What if you could print money out of nowhere? Sounds like a dream, right? Well, we managed to achieve that.
Sort of.
What we built was a transaction processor for the blockchain. It lets people make transactions without paying any fees, and it does that by selling their order flow in automated auctions to high-frequency trading firms.
I know, that’s a mouthful.
Let me put it more simply. Picture an engine for trading crypto where nobody pays fees. Every blockchain transaction you put into it is fuel, and the more fuel it gets, the more money comes out the other end. Seemingly from nowhere.
Where it all started
Our original mission was a pretty idealistic one. We wanted to squeeze every bit of profit available on-chain, spend as little gas as possible doing it, and hand nearly all of the MEV (maximal extractable value, the extra profit someone can make by reordering transactions) back to the people who created it in the first place.
In other words, we wanted DeFi users to be the ones profiting, not miners. Miners are there to keep the network secure. Once they start competing for MEV, they can destabilize consensus, and that’s a problem for everybody who relies on the network.
I won’t go down the rabbit hole here. The easiest way to think about the product is a decentralized exchange with limit orders, no gas fees, and token rewards for using it.
Time to pivot
Back then, crypto had very few rules and a lot of uncertainty. The SEC was going after projects with heavy fines and enforcement actions, often with little heads-up. Letting users stake tokens was risky enough on its own, and on top of that we were sending them claimable rewards in our own token. Both put us right in the danger zone, so we had to change direction.
Throwing away the protocol wasn’t on the table, though. What we’d built for the DEX genuinely made the blockchain safer to use, and it would have been a waste to let it go. So we took a different route and teamed up with order flow providers such as MetaMask, OKX, Base, and others.
That meant everybody came out ahead. Our partners got a significant cut of the revenue our money printing machine generated. Their users got MEV protection that shielded their trades from front-running and sandwich bots, gas optimization that made trading and transacting cheaper, and a few other perks on top.
Results
By November 2021, the Rook had paid out over $40 million in rewards to our users. That’s money that would have otherwise ended up in the pockets of miners and bots.
It also turned out to be a serious tool for serious traders. In May 2022, a whale moved over $80 million through our app in a single day, roughly 20% of all on-chain ETH-BTC volume. Earlier that day, they had lost $250,000 to slippage on another exchange. With us, they paid nothing in fees and walked away with around $60,000 in price improvement.
My favorite story, though, is about someone who wasn’t even our user. One night in June 2022, a trader made a typo in a limit order on a different platform and was about to lose around $15,000 to bots. Our keeper got to the trade first, and because of how the protocol was built, that money went back to where it belonged. We tracked the trader down and returned the full $15,000 to them.
After the pivot, the protocol found its way into some of the biggest wallets in crypto. MetaMask, whose users have swapped over $40 billion across more than 10 million wallets, became one of our partners. In 2025, OKX Wallet became another major partner to integrate Servo. That meant users of both wallets were getting MEV protection and cheaper transactions without ever having to think about it.
So, did we really make money out of thin air? Not quite. But we found a way to take value that was being quietly drained from people and put it back in their hands.
Do you like what you see and have a project in mind? Let’s talk!