The beginning, present & the future
A long due update, It’s been a while in the making, but we can finally let you in on what we’ve been up to.
The beginning
In June of 2023, we started the discussing with Oasis BD the idea of building a DEX with privacy features on Sapphire Oasis to bring compliant privacy to the industry and become a flagship product on their network (Sapphire Oasis) to show case what and how their privacy layer could be used.
In August of 2023, we started the development of what you know of today as the “illumineX v1 / legacy” DEX product. The times were exciting, there’s nothing more exciting than starting a new project with the mind racing full of ideas and solutions.
We started sketching out what the solution might look like, how it could work like, what tech stack to use, nothing fancy, just an early vision.
After some weeks of planning we had a pretty good idea of what and how we want to build it, that’s when the illumineX DEX was born.
Initially, we were wondering if the Uniswap UI could work for us, but we felt like the Uniswap UI was too bloated and with our goals it wasn’t really optimal. We decided that it was the best to build the solution from scratch with the goals we had in mind.
By now, Sapphire Oasis had already been live for a few months and the ROSE community welcomed us and were full of excitement when it was announced that there was going to be a DEX live in the near future on their new network.
The v1 DEX launch
February 4th, 2024 — illumineX v1 DEX is launched and live on the mainnet.
The network was booming in activity and the future of privacy looked promising.
By May of 2024, the activity levels of the network had dropped by over 95% as the network didn’t have much else on it besides from our DEX.
This is also when we realized that in order to give our community the best chances of survival — we have to pivot.
A pivot was NEVER even considered when we initially started building the product when we launched it. The initial scope of the project was relatively straightforward, a privacy oriented product with cross chain capabilities and we achieved this, but it wasn’t enough because the ecosystem wasn’t growing as we had expected.
By now we had completed our road map, and had delivered everything we initially had planned.
A pivot was started because we truly wanted the best for our community and we worked relentlessly hard for it.
During May — mid November of 2024, we expanded the team with developers to deliver illumineX v2 as fast as possible. We built a solution from scratch that would have taken most teams over a year, in just ~6 months.
We knew it had to be done quickly as in order for illumineX to succeed, we needed exposure to a broader market with more users.
Mid November of 2024 — illumineX v2 is launched, so much work had gone into this, frustration, anger, happiness, so many emotions during this journey. During these hardships, the team grew stronger and pushed relentlessly through every challenge we faced.
illumineX v2 is launched.
A complete ghost town, silence.
We began wondering, where are all of our 17,000 followers on Twitter/X, or any of our 4,000 Telegram members? Why is nobody using the product?
During the first few weeks after the launch, we practically had $0 volume. We started analyzing why aren’t people not use the product..
We tried to introduce new product, elevating underlying technology but it was born in a wasteland. We misinterpreted interest in token for interest in the solution as well.
There was nearly 0 interest in our product and there wasn’t any product related support for us either, mostly interest in token which did not become interest in the product. Instead of promoting the product and using it to benefit everyone, there was complete silence and purely focus on the token. It left us in a very difficult position.
By now, we had already dealt with death threats and other nasty things for several months on a daily basis. It’s not very encouraging, but that’s the reality it seems of this industry.
We didn’t let this affect us, we kept pushing forward towards out set goals.
As of now, our userbase was practically only from the Oasis network, and we had very minimal exposure to the outside world. This put us in a very difficult position as the Twitter/X also was only promoting our posts to people within ROSE/Oasis ecosystem as we had over 17,000+ followers at this time and we couldn’t get our posts to the right audience (outside world).
We tried for a few months to change this by posting aggressively and engaging with other communities to see if the algorithm would adapt, but it never did as it had such a strong follower base with ROSE/Oasis ecosystem and we realized that this is a battle we cannot win.
The algo believed that our main targets were within this ecosystem and it wasn’t wrong, because that’s where the users are from, but it wasn’t our target.
We then started to analyze how the Twitter/X algo works by reviewing their code and we finally understood how their scoring & promotion system works.
The more we posted, the more our current audience would engage with our content and this created an infinite circle of our content being just visible for people within this ecosystem and it became a double edged sword, because we had to post and be more active to escape it, but we would always be brought back by the algo to these same users.
A product pivot alone wasn’t enough, we also needed an audience pivot.
At this moment (January 2025), we realized that a completely new approach is needed to tackle this issue and that we did.
The present
January 2025 — the start of a new era. We knew a re brand with a new community was the only hope forward.
With that in mind, we knew also that we needed feedback from an audience that is actually interested in privacy solutions, and we started with the deep user interviews to understand what direction to move, because we were not able to get any reasonable product related feedback from a community that simply doesn’t need it.
No hasty decisions were made, everything was a calculated move based on data.
After several months of researching, we knew what had to be done, and how we would execute the following milestones. We started working with another team to build Coinceal.cash.
Twitter/X: https://x.com/CoincealCash
Telegram: https://t.me/coincealcash
We started working together with them to deliver a re branded product (fork of illumineX v2), but with a focus on private swapping rather than a privacy wallet.
The goal was to keep the Coinceal brand and community separated from illumineX to not create any confusion for the new community and to keep it simple, while Coinceal’s revenue still would be going into $IX buyback and burn, and once Coinceal has grown big enough — completely dissolve illumineX brand and merge it into Coinceal brand.
This is the reason why we couldn’t communicate much or provide updates — it would have lead to a merge of illumineX community into Coinceal earlier than it should’ve happened, and the Coinceal community would be a minority, effectively putting us back to where we started.
In May of 2025, we started the private beta testing with Coinceal — although the community was very small (slightly over 560 followers on Twitter and about 63 members on Telegram), it was very much engaged and eager to test out the solution and help us build something better. In the first days of private beta testing, we had more volume on the protocol than in the entire lifespan of illumineX v2 — confirming our theory about audience pivoting needs.
We had over 50 active beta testers during the private testing phase — a very successful trial period.
illumineX v2 — simply had the wrong audience and we could not succeed due to this.
Things looked very promising and encouraging, users were very happy and the feedback was great. We had succeeded in building a product most people were happy with.
In late June of 2025, we launched Coinceal publicly and during it’s first month of being released to the public, we saw around $100k volume.
A very modest result, but nonetheless, very promising as it was far more than illumineX v2 ever had on a monthly basis.
However, this is when we realized another problem. The assets that were supported (USDT, USDC, ETH & BTC) was not enough to scale and we have halted.
Every bit of feedback we received, it was about assets. The users needed more assets. So why not just develop it?
Because, illumineX/Coinceal is built as a self custodial solution. It’s really complicated and time intensive to build self custodial solutions due to the nature of them, it becomes very complex quickly and in most cases require you to build everything from scratch. We realized that we don’t have the resources to scale it and to take it further. It simply did not have a market fit in it’s current standards. This problem could not be solved without spending several months of development again (6–12 months) of work, with no guarantees of it ever bringing the results we had hoped for.
The final nail in the coffin was when the partners who provided liquidity for the new private swaps (flat swap engine) decided that they will pull their liquidity position, leaving us with no way to take it further.
Yet again, a massive challenge to overcome, and we knew this would be a difficult one — as most protocols struggle to get others to provide liquidity.
A chicken and egg problem so to say, to get liquidity you’d need to have yield, but to get yield you’d need volume. People wouldn’t just park their assets in a protocol without getting anything in return, because that’s how we are and work as humans.
We reached out to our network of contacts to see if anyone would be willing — unfortunately nobody stepped up due to the nature of the project.
This left us with the difficult decision after realizing that we have no way out, and no way forward other than to shut down the development and the project itself, or to find another team with more resources to take this over.
After so much work and effort, we weren’t really happy with seeing the story unfold like this, especially after seeing such promising metrics the first month, it was a tough pill to swallow.
We started reaching out to our network in hopes that someone would take it over — but unfortunately we couldn’t find any suitable teams to take over such a complex technical solution.
The reason why we didn’t share so many updates regarding this, was because we tried to eliminate all possible causes that could potentially throw Coinceal in an unwanted direction.
Getting promoted by the Twitter/X algo organically to the right audience was critical for us. We needed to reach people who actually had an interest in the usage of privacy protocols.
It’s not that we didn’t want to share with you, it’s because we wanted to minimize the risk of failure and also confirm our theory of the audience pivoting needs.
The future & the end
After years of building and supporting illumineX, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the project unless we can find another team to take over the project in September 2025.
We went above and beyond to get the best possible result for the community — we could have taken the easy route and just been satisfied with illumineX remaining as a DEX on Sapphire with no future hope or developments.
We weren’t satisfied with that, and we didn’t like the idea of letting down anyone.
We want you to know that we truly tried our best, always with the best intentions in mind.
Going forward — illumineX v1 will continue to maintained by us for approximately another 3 months and then the Oasis team will take over the legacy solution and handle all the technical maintenance/new development aspects of it.
The v2 version will be shutdown as of 30th September 2025, unless we are able to find a team that is interested in taking over, we are currently discussing this with few teams.
We’ll let you know if there are any updates regarding team takeover during mid September.
We are incredibly grateful for your support, feedback, and trust throughout this journey.
