better performance.

Behind the scenes, we’ve streamlined operations, brought on new team members for comms and partnerships to let devs concentrate on building, and set the stage for upcoming launches. With Mothership in active development, here’s what else is in the pipeline.

The Roadmap Ahead

We’ve just brought back Limit Orders with our partners at Bancor, resolving key issues and upgrading the app to the latest tech stack for faster performance, cleaner interfaces, and easier future integrations.

Our priorities for the coming months: Enhance UX with social logins, batch transactions, and deeper Base ecosystem ties in the first phase, followed by advanced analytics and visualization tools in the second. We’ll introduce Mothership elements incrementally, starting with UI and design updates, then an MVP alpha, and finally a beta release. Epsilon will get an on-chain router upgrade with new order types, and the Token Generator will expand into a full launchpad.

Here’s the breakdown:

Q4 2025: Building Momentum

• Base Account & Miniapp Integration
  We’re adding support for Base Account logins and launching our miniapp on Base App/Farcaster to boost visibility and simplify access within the Base ecosystem.
• Social Logins & Batch Transactions
  Easier onboarding with social login options and batched transactions to streamline trading without the usual friction.
• Farms & Design Refresh
  A complete overhaul of pool and farm pages, designed for scalability and ready for automated liquidity management (ALM) — laying the groundwork for Mothership strategies.
• Mothership MVP
  Alpha rollout on testnet and mainnet with limited deposits and gated access. This includes finalized contracts, core features, and initial rebalancing for automated liquidity.
• Automated (esALB) Reward Distribution
  Streamlining fee payouts to esALB stakers with a modular system that integrates smoothly into future ALM expansions.
• Epsilon Router: On-Chain Aggregator (Extending into Q1)
  Shifting from off-chain APIs to on-chain contracts for greater reliability and transparency. Integrating more liquidity sources and adding native support for limit orders, stop-loss, and other order types without third-party integrations.
• Token Generator refresh: More token types, more tools for managing launches (backend).

Q1/Q2 2026: Scaling Up

• Mothership Beta
  Post-audit launch with wider access, enhanced strategies, and refined algorithms to take automated liquidity management to the next level.
• Analytics & Visualization Revamp
  Upgrading our TradingView integration with order overlays and PnL tracking. Epsilon Analytics will deliver deeper insights on routing, yield optimization, and portfolio performance.
• Token Generator v2
  Evolving into a comprehensive launchpad with tools for token creation, fair launches, and more.

We’re also advancing the DAO structure for better governance and exploring new partnerships to create value for ALB holders. Sustainability remains key — from optimized rewards to protocol resilience.

You can download a pdf version of the roadmap here.

This outlines our focus for the months ahead. Follow along on Discord for change-logs on every update and weekly community recaps: join here.

We’ll be hosting an AMA on X soon — drop your questions on the roadmap or anything else.

Eyes on the horizon 🛸

Since our launch, we’ve always maintained that a successful trading platform must be useful to both traders and liquidity providers. Every DEX focuses on farmers, but very few projects have succeeded in creating a good product for swapping, and this is a gap that we’re looking to fill now with Epsilon.

Epsilon is the codename of our suite of trading products, including our meta-aggregator and advanced trading tools. And it’s the key to our strategy towards making Alien Base profitable.

True profitability without token incentives is a huge issue in DeFi, and there’s really only two DEXs in the entire space that are able to run profitably without any token incentives at all, and thus can generate net-positive value for the token holders.

Still, tokens can mask the unprofitability for some time and result in good outcomes, at least temporarily. Paying for vanity metrics like TVL or raw volume can make sense, as long as the market is good and the token goes up. But inevitably, mathematics catches up to unprofitable protocols and that’s where the flywheel starts slowing down. Our strategy, since the very beginning, has been to ride the wheel on the way up and get out of it when it starts going down. If we just relied on the money printer forever, we’d be no better than the central banks that crypto is trying to replace.

We might do a deeper dive on our theory on this later, but for now, suffice it to say that traders are the key to profitability. Trader loyalty is the number one factor distinguishing successful platforms from unsuccessful ones. Yet, very few projects focused on the user experience of trading.

With the first release of Epsilon, we focused on the basics: swapping all tokens on Base through Alien Base, even if they don’t have a native pool. But it’s useless to trade without information, which is where Epsilon Analytics comes along.

We’ve released the basics a few months ago, letting users view charts and transactions. With this release it becomes a true dashboard for finding the best trade. Let’s dive deep into it!

Launching the (almost) complete Analytics platform

The objective of this update is to enable traders on Alien Base to scout, find, filter and analyze tokens before making their decisions. The concept is simple: if they can find everything they need on one platform, the experience will be smoother and they won’t need to leave Alien Base. And maybe try out a few more products and increase platform revenue.

Analytics pages are usually limited to a specific DEX, but that never gives a full picture of what’s happening.

That’s why the Explore page now shows every token on Base, with powerful sorting and filtering mechanisms. Also, you can filter pools by individual DEXs to have specific information about volumes and transactions on that platform.

The Token Info page features much more advanced information about the asset. In addition to basic descriptions and financial stats, traders can see the pool and the contracts in more detail. Also, thanks to the GoPlus integration, you can immediately check if the contracts are secure or if it’s a potential rug.

The charts are also upgraded: faster loading with more data, while showing the specific price for each pool.

You can check the new Analytics here.

What’s next?

We reached the first objective: developing a chain-wide analytics platform on Alien Base. Now, we need to make it even more useful.

Some of our next plans include providing deeper information about a token. Something we’re excited about is better filtering for the wallets interacting with a token. Knowing at a glance if multiple wallets are connected to a single user, or how many bots are trading that token, if whales are buying it, or if a team is selling aggressively.

More features will be implemented gradually based on feedback and our original ideas. This chapter marks a new phase for Epsilon, bringing it closer to our final vision. Together with our liquidity products and future original work, we believe we’re on the right path to create the ultimate onchain trading platform.

In the past months we’ve been focused on developing Mothership, our first custom-built protocol that will replace our current static V3 pools with an automated liquidity solution. Now that we’re well into the execution stage, we can begin sharing more about what Mothership will be.

The TL;DR is: current Automated Liquidity Managers are designed with very basic strategies, which result in absurd losses to LPs using these products. We are redesigning everything from scratch with a focus on managing impermanent loss. It can’t be prevented, but it can certainly be improved to allow running pools without having to incentivize them with tokens, thus putting us closer to full profitability. Later on, Mothership will become its own ecosystem of strategy creators and users, going back to the roots of DeFi.

For a longer read on the context and the progress with Mothership, here’s the full story:

Mothership: a necessity turned into opportunity

Mothership is our code name for a new generation of automated liquidity management systems for DeFi. It comes as a solution to a problem that has existed for more than 4 years, and which despite many attempts, still hasn’t been fixed in any reasonable way.

Back in the early days of DeFi summer in 2020, the only DEX type available was the full range Uniswap V2 architecture (or similar by other projects). It had a huge benefit: all positions were fully automated, auto compounded, and they used regular ERC20 tokens for accounting. This meant that it was easy for projects to attract liquidity on their tokens by running simple farming schemes. Arguably it was the main ingredient of the DeFi boom at the time and what made DEXs popular.

Then in 2021, Uniswap introduced its V3 DEX with concentrated liquidity. The premise was that instead of providing liquidity over the infinite possible range of prices that might exist, users on V3 could choose their own range in which to facilitate trading. The more the range is concentrated, the better the swaps for the traders, and hence more fees for the LPs for the same amount of capital.

Unfortunately, due to design restrictions, Uniswap broke an important benefit of V2: composability and ease of creating farming schemes. All V3 positions are represented by NFTs, for which there was no infrastructure to run farms. The Uniswap team decided to delegate the task of “liquifying” these NFT positions into ERC20 tokens to external teams. But this was much easier said than done.

A limited solution is that of a static position wrapper. This is what Alien Base currently uses through its Bunni V1 integration, though there are multiple implementations of this concept.

Basically, you can create an ERC20 token for a particular type of position that is shared between all holders of the liquid token. The biggest limitation is that nobody can change the price ranges of the position without exiting and re-entering into a new position. It’s a fully manual process that users of Alien Base might be familiar with.

This solution works well enough for stablecoins and full range pairs. The former, because stablecoins don’t usually deviate in their price; the latter, because a full range position is already completely flexible and doesn’t require changing its parameters based on the market. The obvious drawback is that you’re back at the starting point, as you’re not getting any benefits from concentrating your position.

You might then wonder, why don’t protocols just rebalance the range automatically for the users, instead of requiring them to pull out funds manually and re-enter? It sounds obvious, and we were on the lookout for a partner to do exactly this for some time.

Then we discovered that nobody had managed to solve automated liquidity in over four years.

Impermanent loss on steroids

There have been many attempts at designing protocols that would rebalance funds for users automatically. Together as a class, they’re called Automated Liquidity Managers, or ALMs. You may have heard of Gamma Strategies, Ichi, Arrakis, Fluid and others. We studied them, spoke with some of them, but very quickly realized that none of them offered an acceptable solution for Alien Base users.

In short, these protocols consistently lose money for the vault depositors, so much that no amount of fees or rewards can compensate for these losses.

The problem starts from the bane of any liquidity provider: impermanent loss. The phenomenon strikes fear in seasoned farmers, but in most cases “impermanent” losses are fairly mild, and ultimately you still earn money when the underlying assets go up. And if you withdraw your assets at the same price as you deposited them, your impermanent loss is zero, no matter what the price did in the meantime.

The problem with ALMs is, ironically, that they tend to be too active. Each rebalancing action effectively locks in some of the impermanent loss. Do that too often, and there is no amount of fees or incentives that can compensate for the portfolio losses. And what’s worse, the losses are fully permanent, you can’t just wait the bad periods out.

Many popular ALM vaults have negative performance against USD in 2024. Basically, despite there being a bull market with prices going up quite a lot, despite collecting fees and despite token incentives, LPs would’ve been better off just holding USDC in their wallet.

The money vanished by locking in impermanent loss at every little fluctuation in price.

Easier said than done, sure, but…

Rebalancing properly to avoid impermanent loss is hard, and certainly other teams tried their best to solve these issues. But unfortunately in this market, many chose to focus on the raw volume and fees, covering any user losses by printing tokens. For a while, it can work.

However, this problem can’t be impossible to solve. Otherwise you’d have to imagine that market making doesn’t make money. How would you then explain the 100 billion dollar hedge funds doing it in Wall Street, or more to the point, the $3.2+ billion TVL sitting in completely non incentivized Uniswap pools on V3 and V4?

There’s a huge amount of academic literature on the topic of market making, and frankly a lot of it is noise. Market making is a very dynamic and competitive activity where no single strategy is “correct”. It all depends on the asset, on the current market dynamics, on your own risk preference and many more factors.

What is certain is that you can’t expect to make money with a strategy that can be described as “every X% change in price, shift ranges by X%,” which is what most ALMs tend to run. We can do a lot better than this.

The Mothership MVP

When designing Mothership and its initial strategy, we focused on a few principles:

• Auto-compounding in an AMM setting is wrong. By adding all fees accrued into the pool, you expose them to impermanent loss. Meanwhile, the benefits of compounding are often vastly overstated. Low yield pools can be compounded monthly with almost no income loss, while higher yield pools by their fickle nature are unlikely to give that much time for compounding to be noticeable.
• The majority of the losses for an LP comes from quick and powerful squeezes, either up or down. You want to provide deep liquidity when markets are ranging, and protect yourself when they’re going fast in either direction.
• You don’t always need to be reacting to the market at all times. Sometimes, being sidelined for a bit is actually good.

Based on these principles, we are devising an initial “reference” strategy that will be enabled in Mothership. Our goal is not to get rid of impermanent loss at all, it’s to just make a “bare minimum” strategy that earns LPs money without requiring subsidies.

The Mothership Contracts & Ecosystem

Meanwhile, work on Mothership smart contracts is well underway. We are building the ALM architecture from scratch, after being unsatisfied with competitor solutions currently available. This allows us to build a fully modular structure, where we can easily swap out strategies, possible actions and permissions.

As part of this, we’re also building a dual public-private structure, enabling both permissionless and permissioned vaults to adopt the same strategies. This can be potentially useful in attracting institutional capital down the line.

Mothership contracts are designed to be the most flexible implementation of an ALM possible. This sets us up for the next stage of the project: a marketplace of liquidity managers.

The deeper realization we’ve come to in our studies is that market making is very competitive and always changing. There will never be an ideal strategy that lasts forever, and DeFi protocols really should not be trying to go into the market making business. We’ve seen examples of this turning poorly with GMX and Hyperliquid, whose only known losses come from people exploiting their liquidity strategies.

With Mothership, we are creating the tools for any degen to create their own market making strategy and attract user liquidity by publishing it on Mothership. Strategy creators would earn fees from external capital, while capital allocators are free to choose the best performing strategy out there.

Market making strategies can be very complex. The tools available to them have to be as generic as possible, including complete control over adding any position on top of the pool, even being able to manage multiple pools at once.

Then, they might need to take external actions: hedge the liquidity, swap it externally, set up perp positions and many more. For this, Mothership will feature plugins to enable these actions.

Taking it all together, Mothership is a completely new approach to managing liquidity in DeFi. It takes some lessons from TradFi in specialization and the constant race of making the best strategy, and combines it with what DeFi is at its core: programmable money, accessible to all.

We are currently in the process of conducting the first architecture tests of our contracts and strategies. Once those are complete, and after extensive security and review work, we’ll be able to launch the Mothership MVP.

In the meantime, work on other aspects of our platform continues, including Epsilon and many other smaller updates. For example, you can check out the new landing page at alienbase.xyz 🛸

What is B3?

B3 is a Layer-3 gaming chain built on Base. Created by a team of Base/Coinbase alumni and OG ETH contributors, B3 is a fun-first gaming ecosystem built to bring the next generation of gamers and game creators onchain.

The team spent months building a real ecosystem of builders and players, and you can play today more than 80 games on B3 mainnet along with more that 6 million other players. Until now, there were no DeFi protocols for games to launch their own tokens on B3. That’s where the aliens come to the rescue.

Alien Base will be the liquidity hub of B3

Alien Base will be deployed on B3 as our first multi-chain deployment. Since B3 is a Base Layer-3, it’s tightly connected to the chain and all bridging and secondary activity will be done from Base.

The B3 Deployment will be directly accessible from the main app at app.alienbase.xyz, featuring V2, V3 swaps and integrated bridging powered by Relay.

There are no plans for ALB incentivization or rewards on B3 as of now, allowing the chain to grow organically with Alien Base as the backbone for liquidity and swaps.

Gaming projects on B3 will be able to integrate Alien Base swaps through an upcoming SDK, letting their users interact with tokens onchain without interrupting their gaming experience.

Thanks to a partnership with Basement, the main gaming hub on B3, the SDK will be immediately available for any developer wishing to integrate swaps to their platform.

For Alien Base, the launch on B3 represents an easy and yet impactful integration, bringing extra fees and users to the protocol without requiring additional rewards and resources from the DAO.

Additionally, when the $B3 token is launched at some time in Q1, it will be available on Alien Base on both Base and B3. However, note that the token is not live yet — stay tuned for more information from B3.

One more thing: Epsilon Analytics is rolling out

After our initial announcement here, we began rolling out improvements to our Token List, including the Token Audits to help protect our users from scam or questionable tokens when selected or imported in the Token List.

Today we’re releasing the first iteration of Epsilon Analytics: now you can have information on price and transactions of every token on Base directly in our app.

Also, thanks to the Advanced TradingView charting embedded on Alien Base, you will be able to use our Swaps, Limit and Recurring strategies and DCA while having a clear picture of the price, including your favorite indicators and trendlines on the chart.

We’re just getting started for now, but expect more major updates for Epsilon and our custom protocols in the coming weeks 🛸

The past year was all about securing our base and gathering resources to expand. We’ve achieved that: Alien Base is now the second biggest native DEX on Base, offering a complete suite of products to trade onchain.

We’ve achieved our initial strategy outlined last year: become the preferred platform for traders.

The Epsilon MVP

The first step was to launch Epsilon: a meta-aggregator that always ensures traders get the best rates on Alien Base for any token active on Base. By combining Alien Base native liquidity with external sources provided by multiple aggregator partners, we’ve created a synergistic DEX-Aggregator hybrid where both sides work in unison.

Traders can always be sure to find the token they’re looking for on Alien Base, even if there’s no native liquidity for it. But the Epsilon system will prefer native pools whenever they offer a good enough trade for users, bringing additional volume to Alien Base liquidity providers.

Later in the year we complemented Epsilon with two important products: Limit Orders and DCA.

Unlike most other implementations, Alien Base uses an integrated Carbon deployment to enable true limit orders. This means that whenever the price reaches your target, your position is already filled. This is a major difference with other protocols, where “limit orders” are actually market orders filled at a specific price. The difference seems subtle, but it’s very noticeable on pairs with not much liquidity, where such trades might impact the price and give users a much worse execution.

The DCA feature, powered by our partner OpenOcean, similarly benefits trading on tokens with little liquidity. It allows users to effortlessly spread their trades over many smaller orders done automatically over time. This results in much better trade execution and makes life easier for everyone trading with size.

The Alien Base Frontend now features all the necessary tools to trade any token on Base, combining multiple instruments in one easy to use package.

What 2025 Brings to Epsilon and More

Our achievements so far are just a preview of the innovations that can be done for the DeFi trading experience.

Over the next few months we will be continuing our iterations on our trading experience, focusing on polishing the execution and providing even more contextual data. Our Epsilon Analytics will feature a Base-centric token dashboard, where users can view relevant statistics on a token’s contracts, holders, volume and much more. To learn more about it, we’ve written a dedicated article.

With the core infrastructure done, improvements to Epsilon will improve usability through features like one-click trading, account abstraction, portfolio management and additional order types.

For 2025, our goal is for Epsilon to become the reference point for trading on Base, making it as seamless and feature-rich as trading on leading centralized platforms.

The Alien Base DAO & Smart Contracts

At the same time as our Frontend work, we’ve made major efforts to improve the efficiency of the Alien Base DEX contracts, as well as decentralizing and securing the position of the Alien Base DAO.

The first step was launching esALB in April, a locked version of ALB that grants voting rights and specialized rewards while dramatically reducing the circulating supply. While esALB is quite forgiving compared to other locked token implementations, with only a one month lockup required, this approach has proven to be effective at stabilizing supply and incentivizing existing holders to lock their holdings.

Next up was the halving in August. As part of the initial tokenomics of ALB, the token undergoes emission schedule halvings every 9 months.

This measure was originally introduced because of a very simple lesson that bear markets in crypto teach: you can’t get away with emitting tokens forever. A capped supply and gradually reducing emission schedule ensures that the project can’t kick the can down the road forever — eventually it will need to be sustainable without rewards.

Despite the initial shock, a number of optimizations to pools and emissions allowed us to very quickly recover and later dwarf both the TVL and Volume figures for the DEX pre-halving.

Later on in the year, we focused on decentralizing the DAO: establishing a formal development budget, delivering all protocol fees to esALB holders, and finally establishing the Alien Foundation.

The Alien Foundation is a Cayman-registered entity (registered in December) that acts as the DAO’s foothold in the legal world. It is a critical measure that benefits everyone involved in the DAO and the token holders, allowing the protocol to scale with more safety as governments around the world are starting to notice DAOs and DeFi protocols. The Foundation is ownerless, and exists as a tool to execute the will of the token holders.

The Alien Base Protocol in 2025

While we focused on the basics in 2024, we are feeling the need more than ever to begin developing the next generation of DeFi products this year.

A good example is our upcoming Project Mothership. In the search for a suitable Automated Liquidity Manager for Alien Base, we’ve realized that none of the existing projects are able to offer the bare minimum performance for LPs with concentrated liquidity. There are many instances of ALM pools losing money compared to holding USD (!) in a bull market.

The problem is in no way easy to solve, but a quick look around led us to understand that this market has been underexplored so far. And offering a good enough ALM protocol is one of the key steps to make sure a DEX protocol is sustainable without token emissions.

Developing customized protocols is unbelievably more expensive and complex, but with the foundations built in 2024, we are ready to make serious inroads towards Mothership, Quasar and later on, Nebula.

However, one of the first priorities for 2025 is to revitalize Alien Base as a platform to launch and deploy tokens. Building on our Token Generator MVP, we will be developing a comprehensive platform to let devs deploy exciting new and existing tokens on Alien Base. The goal is to make it as permissionless as possible, because ultimately that’s where most of the excitement of DeFi comes in.

For anyone who hasn’t been around for so long, we’ve already told the story of Alien Base from the beginning. In 2024, we’ve built the foundations, and now it’s time for the Aliens to start their full scale invasion 👽

It’s been just over a year since Alien Base launched, just a few days after Base itself. The space and the ecosystem changed a lot since then, as did the exchange. It’s safe to say that when the team launched the DEX, nobody could’ve expected our current success. But there were quite a few obstacles to get here, and we wanted to explain how that journey defined the platform as it exists today, also for all our new users.

The launch

Alien Base was launched in a fair launch, immediately attracting huge attention and rising to Top-1 DEX by TVL at the end of August 2023.

The initial idea behind Alien Base was similar to other DEXs of the previous cycle, including PancakeSwap, Trader Joe and many others. Token emissions would serve for the initial bootstrapping phase to gain attention and notoriety, establish large TVL figures and capture the volume of the chain.

Alien Base had zero backers outside of the community that came post-launch, who provided the initial liquidity, attention and trust.

The tokenomics was certainly primitive: the initial mint was 26M ALB, of which 1M was locked into the liquidity pool and the rest sent for long-term storage. The rest of the tokens were minted over time, with 15% going to the team and 15% going into long-term DAO storage.

This meant the inflation at the start was relatively huge, but because Base was extraordinarily active, the inflation could be managed in the initial period and helped achieve enormous TVL numbers. By late August, we reached over $26M in TVL relying solely on the original V2 deployment.

By September, other protocols started coming through with their own existing user bases, partners and backers, which made the initial strategy impossible to execute: it was very unlikely for a bootstrapped protocol to compete on TVL with big players.

We could’ve decided at this point to crank up emissions on ALB or create new emissions tokens in the vain hopes of attracting more TVL to compete, but we knew very well this would be pointless and would only kill the project even more quickly.

The experience of seeing DEXs rise and fall throughout the previous cycles, especially in bear markets, taught us that liquidity mining emission models are fundamentally flawed. Liquidity mining is a subsidy, paid by token holders, to rent TVL and volume from users. When times are good, and enough people believe the narrative, tokens can “outpump” the emissions. But when attention dries down, then the model collapses completely.

The only potential exception might come from DEXs that “cleared their neighborhood” and are effectively the only choice that exists on any given chain. The death of the DEX would at that point result in the death of the chain, tying the interests of the two. Other kinds of external backers are also crucial in keeping the “flywheel” alive.

Surviving the winter

Given the situation, we decided to pivot in a different direction: focusing on organic volume, memecoins and alternative products to generate revenue. Products like Area51, a launchpad for vetted memecoins, as well as Predictions and Lottery products were the result of this thinking.

However, by late September the Base season was clearly over, and the overall market was entering into hibernation for the winter. The products ultimately weren’t successful and weren’t providing anywhere close to enough fees to sustain the project and provide enough resources to keep developing.

Around this time, we notified the community that part of the emissions we received (600,000 ALB a month) would start to be used to gain resources and support the development of the project. We had an ambitious roadmap, including products like Quasar and Nebula to get out of the liquidity mining trap.

That’s because ultimately the issue of DEXs is one of tech. Uniswap V2, or wide range V3 products just do not generate sufficient fees to be profitable for LPs in most circumstances: impermanent loss is extremely difficult to overcome. And if the LP doesn’t make money, then the protocol cannot seriously hope to generate fees either.

A product like Quasar, allowing the borrowing of liquidity positions, would allow LPs to essentially get paid a fair price from the impermanent loss they already suffer, leveraging the options market. Nebula would include novel liquidity provision algorithms to give more tools for mitigating impermanent loss, in addition to creating derivatives markets for any new token and generating extra fees.

But building these products requires A LOT of resources, and the Base ecosystem was quickly cooling off. When the original amount of 600,000 ALB/month was set, the price of ALB was around $0.06. It quickly went down to $0.01 and even less, ultimately settling around $0.001 by December, even despite us continuing to build and releasing products such as our V3. From Top-1, we essentially dropped to the bottom of the Base DEXs, in no small part because of interference from competitors (but that is a story for another time).

The ALB community became a very small, closely knit group of backers who continued to believe in us, continuing to put money and effort in supporting the project. This became the core of the Alien Base DAO, our signers, mods and biggest backers. Volume on ALB was low, but not zero, and by that point it was the only source of resources for development.

Delays in establishing the infrastructure for using the emissions, for example to avoid insider trading opportunities, price impact and the nosiness of competitors, meant that we could only begin to reliably use the emissions to fund the project when ALB was below $0.01. The next period saw an even bigger dip, and the original 600,000 ALB was worth $600. There is no business in the world that could survive on that amount in a month.

We had a tough choice: tap into the reserves of ALB the team had accumulated by then, or tap into the reserves established for the DAO. The former felt like the more correct choice for the long-term health of the project: the need to decentralize was obvious, and a DAO without tokens allocated to it is useless.

Long-story short: ALB recovered spectacularly from those days. And those early holders are the top holders of today.

The recovery in 2024

Given the continued Base downturn, the next most logical choice to recover the project was to take the technology and license it to DEXs on other, more active chains. We were presented with an opportunity to be the technology partner for a DEX on Blast. The ALB community was involved, and the new platform included some new technology we were at that point developing for Alien Base.

Ultimately, despite the potential, things played out in the completely opposite way: Blast became weak (at least from an organic DEX volume perspective) about a week after launch. Meanwhile, Base picked up spectacularly, allowing ALB to finally prosper directly.

Given what we had just survived, it was paramount to not repeat the same mistakes, and establish a reserve when times were good to last us through the bad. In addition, it was important to signal to others that we couldn’t be killed off that easily.

In this period for Alien Base, we developed products such as Epsilon, the Token Generator, esALB, Limit Order and Automated Strategies, and laid the ground for developing Quasar and Nebula.

We also paid attention to the DEX side of things, developing a new strategy to optimize TVL and volume while emissions are still live. We also focused on bringing long-term plays with other projects that would benefit Alien Base. For example we listed Golemz, a project spearheaded by our long-term backers and ALB holders/LPs Monstros, which allows anyone to just mint an NFT and earn a good APR without suffering volatility. Other projects would be listed if they provided value to holders, such as offering an airdrop to stakers or esALB holders.

We received extraordinary attention from the community, achieved fully organically just by building and by communicating openly. There was no “marketing” involved: the few attempts made were unsuccessful anyway, and all of our “KOLs” found us organically and simply liked the project.

With the threat of death staved off, we could also proceed with decentralization, establishing a formal budget that would connect the amount of resources we obtain to the success of the protocol: good times would help us build up reserves, bad times would force us to optimize and save. The budget was fully accepted by the largest and most involved esALB holders.

What comes next for Alien Base

Our vision for ALB remains largely the same as before: build a good product backed by true fundamentals and without overcomplicating tokenomics.

We believe DEXs can only be truly profitable if they establish a synergy between traders and LPs, without ignoring one or the other. The halving schedule underpinning ALB tokenomics helps everyone remember that the tide will eventually retreat, and the project can’t afford to be swimming naked (i.e. subsidizing liquidity) when it does.

There are a few major updates we expect to happen soon:

Full decentralization and DAO ownership

By the end of the year 2024, the DAO will have full control over the protocol. We have also been studying solutions in the legal space to help protect the protocol in the long run and give it a voice in the physical world as well.

All major aspects involving the smart contracts of Alien Base will be decided by the DAO, which will also be overhauled for a more structured and deep participation.

We will be also proposing an amendment to the esALB locking schedule to promote long-term ownership and reduce the prevalence of large unlocks, to help better achieve the ultimate purpose behind it: let governance participants join and leave freely, but without excessively damaging the others.

After this, the team will become simply another holder, with a significant but far from majority stake in ALB.

Details of the proposed structure will be shared later. We believe strongly in the A for Autonomous part of DAOs. This means running the platform via code and not decisions of humans, however many they are. This means that most common maintenance items for Alien Base, such as farm emissions, new pools and more will be automated according to fixed, fair and code-based criteria.

Project Mothership & Nebula

In the previous months, it became clear to us that concentrated liquidity is an unsolved problem. Market-leading CLM providers generally lose money to users, again requiring token subsidies to be profitable.

This is why we’re developing Project Mothership, an Automated Liquidity Manager (ALM) that offers Alien Base liquidity providers a way to earn organically from trading activity, without requiring constant manual action.

Mothership will allow us to integrate some of the concepts we were studying for Nebula, such as using more tools to enable effective market making strategies, and it will be gradually iterated all the way to become Nebula.

Nebula and Mothership will eventually be the logical conclusion of the AMM innovation: disrupting centralized market makers by letting anyone create advanced strategies and earn from them, a win-win for all.

Project Quasar

As mentioned before, Quasar will be the final piece of the puzzle for an effective DEX. Weaponizing the impermanent loss helps further solve the LP conundrum on DEXs. In addition, it will enable leveraged trading on the most popular assets and tokens on Base, which so far has been essentially impossible due to technological limitations.

While we were expecting to move on to Quasar right around now, we see a better opportunity for Mothership, as it better integrates with our overall vision of Alien Base: becoming the best place to trade and earn on Base.

This necessarily involves a delay to Quasar, but the point remains: in 2025, we expect Alien Base to achieve true profitability and truly innovate the DeFi space.

Epsilon is Alien Base’s powerful meta-aggregator, enabling users to trade any token on the Base network, unrestricted by the liquidity in Alien Base’s own v2 and v3 pools or the platform’s incentivized contracts.

Epsilon operates seamlessly: when a user initiates a swap, Epsilon gathers price quotes from various providers, compares them, and offers the best rate. This setup not only opens access to all tokens on Base but also ensures optimal pricing, eliminating the need to jump between platforms.

Today, OpenOcean and Paraswap serve as core aggregators for Epsilon, and we’re excited to announce Odos as our newest partner. Odos has one of the best routing systems out there, and our users will be able to use it with 0 additional fees for the initial period.

But Epsilon’s vision goes beyond efficient swaps. It aims to break down DeFi liquidity barriers, empowering users to focus on what they value most: analyzing and trading tokens, without worrying about where liquidity is sourced.

Introducing Epsilon Analytics

While Epsilon currently enables seamless trading on any token within the Base ecosystem, token research is still fragmented across platforms like Dexscreener and CoinMarketCap, often resulting in inconsistent data. Epsilon Analytics aims to change this by embedding comprehensive chain-wide analytics directly into the Explore, Swap, and Token List pages of Alien Base.

Through native data integration with Alien Base pools, other DEXes on Base, and using subgraphs and APIs from multiple sources, Epsilon Analytics will offer detailed information on all tokens, pools, and transactions. This will provide users with unified and reliable data, streamlining the research process and enhancing decision-making.

Epsilon Analytics will also feature advanced charting with TradingView, live feeds for news, tweets and casts from community pages.

The Roadmap

To start, Alien Base has enhanced its analytics to aggregate data from both v2 and v3 pools, and our token list has been expanded to improve token visibility and searchability.

Due to the unique architecture of Epsilon and Alien Base’s varied technologies, presenting complete data on external platforms can be challenging. Therefore, we’re upgrading our analytics to include data from Epsilon swaps, Alien Base Carbon, and Bunni contracts, enriching our in-house platform with a complete view of all activity.

Next, we’ll integrate subgraphs from major DEXes and use APIs to expand token data across Base. TradingView charting will be added for all tokens, bringing powerful technical analysis tools into Alien Base.

Finally, we plan to incorporate social features for an even more engaging user experience, enhancing Alien Base as a central hub for all things DeFi on Base.

Alien Base token emissions have been a pivotal aspect of our strategy since launching, attracting an initial community of devoted users and contributing to having the second highest valuation among DEX protocols on Base. Since the start, the ALB distribution was capped: there can’t ever be more than 510M ALB, meaning that the emission schedule had to be carefully managed.

The solution was to design a system of emission halvings every 9 months, following an initial boost period in the first weeks of the protocol. Though the DAO approved some course corrections along the way, the halvings remain the most important feature of the tokenomics.

The halving is above all the strongest reminder to everyone that the protocol cannot expect to operate on subsidies forever. Emissions will run out, and the protocol will need to be maintained on its own, while generating value for the users without external funding.

Where we are now

ALB underwent its second halving in September 2024, bringing ALB emissions from 7.5 ALB to 3.75 ALB per second.

Since the halving, careful optimization of farms has brought TVL back to pre-halving levels despite the lower emissions. Volume has likewise doubled, and still has lots of room to grow.

In the previous halving cycle since December 2023, Alien Base has implemented a flexible V3 vaults system, the Epsilon meta-aggregator to let users trade any token on Base, Limit Orders and Recurring powered by Carbon, as well as the successful Token Generator product.

The combination of these features makes Alien Base the home of traders, who can trade any token on Base with great execution and ample tools provided through the Carbon integration. The Token Generator provides tools to easily launch a token on Alien Base or others, and it has been used by several popular memecoins on Base, as well as many smaller projects.

At the same time, the release of esALB has been wildly successful, with over 60% of the ALB circulating supply consistently locked throughout this period. The introduction of WETH and fees rewards, coinciding with the latest halving, brings us into the next stage of Alien Base: turning it into a sustainable platform.

What the next cycle brings

With emissions halved, it becomes very important to optimize and maintain full efficiency in terms of TVL and volume gained for each ALB emitted. Currently, the protocol collects approximately 50% of the fee revenue of trades on Alien Base pools, which are being redistributed to esALB holders.

However, there is no amount of optimization that can make DEX protocols profitable if they have no active traders loyal to them.

With this in mind, this halving cycle lasting until June 2025 will be dedicated to aggressively developing ways to go beyond the need for token emissions. It will consist of three stages:

• Fully optimizing the current set of pools on Alien Base, ensuring that either TVL, Volume or both are as high as possible. This can be achieved with smart liquidity position management, including CLM protocols.
• Continuing to improve Epsilon, Limit Orders and develop more tools to keep Alien Base attractive to people, not bots.
• Gradually implementing new protocol ideas including Quasar and Nebula, even in MVP form, to completely change the DEX game.

While the results are difficult to predict, a successful halving cycle would put Alien Base in a position where:

• The vast majority of emissions are delivered to esALB holders or reserved for development/marketing.
• Metrics including TVL, Volume, users and capitalization continue their growth.
• Liquidity mining rewards are used sparingly, only for specific pools and initiatives.

How we can get there

Alien Base achieved a lot in a short amount of time. Now, it’s time to put the community’s resources to work on creating the next stage of the project and of the DEX space as a whole.

Currently, 30% of the emissions are reserved for DAO and operations, including a 15% reserve for long-term DAO holdings, while another 15% is reserved for the development team. To let the DAO treasury accumulate tokens, development of the protocol and operational costs have been generally borne directly through the development team’s initial investment, as well as its share of fees and emissions, with a monthly allowance of 600k ALB per month.

As of the September halving, total monthly emissions amount to 9,720,000 ALB, with 15% (1,458,000) going to the DAO and Team each.

We propose the following changes:

• The development team will transfer 33% of its emissions rights to the DAO, bringing the DAO’s total collection rate to 20% (1,944,000 ALB/mo).
• The remaining 66% will be used purely for long-term incentivization via vested positions for important DAO contributors, protocol developers, and potentially external investors.
• The development team allowance will be increased by 400k ALB, acting as an operational budget for paying salaries to developers, community managers and any other contributor to the Alien Base protocol, as well as potential infrastructure and management expenses.
• The DAO treasury is also to be used for one-time expenses related to protocol marketing, development, security or general emergencies, which would require the approval of the DAO council members.

The arrangement would last until the next halving cycle, after which the tokenomics would likely need to be reevaluated based on the updated situation.

The new approach would enable Alien Base to properly fund the next generation of its products, which will be key to making the protocol truly sustainable in the long-run.