2025 was the year Hoops stopped being “a promising idea” and started looking like what it really is: a compounding infrastructure company that ships.

We built with a (very) small team, under real constraints, in a market that rewards hype more than proof. And we still left the year with a stronger product, a sharper narrative, and a much clearer path to mainnet.

This is our 2025 recap - the wins, the experiments, the lessons, and what we’re preparing to launch next.

Our mission didn’t change:

What changed in 2025 is we turned that mission into systems investors can actually underwrite: repeatable shipping, measurable traction, and infrastructure that holds up under protocol upgrades and real-world weirdness.

In October, we shipped v0.5.0, a major step forward that unified identity, wallets, and developer access into a single, coherent platform.

What shipped:

Why it mattered: this finished our foundation layer. Secure onboarding, identity, and wallet rails are the prerequisites for everything that comes next on mainnet — smart accounts, vault rewards, reputation, and automated strategies.

We didn’t just “add passkeys.” We rebuilt auth so it’s something you can reason about and trust:

This is the kind of work users never notice and the kind that prevents existential failures later. It’s also a signal: we don’t ship fast by borrowing risk from the future

Blockchains evolve. Protocols upgrade. State management gets more sophisticated.

When indexers don’t adapt, they don’t usually crash — they quietly drift away from the truth.

Before Protocol 24, we had already invested in:

That work paid off - because in October, a state archival bug surfaced.

In short:

The impact was limited, and the network responded quickly. But for infrastructure builders, the lesson was clear: “almost correct” data is still wrong.

Because we had replay-first ingestion, raw transaction storage, and historical context baked in, we could:

Teams without those safeguards would never know they were off.

We treated this not as an edge case, but as a design constraint going forward:

It wasn’t flashy - but it significantly raised the reliability bar under everything we build.

We also rebuilt our markets stack from the ground up:

Even while heads-down building, we saw signals that matter:

We’re careful with numbers because we care about trust - but the direction is clear: Hoops is already becoming an infrastructure primitive people rely on. 

We completed our second accelerator in 2025 (Myosin x BuildOnStellar GTM), and won Best Go-To-Market Strategy for the cohort.

The real value wasn’t the recognition. It was the forcing function:

Around the same time, we were selected for the Draper University Founder Residency, where the focus shifted from messaging to company-building under pressure and fundraising constraints.

The value here wasn’t demo days or optics - it was proximity and the network effect:

It reinforced something we already believed: strong infrastructure companies aren’t built by chasing momentum - they’re built by surviving friction and still shipping.

Meridian 2025 mattered because it exposed our story to serious ecosystem scrutiny -the kind that forces a company to mature quickly.

We pitched, took real questions, and left with stronger positioning:

Trustfall didn’t start as “let’s build a game.” It started with a more deliberate question:

Can we use the lessons of game theory to study real user behavior, strengthen our algorithms, test core product assumptions with near-zero friction, and uncover an entirely new market for Hoops?

What emerged was far more than an experiment. Trustfall became a parallel expression of the Hoops product - one that attracted a different type of user, generated high-signal behavioral data, and validated core mechanics long before mainnet risk was involved.

In 2025, we shipped:

None of this was ornamental. Every system mirrored a real Hoops primitive: identity, incentives, persistence, trust, and long-term outcomes.

The key insight was translation.

The same underlying product can be understood through multiple frameworks:

And it worked.

Trustfall drove strong engagement, repeat participation, and unusually high-quality feedback. More importantly, it gave us a safe, low-friction environment to:

Trustfall became a live research surface - one that feeds directly into how we design onboarding, reputation, risk signaling, and automation for mainnet.

Different interface. Same system. Stronger product.

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that financial infrastructure rarely fails from a single dramatic bug. It fails from accumulated compromises. Many small “we’ll fix it later” decisions that compound into fragility.

We made a different call.

Across the year, we consistently chose paths that were slower in the moment but meaningfully faster over the long run:

This is what building mainnet-ready infrastructure with a small team actually looks like: fewer headlines, more compounding. The payoff isn’t hype, but trust earned quietly, one invariant at a time.

Our path to mainnet has been deliberate by design. The priority has never been speed for its own sake, but readiness that holds up under real usage.

Today, our preparation is anchored around four principles:

We won’t commit to public dates here. The standard is simple: ship when it’s ready, and prove it through behavior, not timelines.

That said, the sequencing is clear:

This is not exploratory work anymore. It’s execution against a well-defined target state.

In 2026, we expect to explore a Seed round - selectively. We’ll share more when it’s real. Until then, the focus stays where it belongs: product proof, reliability, and distribution leverage.

We’re also excited about a set of partnerships we’ve been quietly building to make Hoops more useful immediately, not someday:

When these land, the signal will be obvious: more places where Hoops shows up, more volume and strategies flowing through the stack, and more developers choosing us as default infrastructure.

Hoops isn’t growing because we got lucky.

It’s growing because we built a loop:

With a small team, we proved we can:

If you’re a builder: we’re here, we’re shipping, and the platform is getting sharper.

If you’re an investor: 2025 is the year we proved we can turn ambition into infrastructure. 2026 is about making that infrastructure unavoidable.

Onward.

— Hoops Finance