So Anoma finally "launched" its mainnet.
You'll have to forgive me for the air quotes. I reserve actual, non-ironic launches for things that, you know, actually do something. Anoma, on September 29th, gave us what amounts to a brand new, eight-lane superhighway with no on-ramps, no off-ramps, and no cars. But hey, the pavement is real.
They’re calling it "phase one." A classic bit of PR jujitsu to make an empty room sound like a "pre-gala VIP event." What did this grand phase one actually deliver? A native token, XAN, which you can now officially own. And a governance system. That’s it. No third-party apps. No sign of the much-hyped AnomaPay service. The treasury is there, I guess, but it’s not turned on.
It's a mainnet with the "main" part conspicuously missing.
So You Think You're in Charge?
A Tale of Two Bodies
Let’s talk about this governance system, because it’s the only real toy in the box right now. They’ve set up a "two-body" structure. It sounds very grand and democratic, doesn't it?
Body one is the "voter body." That's you, me, anyone who locks up their XAN tokens to have a say. Body two is the "governance council," a multisig controlled by a cozy little group of "early contributors." Any proposal needs two weeks to pass, and here's the kicker: the voter body—the little people—gets veto power over the council.
On paper, it’s a check on the power of the insiders. In reality, I’ve seen this movie a dozen times. The "council" proposes everything, and the community veto is a nuclear option that will be framed as catastrophic to use. It’s the illusion of decentralization. A safety valve designed to make everyone feel good while the same small group of people who built the thing continue to steer the ship.
This is a bad plan. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a depressingly predictable plan. It's the crypto equivalent of a parent letting their kid "drive" by holding a plastic toy steering wheel in the passenger seat. Sure, you can turn your little wheel all you want, but we both know who's actually got their hands on the real one.
And what are they even governing right now? The color of the drapes in a house that hasn't been built yet? The first big vote is to... checks notes... allow the mainnet to actually have apps deployed on it. Give me a break. A vote to enable the core function of the entire network. Why wasn't this the default state? It feels less like a decentralized choice and more like a manufactured event to create the appearance of activity.
A Five-Star Menu with No Kitchen
The Intent-Centric Dream vs. The Empty Reality
This is what gets me. The idea of Anoma is genuinely cool. I'll give them that. An "intent-centric" operating system. You don't execute a swap; you just declare your intent: "I want to trade 1 ETH for 3,000 USDC, and I don't care how it happens." Then a network of "solvers" finds the best path across any chain—Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, you name it—and makes it happen.
They even have this "gas abstraction" thing, where you can pay your transaction fees in whatever token you have, no need to hold ETH for an Ethereum transaction. That’s a real problem solver. It’s the kind of seamless, chain-agnostic future we've been promised for years. AnomaPay, their private stablecoin router, sounds fantastic too.
It all sounds great on a whiteboard.
But that’s all it is right now: a story. A well-marketed, venture-backed ghost story. They’ve spent years building this grand vision of a universal translator for blockchains, and what they’ve shipped is the on/off switch. The rest is "coming soon," pending an audit and, offcourse, a "community vote."
It's infuriating. It's like going to a restaurant you've heard amazing things about for months, and when you finally sit down, the waiter just hands you a beautifully printed menu and says the kitchen staff will be hired next year. I don't want to read the menu. I want the food.
And it seems I'm not the only one. The airdrop has been met with a collective shrug. Even the free-money-hunters who will farm anything that moves seem underwhelmed. When the degen crowd can't even be bothered to dump your token, you might have a problem. It shows a fundamental disconnect between the hype the project is trying to generate and the actual value it's providing today. Which is zero.
This whole "launch now, add features later" philosophy is a cancer in the tech world. It's not just crypto, my toaster oven now needs firmware updates to toast bread properly. But in a decentralized network, it feels particularly dishonest. They're trying to bootstrap a financial network and a community around a product that ain't finished. They want us to buy into the vision, to provide liquidity, to participate in governance for a system that has no subjects. They want the network effect before there's a network.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this is just how you build things in public now. You pour the foundation, put up a sign that says "Skyscraper Coming Soon," and start pre-selling the penthouse condos. Maybe the real product is the token and the narrative around it, and the actual tech is just a long-term accessory.
But when you promise a revolution in cross-chain communication, and all you deliver is a committee and a token, it feels like...
Call Me When It's Finished
They didn't launch a product; they launched a token and a promise. And in this space, we are absolutely drowning in promises. This isn't a mainnet. It's a glorified testnet with a market cap, a placeholder for a future idea. Wake me up when you can actually do something with it. Until then, it's just another ticker symbol on a long, long list.
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