# 6 Month Birthday Celebrations By [AYIN](https://paragraph.com/@ayin-2) · 2024-02-14 --- We made it! Is there a lot to celebrate? We think so! ----------------------------------------------------- On August 1st 2023 we turned live the first DEX in the Alephium ecosystem. Not just the first DEX but also the first D’App - and accompanying our quest we set out to answer a few questions… Can we build a successful DEX using the Ralph code base? Can we interface with the ALPHred virtual machine? Can we build a community around our vision of fintech products? Is all the incredible promise of the Alephium ecosystem real - does all of its bleeding edge innovation stack up in real life? The first (of many causes) for **HUGE** celebration is that we can now answer **ALL** of those questions with an emphatic **YES!** And what we’ve accomplished in these last six months provides us (and cryptoland) with a decisive rubber stamp for all things extraordinary about Alephium. In this short passage of months our ‘experiment’ has surpassed all expectations: ![Numbers our community should feel proud of - and it's just the beginning!](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/882b653fa6c3d1ff36bae98c8f9bc0fed1c2484880cb5496b88d21890a63963b.png) Numbers our community should feel proud of - and it's just the beginning! The cogency of evidence provided by all this success has been cause for much plotting and planning amongst the AYIN collective. The next big question on our horizon \[and one asked just a teeny bit by our community 🫣 \] is **where do we go next?** Cue: \*\*HUGE NEWS! \*\* We now have laser clarity on what we need to do, and over the next few weeks and months we are going to drip feed our communities with a torrent of lava hot ALPHa on just how incendiary the $AYIN future is looking 🔥🔥🔥. ### DOUBLE DOWN, TRIPLE UP. What’s also become clear is that with so much ambition in the pipeline we are going to need a bigger boat! To this end, we are thrilled to announce that we are growing the team considerably - not to mention adding another 4 headcount to our dev team. We are doubling down on our resolve to provide the very best suite of de-fi products to Alephians and we are tripling up on our ambition (and resource base) to deliver all this and more to our communities in 2024. Over the next weeks and months we have tons of firebrand ALPHa to drop - in the coming days we are going to be introducing new team members, we have a road map reveal (some of which is already nearing release) and we’re quietly confident you’re going to love love love what’s coming next …so Happy Valentines day mofo’s 😍 We are also committed to providing more frequent & more enriched communications from the team - this is the first missive of many - and without giving too much away 🫢 the next ones may have more ALPHa on: new products coming out, the fact we may be working on more pairs, may be even more ways to earn, and maybe… 😳 ? What we can confirm today is that we are busy rebuilding our entire backend stack for more robust scalability, and that from where we are sitting the future of AYIN is looking tasty af 😉 😅 . If, in this first six months we’ve been busy giving the Alephium ecosystem a good poke, testing protocols, and exploring ways to fuel the rocket - then strap in ladies and gentlemen, degens, and AYINista’s …prepare for takeoff as we jettison your galactic journeying with us in to entirely new dimensions. More coming soon™️ --- *Originally published on [AYIN](https://paragraph.com/@ayin-2/6-month-birthday-celebrations)*