2023: the Year of the Next Wave
2022 has been one of the most intense years at Connext. We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved — and even more excited about what’s coming in 2023.
The overall crypto market has seen some chaotic phases with the collapse of Luna, 3AC, FTX, and others that sent shockwaves through the industry.
Nevertheless, we have been building nonstop to reach our vision: secure interoperability for protocols and users alike. This is not our first bear market, and everything that happened this year made our protocol more resilient, and us even more convinced that we need a decentralized and trust-minimized public good that can resist the greed, mistakes, and inefficiencies of traditional infrastructure.
A Year of Research and Development.
2022 will be remembered as the “heads down and build” period for the Connext team.
Intensive research led us to several breakthroughs, first around the introduction of modularity (separation of liquidity and messaging layer), then into an optimistic+fast liquidity architecture that ultimately evolved into our hub and spoke model that plugs into AMBs.
As we continue exploring innovative designs within the single layers (including what is not feasible), the modular approach that wraps all layers allows Connext to be not only the most trust-minimized interoperability protocol in the space, but also the most flexible and future-proof solution.
The results of our research helped to inform the architecture that ultimately became the Amarok network upgrade. Our testnet has now been live and stable for a couple of months, and with our mainnet deployment complete, we are just a few weeks away from the public launch of Amarok.
A Year of Hackathons
Last year we participated in and sponsored 5 major hackathons and a multitude of other events.
- ETHDenver — February
- ETHAmsterdam — April
- ETHNY — July
- EthOnline — September
- ETHIndia — December
These activities were critical for us to gather feedback from developers and make sure we were building a platform that was easy to use yet powerful and flexible.
As we have validated this, the protocol will be able to scale quickly in the following months.
A Year of Community Strengthening
We are grateful to have such a strong community of crosschain enthusiasts that grew considerably this year.
Thanks to the Contributor Program announced in April, skilled, smart, and passionate individuals have become part of the Connext ecosystem to support our path to success (if you haven’t yet, join them here!).
There are now developers, creatives, and infrastructure experts spread across the globe that support our mission. A special thanks to all the community leaders and moderators too:
The future ConnextDAO is in good hands.
In the broader space, builders, and innovators grouped together online and offline, and it was fantastic to engage in conversations with projects of the caliber of Arbitrum, The Graph, Yearn, Optimism, and many more in our WhatsNext series:
- WhatsNext for Liquidity
- WhatsNext for Composability
- WhatsNext for DAOs
- WhatsNext for Secure Infrastructure
2023: the Year of the Next Wave.
If 2022 has been the year of the L2s, with many rollups gaining traction in usage and TVL, 2023 will be the year to interconnect them with each other.
2023 will be the year for Connext to become the preferred communication layer thanks to the Amarok upgrade, and grow into a fully decentralized ecosystem. We have started to onboard new independent teams that will contribute to the protocol, and, on top of the notable integrations already announced (Metamask, Keep3r, Fuji Finance, Gnosis Guild, …) plenty of new partnerships are already in progress, and we can’t wait to tell you all about them.
The path ahead of us is still a long one, but we believe all the pieces of a puzzle that started 5 years ago are finally coming together.
Connext will become a ubiquitous public good that truly enables a safe, open, composable Web3. We are glad to have you onboard in this journey.
About Connext
Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers who are looking to build secure bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.5b in transactions have securely crossed the network.
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