When we started UniLend, we set out with an ambitious goal: to make decentralised finance more open and permissionless.
A lot has happened since then.
The market has changed. The way people interact with crypto has changed. The products people use every day have changed. And, over time, our own understanding of where we could create the most value has changed as well.
Today, we want to share an important update with the UniLend community.
After ceasing active development on UniLend Protocol last year, our team began working on what comes next. That work has led us to Maxi, a new decentralised social-first crypto trading platform designed to improve the way people discover, understand and trade assets across crypto.
More importantly, we want the UniLend community to be part of this next chapter.
All $UFT holders will be offered a 1:1 migration from $UFT to $MAXI
This is not simply about moving from one token to another. It is our way of making sure that the community that supported us through the UniLend journey has an opportunity to participate in what we are building next.
Looking back at UniLend
UniLend began at a very different point in the crypto market.
Our original thesis was that DeFi should not be limited to a small number of assets selected by centralized teams or governed by restrictive listing processes. We believed there was room for a more permissionless financial infrastructure where a much broader universe of tokens could participate.
That belief led us to build UniLend and, later, expand on that vision with new products and iterations. Like any startup journey, there were periods where things moved quickly and periods where we had to rethink assumptions.
We eventually launched the next iteration of UniLend Finance into a market that looked very different from the one in which we had started building. User behaviour had shifted, liquidity had moved, and the broader DeFi market had changed considerably.
We continued building and trying different approaches, but the product did not achieve the level of traction required to make the business sustainable. At the same time, our available runway came to an end.
Last year, we made the difficult decision to cease active development and operations around UniLend.
It was not a decision we made lightly. We had spent years building UniLend, working alongside our community and seeing $UFT become a part of the portfolios and identities of people around the world. Walking away from active development without knowing exactly what would come next was difficult for everyone involved.
But continuing to spend resources on a product simply because we had spent years building it would not have been responsible either.
We needed to take what we had learned, look honestly at where crypto was moving, and decide what we believed was worth building for the next cycle rather than the previous one.
What we learned
One of the biggest lessons from UniLend was that infrastructure alone is not enough.
Crypto users ultimately care about what they can do.
Over the last few years, trading has become one of the clearest and most persistent activities across the industry. At the same time, the trading experience itself has become increasingly fragmented.
A user's portfolio may sit across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and several other ecosystems. Discovery happens on social platforms. Research happens across project websites, documentation, X, analytics tools and community conversations. Execution happens somewhere else entirely.
Users are expected to manage different wallets, different networks and different interfaces while constantly moving between tools.
We felt there had to be a better experience. That became the starting point for Maxi.
Introducing Maxi
Maxi is a decentralised social-first crypto trading platform built across major chains, including Bitcoin.
The premise is straightforward: crypto trading is already social.
People discover new assets through other people. They follow traders, communities and narratives. They see what others are buying, selling and talking about before deciding whether something deserves their attention.
Most trading platforms, however, still treat the social and trading experiences as two separate worlds.
With Maxi, we are bringing them closer together.
Users will be able to discover assets and trading activity through a social-first experience, understand what is happening around a project, and move from discovery to action without navigating a fragmented collection of applications.
We have also spent a significant amount of time simplifying the trading experience itself.
Crypto users should not have to think constantly about which wallet they need, where their funds are located, or how they are going to move assets between different ecosystems before they can make a trade.
Maxi is being built around the idea that much of this complexity should disappear into the product.
The result we are working toward is a trading experience that feels considerably simpler even though the infrastructure underneath it spans multiple chains.
Helping traders understand more, faster
Discovery is only one part of trading.
Finding a new token on your timeline may take seconds. Understanding what the project actually does can take considerably longer.
The usual process involves opening the project's website, reading documentation, looking through announcements and searching through a mixture of facts and opinions before deciding whether the project is worth investigating further.
We believe technology can make that process more efficient.
One of the first AI-assisted features inside Maxi is designed to review information from a project's official sources and produce a concise explanation of what the project is and what it does.
The purpose is not to replace research or tell someone what to buy.
It is to help a trader answer a much simpler question quickly:
Is this something I want to spend more time researching, or should I move on?
In a market where hundreds of projects compete for attention, saving that time matters.
This research layer sits alongside Maxi's social experience. Users can understand what a project says it is building while separately seeing what traders and the market are saying about it.
We think keeping those two perspectives together, without confusing one for the other, can make crypto discovery considerably more useful.
Why Maxi is a new project
Maxi is not a new version of the UniLend lending protocol.
It is a new product built around a different market opportunity.
The team, however, carries forward years of experience from building UniLend: shipping financial products on-chain, working across crypto ecosystems, operating through multiple market cycles and, importantly, learning from things that did not work as we expected.
There is a tendency in crypto to present every chapter as a straight line of success.
That has not been our experience.
We built. We succeeded in some areas. We made mistakes in others. The market changed. Some assumptions proved wrong. Eventually, we reached a point where continuing UniLend in its existing direction was no longer sustainable.
What matters to us now is what we do with those lessons.
Maxi is the result of that process.
The UniLend community remains part of our journey
There was one question we felt strongly about while deciding how to move forward:
What happens to the people who supported UniLend and continued holding $UFT?
It would have been easier to treat Maxi as something entirely separate.
We don't believe that would be right.
UniLend would never have existed without its community. For years, people supported the project, participated in the ecosystem, held $UFT, provided feedback, created content, helped other users and stayed with us through different versions of the protocol.
We value that history.
And we do not want to start our next journey by leaving that community behind.
For that reason, we intend to provide every $UFT holders with the opportunity to migrate their tokens into $MAXI
$UFT → $MAXI migration
The migration ratio will be:
1 $UFT → 1 $MAXI
In other words, an eligible holder migrating 1,000 $UFT would receive 1,000 $MAXI under the migration program.
The 1:1 ratio refers to the number of tokens being migrated. It should not be interpreted as a representation or guarantee of market price, monetary value or future value between $UFT and $MAXI
A dedicated allocation of $MAXI will be made available for the migration of eligible $UFT
We will publish a separate, detailed migration announcement containing all of the information holders need before the process begins,
There is no migration action required from $UFT holders today.
Please do not connect your wallet to any website claiming to offer the $UFT → $MAXI migration until an official migration link has been published through UniLend's verified communication channels
We expect attempts to impersonate the team once migration information becomes public. The UniLend or Maxi team will never ask you to send us your private key, seed phrase or wallet credentials.
Further details will be communicated before the migration begins.
Why we chose a 1:1 migration
We wanted the transition to be simple to understand. Rather than designing a complicated conversion formula, we want eligible UniLend token holders to have a clear route into the new ecosystem.
If you supported UniLend and continue to hold $UFT, this migration provides an opportunity to become part of Maxi from the beginning.
We also believe it better reflects how we see the relationship between the two communities.
Maxi is a new product, but the team is not starting from zero.
The experience, relationships, lessons and community that came from UniLend are all part of how we arrived here.
The migration is our way of acknowledging that.
What happens to UniLend?
Active development and operations around the UniLend product were ceased last year, and our development focus has since moved to Maxi.
Where required, we will provide additional information relating to existing UniLend infrastructure, products and community channels separately.
The $UFT → $MAXI migration is intended to give token holders a path into the new ecosystem rather than leaving them disconnected from the work the team is doing next.
We will communicate clearly as the migration progresses so holders have sufficient information to make their own decision about whether they wish to participate.
What comes next for Maxi
We have deliberately kept Maxi relatively quiet while building.
That is about to change.
A social-first experience.
Trading has always been influenced by people, communities and conversations. Maxi makes that behaviour a native part of the product rather than something that happens somewhere else.
Support across major crypto ecosystems.
Crypto is no longer a single-chain market. Maxi is being designed for users whose activity spans multiple ecosystems, including Bitcoin.
A simpler trading experience.
Users should be able to focus on the asset and the trade instead of constantly thinking about the infrastructure underneath it.
Faster project understanding.
AI-assisted research will help users quickly understand unfamiliar projects using their official sources before deciding whether they want to investigate further.
These are only the first pieces.
Our ambition is to keep improving the experience around how people discover and trade assets across crypto while removing as much unnecessary complexity as we can.
A word to the UniLend community
To everyone who has been part of UniLend over the years: Thank You.
Some of you have been with us since the earliest days. Some joined later. Some contributed directly, while many simply supported the project and believed in what we were trying to build.
We know the last phase of UniLend was not the outcome any of us had hoped for.
We also know that trust is earned through actions rather than announcements.
That is one of the reasons this migration matters to us
We could not change how the market evolved, and we could not force a product to achieve traction simply because we wanted it to. But we can decide how we treat the people who supported us while we built it.
We do not want to move forward by pretending UniLend never happened.
We want to move forward with the lessons it gave us and give the community that supported us an opportunity to come along.
UniLend was an important chapter for our team.
Maxi is the next one.
And we hope many of you will be there with us.
From $UFT to $MAXI
A new product. A new journey. The same commitment to building for crypto users.
More information about Maxi, the $MAXI token and the 1:1 $UFT → $MAXI migration will be shared through our official channels shortly.
Website: https://maxi.family
Telegram: https://t.me/MaxiFamilyHQ
X: https://x.com/MaxiFamilyHQ
Robinhood CA: 0x7581EC9347669477711d146E0E43BdDdA474f415