Aerodrome voting opens May 28. Mainnet Launch: June 4.
This quarter, AI started writing its own exploits. Tea is shipping the trust layer underneath it. Code Is Abundant. Trust Is Not.
In the span of seven days, the ground beneath the software shifted twice. On May 4, The Conversation published the most widely-circulated post-mortem yet of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, the frontier model Anthropic itself declined to release, because it can autonomously discover zero-days, generate working exploits, and execute multi-step cyber operations with minimal human oversight.
Days later, Google’s Gemma 4 landed inside Android’s AICore and Google AI Edge, putting agentic code generation, function calling, and offline reasoning on every developer’s phone and laptop under an Apache 2.0 license.
The implication is unavoidable. When any device can generate, execute, and weaponize software autonomously, trust cannot live in the binary. It has to live at the source.
Tea: the value layer for open source
Tea is the provenance, attribution, and verification layer for a world where code is written by agents faster than humans can audit it. Every package, every contribution, every dependency, cryptographically attributed, continuously verified, and economically aligned with the people and systems that built it.
Tea goes live on Aerodrom: the liquidity engine of base meets the trust layer of software
The moment Tea lists on Aerodrome, the two fastest-moving primitives in crypto collide: Base’s deepest liquidity venue and the first on-chain provenance layer built for the agentic AI era. Working with Aerodrome is a statement. It’s known as the place where Base’s most serious assets route. Tea chose Aerodrome because a trust layer for software should launch into the most battle-tested, transparent, community-governed market structure on-chain, not a centralized orderbook pretending to be neutral.
From block one, $TEA liquidity on Aerodrome means: verifiable on-chain routing, deep vote-directed emissions, and a price surface every trader, investor, and builder can see in real time. Aero flywheel + Tea provenance = a launch where the market structure is as credible as the technology’s pricing.
“Code is abundant. Trust is not,” said Tim Lewis, leading Tea’s launch. “Mythos showed us AI can write its own exploits. Gemma 4 put that capability in every pocket. The question isn’t whether agents will ship software (because they already are). The value of contribution will be weighed in inference and tokens and whether anyone can verify what they shipped. That’s what Tea is for.”
About Tea
Tea is building the software verification layer for the agentic era, serving as a decentralized protocol for provenance, attribution, and trust in open-source software. With open source running almost everything today, TEA provides the essential economic infrastructure to help people support it. Validated directly at the source, the protocol enables the community to verify work, understand dependency graphs, and govern what truly matters, ultimately empowering AI agents to build with better context.
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