Taraxa 2024 Retrospective
In 2024, Taraxa laid many infrastructure and dApp foundations focused on enabling DeFi and Social AI, strongly positioning Taraxa to capture the right narratives, attention, users and developers going into 2025.
Here are the highlights.
Key Successes in 2024
In 2024, Taraxa worked on two massive upgrades — Ficus and Cornus, successfully deploying Ficus with Cornus scheduled to deploy in the beginning of 2025. Together they contain massive numbers of optimizations, features, and fixes, including features such as the addition of Pillar Blocks to enable the bridge, enabling liquid staking, reducing un-staking delay from 32 to 7 days, account abstraction and more.
In 2024, Taraxa’s DeFi ecosystem has grown substantially, adding many foundational puzzle pieces,
- Ficus Root Bridge: a fully permissionless bridge between Taraxa and Ethereum, allowing cross-chain access to liquidity and assets
- DeFi Primitives: DEXs (e.g., taraSwap ), stablecoins (e.g., Meridian USDM ), oracles (e.g., Stork ), and many more joined Taraxa’s growing DeFi ecosystem.
- Cross-Chain Liquidity: the Ficus Root Bridge enabled the flow of liquidity across networks, and the Taraxa community generously delivered solid liquidity on the Ethereum ecosystem (in Uniswap ) as well as in the Taraxa ecosystem (in taraSwap ).
- Indexed by major DeFi Aggregators: DeFiLlama and DexScreener have both indexed and listed Taraxa’s DeFi ecosystem.
Taraxa’s Social AI ecosystem has grown significantly. The foundational Chappe (rebranded from Echo) network has matured, providing the world’s only source of continuous, real-time Telegram data from over 20k public crypto groups, attracting a great deal of interest from a large variety of partners in AI, eager to tap into this unique dataset. One particular social AI ecosystem project, trendMoon , has been gaining rapid traction with a variety of partners by helping provide analytics on early social trend detection and a set of automated bots executing social trend-driven trading strategies. We expect Taraxa’s Social AI ecosystem to continue to rapidly grow into the next year.
Key Takeaways in 2024
To grow the ecosystem, in-person business development is far more effective in generating real, lasting partnerships.
In the first half of the year, we primarily relied on digital outreach, with Taraxa’s Grant Program and a Hackathon as incentives. Results from these efforts were well-below expectations.
We shifted towards more in-person business development towards the second half of the year. This is done by re-allocating a portion of our dev team’s time to attend more in-person meetups and conferences that were geographically close to where they are, as well as recruiting a team member dedicated to in-person BD. The results from this kind of outreach has been a marked improvement over the digital-only method.
We will ramp up our in-person developer and project outreach to drive awareness for Taraxa’s technology and ecosystem.
Taraxa Outlook 2025
Developer Adoption remains the key focus for 2025 and beyond.
Here’s how we’re going to get there.
Layer-1 Optimization and Benchmarking
To ensure Taraxa's Layer-1 technology remains competitive, we will focus on optimizing its performance, such as throughput (TPS) and finality latency. Over the course of the past 7+ years, we've been focused on building a network that is functional and secure, now we'll dive into the long list of potential optimizations we could make to our Layer-1.
Our throughput has always been highly competitive, and in 2025 we'll prove it with a series of throughput optimizations and benchmarks performed directly on the mainnet. This makes the results visible and easily verifiable by all, and we'll also work with independent third parties to verify those results. Serious developers and applications care deeply about true performance actually achievable on the mainnet, instead of some secret network no one can see.
Our current finalization latency on the mainnet of 3.7s is highly conservative in favor of maximizing the liveness guarantee of the network. For years we had been aware of myriad ways to improve latency, and in 2025 we'll start to dig into some of them and reduce the finality latency of the network.
More In-Person Developer Outreach
In 2025, we will ramp up more in-person developer outreach - a key takeaway from 2024.
We will selectively sponsor one or more developer-focused events, incentivize developers to try out Taraxa's Layer-1 technology, and forging relationships with more dApp partners.
We will also continue to have a consistent in-person BD presence in as many developer-focused events within reason.
Post-Quantum Readiness
Building towards post-quantum readiness builds confidence with developers.
While not yet a clear & present threat, recent technical developments in post-quantum technologies point to an accelerated timeline. This coupled with NIST's increasingly maturing standards recommendations, we believe now is a good time to start laying the foundations for an eventual post-quantum migration.
A few initial steps we could take in 2025 include upgrades such as,
- Adding post-quantum cryptographic signatures into Pillar Blocks
- Adding pre-compiled post-quantum cryptographic primitives to the VM
- Creating an account-abstraction layer for post-quantum for easy migration
New cryptography should be implemented carefully and slowly. As we've been doing for years, we'll continue to closely track the progress of post-quantum standards and their implementations in crypto at large to ensure we bring the safest & most effective quantum readiness to Taraxa.
2025 will be a great year for the Taraxa ecosystem! Stay tuned! 🪁