XDC Network celebrates two years since Mainnet launch 🚀
Nearly twenty-three years ago, to the day, my wife and I celebrated our 2nd Anniversary. On that night, we enjoyed dinner al fresco in Puerto Vallarta at Cafe de Artistes, secluding ourselves at a table within a garden oasis. While finishing our dinner, ready to order dessert, the waitstaff surprised us with a special arrangement. The restaurant had specifically crafted for us a combination of desserts, beautifully laid out on top of a flat mirrored serving plate. A bright white sparkler sat beside the dark delicacies, shooting sparks into the night air. As they placed the mirror on the table, my wife and I saw our reflections beside each other and we reminisced about where we have been, where we are right now, and where we might be going — only to get distracted by a handwritten message written in chocolate across the mirror. It read, “Happy 2th Anniversary.” (which we read as ‘Tooth’ Anniversary.)
Because their thoughtfulness left such an impression on us, we fought off the urge to laugh at their attempt to write 2nd — an endearing mistake which has become a lasting memory and story told many times since that day.
I find that it’s moments like these within our lives that connect us, weaving a thread from the past to the present — giving us an opportunity to reflect both on the magnitude of achievement and a faint glimpse at the road ahead.
In crypto, most people spend their time waiting for these moments — the next piece of news to break, the next hyper green day, the market rebound, etc. And they hope for the best. When challenging times bear down on the entire space, people just do their best just to carry on through another day. Crypto isn’t so different from marriage, because over time, through thick and thin, the more we do each day to move forward, the stronger that marriage gets, and the more rewarding the relationship becomes.
So in celebration of XinFin’s special occasion, the 2nd Anniversary of our Mainnet launch, I want to share some of the amazing milestones we have completed through both the good days and the bad and look to the future to see what is yet to come. While we may not be able to disclose the nuggets people really want to know, there is still plenty under the hood which we can discuss, as we work our way to our first live trade finance transactions on-chain (a moment which inches closer by the day as we align all the important pieces.)
A Growing Team Effort
After many years as an active community member, I officially joined the team in the beginning of February. My job is to develop our global ecosystem so that we can support the demand of the XDC Network’s enterprise clients. At that time, I was far from alone in working to support the team as there was a crew of long-time community members all working together by my side, and the team in Singapore continued to work in parallel, doing what they do best. We created a roadmap and set the course for what was yet to come — exchange listings, marketing making, wallet integrations, new custody solutions, and much more… including more things I can’t talk about… but it’s safe to say that since the start of 2021, XinFin has added significant firepower to our arsenal which has transformed our efforts on all fronts.
To describe the pace as fast and furious could actually be an understatement. The speed of development in this arena is fierce. Every day more and more outside-industry players are looking to get involved, and the space is starved for blockchain development talent. This is something we are seeing all across the industry — not just with XinFin. We had foreseen this challenge in the early days and therefore created Blockdegree to help fill that need. Lack of qualified developers has strained the industry at broad and has resulted in extended lead times for cross-chain and exchange integrations, while adding challenges to dApp development. However, we have worked to find solutions to all of these issues and are thriving in many of these areas.
To give a greater sense of the breadth of work going on we now have a thriving team based in the US with team members situated across the globe. We have team leaders in charge of onboarding and managing exchanges, developing and managing Market Makers to build liquidity and depth, Product Development, Communications, Legal and a team of top scientists who are working on our protocol to bulletproof our network, more to come on this in the coming days. Is there a new Sheriff in town?
We have created a new development team, which is already working on a roadmap to build out our services and strengthen our core dApps, and we have a team of Devs being thoroughly trained, through a intensive XDC Network course, to build on and support our network, which you can liken to a farm system for a professional sports team.
We are green and growing, seeing the importance of sustainability and scalability well in advance and positioning our network to be well-situated for the future. Results manifest because of the attention to detail we bring as a team to everything we do. We know what is desired and expected from a top 100 project in crypto. Congrats to the team for achieving that milestone this month!
The Building of DAO
The Chinese word Dao (or Tao) can be interpreted as the way. It can be considered a method of operating, where one is asked to put their trust in the greater movement of things.
“The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing,
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.
Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn’t let a thing slip through.”
~ The Tao Te Ching was written by Lao-Tzu, translation by S. Mitchell
When working within and building on the XDC Network, we want to communicate one message: participants are building on trust.
Many of our recent developments are built on the effort to form a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). While many have measured XinFin and found it to be equivalent, in form and function, to other private enterprises building blockchain protocols, the team has always held the vision of building an ecosystem that isn’t owned by any one party or partner, but instead is led and supported by the community. They have put their trust in us, and we are working diligently to extend that trust to other network participants and communities.
There is currently a team of over 40 community members working together to support the project in the areas mentioned above. Our ultimate goal is to have community members across the globe building on and supporting the network. And one of the many ways we are supporting that is through incentives offered by our bounty programs.
Our bounty programs offer opportunities for community members to support the project with development efforts and other integrations from exchanges to wallets to projects with whom we can interoperate. To help give a better understanding, our vision is similar to that of Ethereum or Bitcoin where people were incentivized to build and support the network. While Atul, Ritesh, and the team are working hard on deploying the network for its use cases and onboarding enterprises, we, as a community, are in the early early days. Even you who are reading this have a chance to make this decentralized ecosystem your own — much like early Bitcoiners and Ethereum users.
As all projects are unique, so too is Xinfin, specifically in how the team has developed a successful model to incentivize our community to be fruitful while working within and on top of the XDC Network. In time, our bounty program will be the fuel that powers the engine behind the network, and continues to incentivize developers to build. You can see evidence of these efforts with our integration with Gitcoin.
Ultimately, a DAO needs a Foundation to support the structure, development and activities needed for a vibrant ecosystem. Efforts are underway to create this structure as a non-profit entity from within the community. As with all the efforts we undertake, our focus is always community first and our Foundation (no pun intended.) When in place, the foundation will continue to honor the community, as we work together to support the growth of the network, deploy Dapps, and enable businesses to run programs successfully within our ecosystem.
What The Future Holds
So what has 2 years of live Mainnet brought us?
A solid foundation on which to build our future. Opportunities to turn the seeds of a brilliant idea by our founders, the Hybrid blockchain, into a robust living breathing ecosystem with enterprise and household participants. We are not a SAAS blockchain that charges businesses a fee to operate on-chain. Instead, we work to be a robust, complete ecosystem that not only offers the opportunity for private businesses to integrate their services onto our chain, but also incentivizes them to do so — a business model that creates profit centers for our partners, instead of cost centers.
This groundwork is all being laid today as we speak and the work we do is paving the highway for institutions and enterprises across the globe to tokenize off-chain real world assets and capitalize on the advantages of Blockchain for lending, borrowing and building a more efficient financial system. This system will be rooted on asset backed financial instruments.
So today, on our 2th Anniversary we want to share our appreciation with you the community. And we want you to know that we are really just getting started. The countdown to ignition is slowly ticking down and all the promise of our EVM compatible, enterprise ready Hybrid Blockchain is in place… ready for liftoff.
So in the words of another community member, “I am so privileged to be part of an ecosystem with a storied history, a track record of technological success, and an architecture that supports real world use cases. Yes, XDC is an enterprise-ready blockchain, but that is the product of founders who were forward thinking and champions of the network who are well connected. Today, the XDC Network is not just theirs, it is ours.”
I hand off the rest of this piece to a community-based team member to briefly recap our journey through another lens, to discuss our storied history, and to point out where we find the blockchain space today. Soon everyone will understand what has truly been built under the hood of the XDC Network.
Where the Moments Have Taken XDC
In many ways, the world of blockchain has been evolving to rendezvous with our initial vision at XinFin. We are at a crossroads, meeting with emerging blockchain solutions that we have long thought would lead to wide-scale adoption. And we are encouraged by what we see:
Enterprises, banks and institutions are coming forward with their interest in exploring blockchain technology, and private ledgers are being developed to meet their unique needs. Energy consumption and sustainability have entered center stage. Smart contracts are once again presenting their promise, while ecosystems reengineer their consensus mechanisms to remain scalable. DeFi has been thrust into the convincing currents of the mainstream, as native DeFi tokens are being discussed (even by celebrities) as a real-world solution for alternative asset investing, the foundational concept on which TradeFinex was built.
While our focus has been on and continues to be on enterprises and accredited investors in this regard, the retail use case is firmly held in our vision and SME’s will certainly benefit from industry advancements. Regulatory frameworks are being constructed at this very moment that will allow for such a future.
The team here at XinFin could choose to be discouraged by many new players entering this space and setting their sights on the fruits we have long held dear.
However, the XDC Network, a network of networks, doesn’t see competition, only interoperability. We, instead, are encouraged to see the market mature to recognize our ecosystem values and to clearly articulate a desire to work within the sustainable, enterprise-friendly infrastructure we have long-sought to provide.
And we believe we are well-positioned for this promising future, as the industry vision is finally catching up with our own.
In coming weeks and months, with our developments in trade finance, shifting regulatory tides, a scalable foundation and committed partners, we will harvest the apples of our eye, pass them down the line to the broader ecosystem, and one day, it will be the fruits of our labor that produce the trees to come.
We are proud of our past, especially the solid, forward-thinking foundation which we have built. We are demonstrating our workability now. We are looking towards a future horizon, abundant with opportunity.
We are XDC.
Happy 2th (Tooth) Anniversary to the XDC Network was originally published in XinFin on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.