Hourglass (WAIT)

Let me tell you something maybe you don't know.
After reading this you'll probably understand why Hourglass performed so poorly.

@hourglasshq was called Pitch Money 23 years ago.
It secured seed funding of $4.2M from @ElectricCapital, Circle Venture, @coinbase, etc.
Initially, they boldly claimed they would become the leading interest rate trading platform.
In the end, even riding the tailwinds of $ETH's LRT, TVL only grew to a maximum of $65M.

Their product, called a "Time-Bound Token" (TBT), is built on the ERC-1155 token standard, but the problem is that average users don’t understand the concepts of time premium/duration matching, resulting in little adoption.

I ask, when PT/YT are already beginner‑friendly, who the heck can figure out Time‑Bound Tokens? Moreover, there’s no AMM for order posting; you have to use an RFQ (Request for Quote) system.

In fact, the project team never cared about user experience nor considered how to educate users about what a TBT is. During the Hourglass V1 era, their presence on Twitter was essentially zero compared to competitor PENDLE.

If you ignore users, they ignore you. As a result, at the beginning of 2024 TVL went to zero, and the $WAIT token fell from $10 to $0.08.

When a project collapses and spends a year pivoting, do you think the veteran members will still stick around?

The answer is definitely no, so it's possible that Hourglass itself was cobbled together by an outsourced team. @yuyue_chris

Stable outsourced Hourglass, and Hourglass further outsourced to something like an Indian dev team, leading to a comedic tragedy where even the official RPC could only be accessed via free nodes, causing everyone's signatures to fail.

The funniest part is that @MengLayer questioned whether Hourglass's team was still the original one, and Hourglass later replied that their team is fully doxxed.

No, the only person who has ever been doxxed at Hourglass is the founder, right????

So your founder Mr. Charlie Pyle equals a one‑man team????

There are too many shady aspects, including how Hourglass got involved with Stable, which remains a mystery.

All we can say is that networking in the crypto space is more useful than competence; even strong projects like Pendle can only work honestly, while Hourglass managed to partner with Stable through a simple PY transaction.

Sigh.