Rook

mission

At Rook, we believe the value in your transaction belongs to you.

That’s why we've built the Rook Protocol: An open, transparent, and distributed MEV marketplace that captures a transaction's maximum value and hands it back to those who have the right to it.

This marketplace provides the fundamental architecture to allow DeFi to fulfill its promise of building a financial infrastructure that can outcompete TradFi, while maintaining the ethos of DeFi.

current challenges

• Creating and maintaining low-friction, high-quality end-user experiences 
• Creating and maintaining comprehensive documentation to allow users to understand the protocol (and hence use it more readily), and allow developers to more easily build on top of it as well as contribute proposals and integrations
• Developing a product strategy that can be communicated to orient, incentivize, or prioritize work in particular areas which are particularly beneficial 
• Sequencing our messaging so that the Rook brand and values are recognized and well-represented in the Ethereum ecosystem 
• Establish consistent outreach channels to onboard new users, market makers, liquidity providers, and other key stakeholders within the network
• Study, review, and potentially contribute to implementing positive governance proposals — especially proposals that come attached to working code that is built with or interacts with the protocol

culture & values

1/ Ownership

Value belongs to those who create it. Without users, applications, and protocols, there is no network. Profit shouldn't come at their expense, and they should be entitled to the maximum possible returnable amount of surplus value that their transactions create.

2/ Forward Thinking

Our contributors work to solve challenging problems that few have faced and to take DeFi and web3 into a better future. We have a strong vision, but we know that the landscape could look entirely different in a year, so we're agile enough to adapt to whatever the future has in store.

3/ Public Good

Rook’s operational goal is to reduce the information asymmetries that redistribute value away from those who create it by transforming MEV and other extractable forms of value into a public good. The Rook Protocol identifies and realizes value, and the DAO governs and sustains the resources necessary for the protocol and its stakeholders to succeed in Rook’s overall mission.

4/ Coordination

We win by coordinating, not by extracting. Rook is oriented to coordination by design; this design in turn incentivizes more participants, which only strengthens the competitive markets at the heart of our transaction engine. As a provider of transactional infrastructure, we also grow our network and its benefits by coordinating through strategic integrations with leading projects in DeFi.

history

The Rook (prev. KeeperDAO) project was first revealed in December 2019, as a joint effort between Amber Group and Talo Systems. Amber is Kullander's crypto trading and market-making firm, and Talo is a blockchain research firm run by Taiyang Zhang, who is also the CEO of DeFi protocol Ren. Kullander and Zhang jointly manage the project.

The Rook Labs team consists of world-class contributors with deep experience in blockchain automation, MEV, trading, and financial systems. We’re a remote team of over thirty contributors with alumni from Google, NASA, UBS, Citadel, Gemini, Apple, Shopify, Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and Imperial College London.

core team

Tiantian Kullander- Founding Member

Taiyang Zhang - Founding Member

Joey Zacherl - Founding Member

benefits

Working at Rook offers you the chance to work with the best, develop subject matter mastery, design your own work-life balance, create original products and research, operate in a Teal organization with great amounts of autonomy and freedom, advance the state of the art, and provide meaningful change to the world of finance.

The Rook Labs team consists of world-class contributors with deep experience in blockchain automation, MEV, trading, and financial systems. We’re a remote team of over thirty contributors with alumni from Google, NASA, UBS, Citadel, Gemini, Apple, Shopify, Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and Imperial College London.