Taraxa 2023 Retrospective
{ Awareness }
2023 put Taraxa on the map.
After our mainnet launch in April of 2023, Taraxa achieved significant recognition in the market for our technical innovations in creating the first natively EVM-compatible smart contract platform with true finality on top of blockDAG. The credit goes to our community, who relentlessly drove the message of Taraxa and blockDAG throughout the larger crypto ecosystem.
Supporting the community's efforts was the dev team, who built & built & built, regardless of market conditions. They delivered a stable mainnet launch, smooth token conversion, a major mainnet upgrade (Magnolia), stable indexer, RPC cluster, and innumerable upgrades to the community site and explorer, enhancing Taraxa's network security + stability, and elevating the community's user experience.
Here are some highlights.
⭐ Successes in 2023
Taraxa's mainnet was successfully launched on April 3, 2023 along with the native token conversion. The mainnet is the first and only EVM-compatible, PoS blockDAG network with true finality & dynamic block generation. Taraxa's mainnet has remained in stable operation without interruption since launch.
After Taraxa's mainnet launch, we were able to successfully capitalize on the rapidly increasing awareness for the revolutionary blockDAG architecture at the core of Taraxa network's Layer-1 technology stack. Taraxa gained a great deal of market attention as a result, receiving over multiple millions of impressions on Tweets mentioning Taraxa. The core dev team was also very fortunate and honored to get to know the inventors of blockDAG , who authored the original 2018 Phantom GhostDAG paper and founded the Kaspa project.
The Taraxa community successfully completed its first governance vote to cap the total supply of $TARA . This marks the beginning of Taraxa becoming not just a more sustainable ecosystem, but our evolution towards a much more decentralized governance model. This change to the Taraxa protocol is called Aspen and will be pushed to the mainnet in 1Q 2024.
Magnolia, a major network upgrade successfully took effect on the mainnet in December, 2023. It contains almost an entire year worth of fixes, improvements, and new features. The upgrade took effect without a hitch with no network disruptions, marking an excellent precedent for all future upgrades to the Taraxa network.
☹️ Disappointments & key takeaways in 2023
The Hype app didn't quite live up to our expectations in driving awareness for the Taraxa ecosystem. It was, however, very successful at demonstrating the power of the decentralized Echo social data analytics network. We have received quite a bit of organic developer interest in the platform and should be seeing a slew of ecosystem projects emerging in 2024 leveraging Echo.
Key takeaway: instead of betting on any single app, we should focus on how to drive developer adoption.
Let's see how we can take it to the next level in 2024. 💪
Taraxa Outlook 2024
{ Dev Adoption }
The primary focus of 2024 will be driving developer adoption for Taraxa's revolutionary technology. To drive developer adoption, we will focus on enabling infrastructure and aggressive developer outreach.
Our forward-looking plans are outlined in Taraxa's Rolling Dev Roadmap .
Enabling Infrastructure
Taraxa's core dev team will focus on building technical infrastructure to enable ecosystem developers to build on the Taraxa network more easily.
- Ficus Root Bridge: a truly decentralized cross-chain bridge that connects Ethereum and Taraxa, giving the Taraxa ecosystem access to a far richer range of assets, including stable coins.
- DeFi primitives: reference implementations of common primitives such as AMM and lending, making it dead-easy for developers to build the DeFi stack on Taraxa.
- Ecosystem tooling: features such as token-awareness in the explorer, ecosystem hub, etc. to make the community's lives easier.
Developer Outreach
Programs and demonstrations designed to make the Taraxa ecosystem more attractive to developers is the second half of the plan to drive developer adoption.
- Hackathons: designed to market Taraxa to developers through a combination of digital outreach, demos, workshops, and of course prizes to help raise Taraxa's profile in the wider web3 developer community.
- Grant Program: aimed to provide financial support as well as business mentoring to promising projects that can potentially make unique contributions to the Taraxa ecosystem.
- Technical demos and workshops: designed to highlight not only Taraxa's technical prowess, but also its unique properties (e.g., front-running resistance) and ecosystem (e.g., decentralized social analytics) to further strengthen our differentiated offering.
Together, we'll make 2024 a transformational year for the Taraxa ecosystem!
Stay tuned! 🪁