Introduction to 01
What is 01?
01 is a decentralized exchange that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies and other digital assets in a permissionless, non-custodial manner directly on a blockchain. It is built on N1 ’s NordVM engine, a purpose-built rollup for orderbooks with 01’s own dedicated execution environment, to execute trades in a decentralized manner while having the same speed as centralized exchanges.
A Brief Summary of 01’s Progression in the past months:
01 launched it’s Pre-launch Mainnet in mid December, aiming to begin improving and fixing bugs as fast as possible, essentially ‘skipping’ testnet and going straight to testing Nord (N1) with onramp possible via a Solana Bridge. At this time, users needed, and still need an invite code or link to join the exchange and test 01.
Despite a lot of initial issues, bugs and downtime, as can be expected with new products, the team spent Christmas and the beginning of 2026 shipping updates daily, fixing issues and optimizing 01 as quickly as possible.
By February 3rd, having sustained multiple weeks of stability, 01 launched it’s private mainnet, where users can earn Points, although still requiring an invite code or link to join.
Timeline as follows:
Private Mainnet (Invite only):
The first 10 weeks after launch, Mainnet will be private, with users needing an invite to trade on 01.
Public Mainnet Alpha:
The launch of the Public Mainnet after private mainnet, with a duration of around 8 weeks. No invite codes will be required to trade on 01.
Public Mainnet Beta:
12 weeks long, after Public Mainnet Alpha.
Some final notes on 01 progress:
Recently, 01 has surpassed 1.000.000.000$ of trading volume, heading towards 2B $ at around 50M $ a day, having only launched in December. As of now, deposits are possible via Solana Bridge, with EVM support having recently been integrated after a successful testing period. The 01 Team has also hinted at iterations of its referral system being published soon, with Vaults also under way.
A full breakdown of the Points Program
01 has launched it’s own points program, which works as follows:
A total of 10 million Points are allocated for users, with distributions every Tuesday (changed from Monday to allow for more backtesting of distribution mechanisms), for “ trading volume, liquidity provision and participation is qualifying events “.
The distribution is split into the following phases:
Private Mainnet (requiring an invite code):
-375k Points per week for a total of 10 weeks
Public Mainnet Alpha:
-296.875k Points per week for 8 weeks
Public Mainnet Beta:
-156.250k Points per week for 12 weeks
-1M Points for Community Acknowledgement Rewards for (in part) feedback and bug reports
-1M Points for LPs
Points weeks so far:
Week 1
The first week of Points saw a lot distributed to both people with insanely profitable accounts, but also people who were liquidated beyond all means of proportion. For example:
This Account was almost entirely liquidated for a staggering 66k, and received the third most points that this week, despite only trading around 250k of the over 250m total Volume traded, clearly showing the week’s bias toward extreme PNL.
On the other hand, accounts like this one saw huge gains with sizeable volume, racking in first place in the weekly Points haul with around 15.000 Points.
In summary, I believe week 1 Points were aimed at giving back to people who were liquidated using 01, and rewarding people who took risks and won big.
Week 2
Key takeaways from the second week of Points are as follows:
There was likely a higher focus on overall trading activity and collateral size rather than PNL or Volume, with different accounts doing roughly the same thing getting various Points results.
Analyzing the largest Points recipient, we can see that
This account clearly MM’d, although not with huge size, limiting his volume to around 1-2M in the respective week, clearly only a fraction of the estimated 350M volume traded this week. The 50.000 Points this account received is likely based on the comparably sizeable trades he executed, mostly on low OI altcoins, thus suggesting a shift toward incentivizing the liquidity provision and trading of altcoins during this week of Points.
Other accounts, likewise probably private MMs running similar strategies with comperable Points hauls are, for example:
Note that, although Rare-Fold did considerably more volume, a lot of it was done on BTC and ETH, likely not netting nearly as much Points as the smaller OI altcoins.
My personal summary would be, that this week was focused more on Volume on low OI caps, and just being active in general. It is important to keep in mind though, that all of this is purely speculation, and that the team has not, and will not detail their exact criteria to anybody.
Week 3:
Week 3 saw Points being distributed rather evenly, with the top Points earner ‘only’ receiving 474 Points, a stark contrast to week 2’s 50K Points for first place.
The shift in focus onto qualifying actions that increase Points for smaller accounts was likely to balance week 1 and especially week 2’s focus on higher collateral traders/MM’s on alts.
Again, this is all my own speculation, and an aggregation of the speculation of other degens on X.
Week 4:
Week 4 distribution of Points was similar to that of week three, with possibly a bit more focus on size than before, as Accounts with higher overall trading size did receive more Points, albeit not a whole lot more. Likely main focus was again something along the lines of OI and holding time.
Market Making on 01
Some people, like the account named URA, mentioned in the previous Week 1 Point analysis, have made use of the open API to create personalized MM bots, taking on the role of private Market Making before large quantities of Institutional Capital remove the edge any smaller entities might still have MM’ing on 01. You can check out his Market Maker bot here:
(https://github.com/yat1ma30/zo-market-maker-ts/)
Clans
Clans on 01 are essentially groups of traders limited to 50 members per group, with the Clan having total PNL, Win Rate, Trade and Volume scores. Clan leaders accept or decline join requests, with 01 requiring 500K volume to start your own Clan. There has been some speculation about things like Clan War events with Point rewards, with the Team recently releasing the following information:
Clan wars are to begin the 4th Points week, (starting from Tuesday the 24th of February) with every active Participants in the Clan victorious in the weekly competition enjoying a 10% Points boost for that week’s Points distribution.
More details on Clan Wars:
-Clans automatically participate if they must have 10+ active trading members with $10,000 in trading volume that week. A member must be in the clan for at least 5 days during the week for their activity to qualify towards that clan's score.
-Winning criteria is shared every three weeks, for the following three weeks.
Winning criteria for Weeks 4, 5 and 6 are:
-Week 4: most members with positive PnL ($100+)
-Week 5: most active members, based on trading activity every day
-Week 6: most volume generated as a clan, with hold time of 12+ hours
Read 01’s tweet on Clan Wars here and make sure to follow 01 for future updates on Clan War Criteria
Who is behind 01?
01 was founded by cited, who himself has provided a brisk but informative overview of 01’s background, which I have attached here, taken from the 01 discord ‘01-background’ channel.
“ 01 is building a perpetual exchange focused on structured strategies and mature markets.
In a post-throughput future where every chain does 100,000+ transactions per second, there are still many perpetual exchanges that focus on speed and liquidity. We believe that traders will decide where to trade based on what kind of markets are available and while speed and liquidity still matter, it won’t be the deciding factor as most high throughput chains can now support near-instant execution and deep liquidity by default. The differentiator becomes what you’re able to trade and how the DEX helps you capture edge.
In early 2024, the N1 team (Dima and David) came to me and asked me what I would like in a DEX. At that time I mostly did funding rate arbitrages and I wanted to trade more advanced strategies, specifically the ability to express how I think particular tokens (Eigenlayer, MOVE, Story) might underperform compared to their sectors. And even maybe the ability to short or long an entire VC’s portfolio.
After a few conversations, this became the heart and thesis of a dex called NOS, rebranded to 01 since the N1 team had access to the 01 IP and gave it to me. N1 isn’t just another generalized blockchain, each application has its own execution environment. This means compute limits become less of a factor as we’re not fighting for blockspace, allowing transactions to be very powerful and allows me to create the strategies to properly fulfill my vision of what the future of markets will look like. As well, their team felt genuine and I liked that instead of building just another L2, they were building from scratch and reinventing what a blockchain could look like. After building for the past two years, with a team of 6 mostly funded by myself with minimal outside funding from a few angels that were close friends of mine and very recently a small Echo community round ($500K~), 01 was on testnet for 6 months and have been testing for launch on mainnet for the past month. We didn’t market our testnet stats as I don’t like marketing without real substance, and despite this we have onboarded over 3000+ users to test 01 in the last month. I’m incredibly thankful and overwhelmed by the support. I remember asking June (@June) earlier this year what he thinks about 01 as the competition got more competitive and he told me that nothing has happened that invalidates my thesis and when we launch, we will feel better to be able to market a live product than just testnet fluff. Retrospectively, this was right. I’m excited to show the world what 01 is capable of, what our team is capable of, even as 01 is still playing catch-up against competition that has risen in the last year. Our team has demonstrated we are looking at things differently (our news features, clans, social features) and we’re talking to some of the biggest institutions in the world to help navigate the future of structured perpetual markets. Thank you for believing in me.
On a quick background on myself: I started crypto in 2016, was one of the earliest employees at an on-ramp, created partnerships with leading exchanges, counterparties, wallets, and spearheaded the creation of our OTC desk. After becoming a partner there and as the company grew to 300+ employees, I just missed startups too much and transitioned to running validators, discovering trading when hedging validator rewards. Was shitposting for a while as well and that’s where a lot of people might know me. Happy to be back building something again.”
Finally:
This article is obviously a work in progress, as 01 Devs continue to ship at a staggering pace, essentially making it hard to write an up to date article before it is rendered out of date again. I will try to update further on any news regarding 01 and N1 on my Twitter but I would also strongly recommend following 01 and N1 on Twitter, and joining their respective discords so as not to miss any updates or Announcements.
01 Dc: https://discord.gg/WCuGdzZvEz
N1 Dc: https://discord.gg/zJPMX6jKgJ
If you want to use 01 but still need an invite link, feel free to use mine: