I had the privilege of driving marketing and most go-to-market initiatives at bloXroute for slightly more than a year and a half before I joined Cumberland Labs at the end of 2023 to do the same, but now at the scale of a rising incubator.
The unstoppable Product-Led Growth (PLG) initiatives I had the chance to work on with the super-talented bloXroute folks were nothing short of remarkable, given the ROI we achieved with so few resources we chose to use.
My Point of View is that understanding of Product-Led Growth as a concept is massively lacking in the industry, which heavily contributes to the minuscule survival rate of startups.
*For context clarity, please keep in mind it was written in 2023.
What is a Product-Led-Growth Initiative?
The PLG initiative starts way before the go-to-market brief and never really ends as a marketing function. Rather than having a separation between sales and product, and marketing at the execution level, PLG brings together Product/Sales/Marketing as a constant operational pod in charge of the response ability to market feedback. This approach enables constant PLG evolution, rather than a one-and-done go-to-market by PMMs.
Marketing milestones
- Lean spent <$25K a year on paid promotions.
- 99% of the outlined events were obtained for free on a merit basis and/or because of alignment with the community.
- Field marketing done with strategic partners, kept budget <$2K for a 250-person 3-hour networking session.
- Read X from May 2022 to dive into MEV topics
Product Led Growth initiative #1 - "THE MERGE" - Connect to Survive
Summer 2022 - The Merge is finally a reality. The reality was pressing, given a tight timeline - 3 months to deploy our solutions on the testnet Goerli and then on the mainnet Beacon Chain. The main issue at hand was that bloXroute's core business was heavily dependent on the connectivity to the Proof of Work (POW) Ethereum miners. Thus, immediately after the last POW block was put on the chain, we had to be ready to propagate blocks to POS Ethereum validators. No downtime, no latency issues, just - "ready, set, Go." And bloXroute was ready to go. BDN or Blockchain Distribution Network has not skipped a heartbeat.
GTM #1 - Results:
- Over 200K connected ETH validators at the Merge transition
- More than 500K ETH validators a year later.
- One of many earned press examples - positioning bloXroute as a blockchain infra incumbent bloXroute helped to mint an NFT of Ethereum's Last POW block
Product Led Growth initiative #2 - "WE ARE BUILDING BLOCKS, BABY!" - Diversify to Grow
What I loved about bloXroute is that it was always about the bigger picture.
With the advent of Proposer Builder Separation (PBS), it only made sense for bloXroute to cement its position as a core infrastructure provider and venture into block building and relaying.
The prospects of making money were opaque at the moment, but this is a fast-paced Web3 world.
Web 3 game is entirely different - it's about building and creating ecosystems deeply integrated with all the players (top actors in your sector) and keeping your ear close to the ground to rapidly act on newly developing trends while distinguishing actionable and pivotal moments in the industry vs. everything else.
The commitment from the engineering team to support block-building initiatives is no easy walk to South Beach on a sunny day. This is a highly competitive area where milliseconds define the winner, who often takes it all. The cost of running the infrastructure solely for the relays can quickly rise to $500k annually and beyond.
GTM #2 - Results
- 35% of all Ethereum blocks are being sent to bloXroute relays daily.
- "Powered by bloXroute" - printed on-chain by bloXroute block builder helps a lot with branding, identity, and marketing reach.
- bloXroute has 2 relays. One is catering toward institutions and only allows OFAC complaint TXs, and the other one - bloXroute (max profit), which since The Merge has been the #2 relay by the amount of non-sanctioned TXs.
Product Led Growth initiative #3 - "PROTECT RPCs or ORDER FLOW MATTERS" - Flow to grow
Back in winter 2022, the entire industry was still recovering from the FTX debacle. However, at the infrastructure level, it was clear that a fight for order flow was soon to emerge. It was also clear that entities with access to the private order (coming directly to block-builders vs. default mempool routing) would have much more leverage than those without it.
But how can you access the order flow entirely unrelated to the core business to avoid any potential cannibalization of the existing product for traders - Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN)?
At this point, bloXroute decided to unbundle previously packaged services and made Private TXs free for everyone. Funny enough, Private TXs, per se, have nothing to do with the actual privacy of a TX, but they circumvent public mempools, where most attacks occur.
Here is a clear win-win situation. Access to Private TXs for free and mitigate the risk of being front-run with 0 investments. While bloXroute is routing, your TXs are getting one of the highest RPC inclusion rates in the industry, with approximately 90% of the blocks being included in the next block (n+1).
GTM #3 - Results
- 9 months since the launch of the product, bloXroute is averaging 500k daily not-a-paid-customer TXs across ETH, BSC, and Polygon.
Product Led Growth initiative #4 - "BACK RUN ME or GET YOUR MEV BACK or at least some of it."- Share to grow
2 main strategies have dominated the MEV world since its inception: frontrunning and backrunning. In general, someone spots your massive Tx in the mempool and decides to exploit it. It all has to happen atomically, meaning the whole attack must be executed within a single block or within 12 seconds on Ethereum.
First, the attacker needs to place her transaction in front of your TX. To make it happen, she needs to bribe/tip a validator to ensure that, specifically, her Tx will get into the same block with the Tx of interest. Then the victim's transaction creates a price impact that the attacker immediately exploits by selling into the victim's buy orders. Essentially, the victim's TXs are being sandwiched from both sides, hence the name - Sandwich attack or frontrunning more generally.
However, if you only take one part of this whole trade - the back-running one, and look for price inefficiencies on other DEXs or CEXs - this is not a malicious attack anymore. Now, it's arbitrage. Arbitrage is considered "good MEV" vs. frontrunning and sandwich attacks, which are "bad MEV."
Arbitrage is beneficial for ecosystems and end users. It connects together fragmented parts of the market, making price discovery more efficient and faster for all participating venues. It also makes spreads tighter. Hence, retail users can enjoy improved spot prices.
Now, bloXroute has two products: a retail-facing one and one specifically designed for DEXs and wallets. These products are designed only to extract good MEV and share it with the participants. If you are a DEX or a wallet and you decide to connect to the bloXroute "Ethical MEV" program, what will happen is that all the TXs routes through bloXroute RPCs will be checked if there is a potential for "good MEV," and if there is, the captured PnL will be split between all the participants, usually leaving the Tx origination source with the most significant chunk of the captured profits.
If you haven't noticed the underlying theme yet, I'll help you out. All these initiatives have a win-win design, making distribution not a matter of forced sales but rather an appeal to common sense and logic.
GTM #4 - Results
- Six months after the launch, connected 30+ implementation partners.
Not all launches dominate the market even if the product idea is right. Historically, bloXroute was the first infrastructure provider to share back some of the captured MEV. While it was truly a great idea, it never took off. I think we were too tight with marketing, and UX needed more refinement. However, another product launched with exactly the same idea - MEVblocker - became a huge overnight success, delivering back millions to users and generating millions in fees.
Maybe it just didn’t look that great 🤣 ( I was not the PM or PMM on it!)
Product Led Growth Initiative #5 - "Unlocking MEV for BSC."- Bundle up
Introducing Bundles on BSC took a lot of groundwork and aligned BD/marketing motions. But it was well worth it.
- BSC holds a solid second place, right after ETH, in terms of MEV TAM.
- Bundles contribute to the gas used on ETH, but they were hardly accessible on BSC.
- Market makers and professional trading desks employ bundles A LOT - when you send a bundle, it means that either all the TXs in the bundle will be executed or none of them - hence, it's a RISKLESS trade, and not only this, remember that bundles are atomic, meaning that your exposure is 12 seconds or even less.
So, if you need to attract market makers to your chain, ask yourself, do I have bundles?
GTM #5 - Results
50+ partners joined the waitlist to start using the BSC bundles API from day 1.
Product Led Growth Initiative #6 - "WTF SAM?"- Solana Trader API
While I've tried to outline most of the PLG bets with really great launch results behind them, let's be real. Being right is hard, and while it's your responsibility to make smart bets, there are things out of your control, like Solana, for example.
Solana has great tech.
As builders always recognize builders, it was only natural for bloXroute to commit to adding the first non-EVM chain to the suite of products - Solana. As you can imagine, given that it takes Solana anywhere from 250 to 350 ms to print a block, and the whole chain was designed to support 65K TXs per second, this commitment was quite costly.
Given the complexities of the Solana chain itself, multiplied by the nuances of the projects built on it, the idea was to streamline the trading experience on Solana for all institutions and market makers by creating infrastructure they can start using within less than 24 hours.
Solana Trader API value prop:
- CEX-like API allows you to trade on 5 different Solana venues using 1 entry point
- No need to run your own node to trade, bloXroute invests over $100K just to maintain this infrastructure, readily accessible.
- With the bloXroute Trader API, even on Solana, you can still get approximately 50-70 ms speed advantage over regular Solana p2p nodes (that are fast as af anyway)
Well, you all know how it went down, hence the current status.
GTM #6:
- The development of any new functionality is frozen. The existing infrastructure is being supported 100%.
Update as of 2026.
Although I was working at Hashnote, I’ve heard that there was a year when the Solana Trader API product broke all Txs and volume records to date. Who would have thought! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Post-Circle 2026 reflection.
Working across builders, institutional players, and fintech organizations gave me perspective. Looking back, my time at bloXroute really gave me a lot of fullfillent, general excitement for the new paradigm. And the most precious lesson: a year and a half of successful ecosystem building. Relentlessly expanding and growing with every GTM, every product launch, every iteration.
I spent countless hours with builders — trading teams, infra founders and their teams, protocol engineers — discussing MEV and how bloXroute changes their game. Grateful for the collaborations with Flashbots, the Solana hackathon team, EigenPhi — our marketing MEV partner, Allnodes, and Rocket Pool — where we got a chance to work together on creative activations, and with many other actors. 🙏
And deep respect to Brent and Justin — relentless on the BD front in DeFi infrastructure🙏 LFG🚀🚀🚀
At ETHDenver 2023