Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2022
Hello all,
Recording steady growth in its ecosystem and with new leadership at the helm, Zilliqa began 2022 on a strong note. The ZILHive 2021/2022 accelerator demo day, our new ZRC-6 NFT standard and launches from projects like Beanterra and Heroes of Lowhelm, all played an integral role in this growth and in generating consistent community engagement.
Behind-the-scenes, everyone from marketing, dev to the platform teams are putting an incredible amount of work into building Metapolis into the ultimate XR experience for all users — rivalling the best-of-the-best in the market and superseding hype with value-driven, utility-based digital experiences [*We assume you’ve already seen the wonderful teasers 🙂].
In the spotlight: Events and Interviews
- ZILHive demo day: We showcased the latest ZILHive accelerator batch teams and their efforts into growing the Zilliqa DeFi landscape and application layer. Projects included Cerchia (InsurTech dApp), Access Metaverse (outside-in adoption by combating ticket scalping) and several others.
- Web3 by Tech Circus: Sandra Helou, Head of NFT and Metaverse spoke at this virtual event on the role of UX/UI as a fundamental part of Web 3.0’s coming of age. She spoke about how it can give the industry the push it needs to bring developers’ brilliant software work to life on Web3 — making blockchain seamless, usable — and in fact, invisible to the wider world of users.
- CPP @ POPL 2022: Honouring its legacy and in a gesture to give back to the academic community that is so crucial to the development of the crypto space, Zilliqa was proud to virtually support the annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Language, a forum for the discussion of all aspects of programming languages and programming systems — for the second year in a row!
- Zilliqa on the Paul Barron Show: Sandra H., our Head of NFT and Metaverse, took the audience through what they can expect for Metapolis, our highly immersive and engaging XR-based metaverse whose launch is on-going in phases. We’ve received fantastic feedback from the community on the teasers, features and promised functionalities!
- Zilliqa on the GeckoCon Panel: In November 2021, our Head of NFT and Metaverse Sandra Helou was on GeckoCon’s NFTs Gone Wild Panel with Chris Clay of Immutable X to talk about VR, AR and gaming in crypto. You can now catch the recording using the above link!
Metapolis and Zilliqa City Roadmap
…and speaking of amazing functionalities, we’ve released the roadmaps for both our upcoming metaverse, Metapolis as well as our special zone within the metaverse called ‘Zilliqa City’. It’s full of exciting features such as fully customisable avatars and environments and a Play-to-Earn questing system. These roadmaps will definitely be of interest to creators looking to build on Metapolis as well as community members eager to participate and Check out the videos below for more details.
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The Ultimate “Creator Token Standard” is here!
The Metapolis launch phases, detailed above, will be strengthened by the implementation of our new NFT token standard — the ZRC-6, which was finalised recently thanks to public feedback from our community! ZRC-6 will enable greater functionalities for NFTs on our blockchain. They will help Zilliqa NFTs be more energy-efficient and also allow creators to receive different forms of royalties in their NFTs — providing flexibility and creativity for those minting on our blockchain.
Ecosystem Project Updates
GameFi projects launching on Zilliqa
The GameFi space on our blockchain saw two new entrants in the month of January. We’ve seen two promising projects launching their ILOs and NFT mints.
- Heroes of Lowhelm completed their pre-sale for Oki stakers on Okipad, and their public sale went live on 28th January. This turn-based mobile game aims to bring a high-quality P2E experience with its anime-inspired artwork. They’ve also announced a partnership with Definite Studios, a 120 strong game design and development studio that specialises in 2D anime art, to bring the game to life.
- Beanterra, a project incubated by ZILHive, had their NFT mints launched this month. An Axie-inspired strategy game, Beanterra incorporates sustainability with its Beanz token, which can be earned through real-world actions such as recycling. They’ve released a gameplay trailer, showcasing what users can expect from the game. With mechanics such as terrain and relics, this one is sure to excite strategy game enthusiasts.
TokenTraxx TGE date announced
Our partner TokenTraxx has announced its Token Generation Event (TGE) date as 14 March 2022. TokenTraxx is a revolutionary NFT marketplace built by musicians with years of industry expertise under their belts. The platform aims to take the power back for music lovers, extracting more from the value chain for consumers, curators and creators. TokenTraxx’s TGE will take place on Ethereum but the token will eventually be bridged over to Zilliqa and the dApp will be powered by Zilliqa. For more details on the TGE, read their press release here.
Carbon Token’s CarbSwap Launch Process
We’re proud to share that another project in our ecosystem plans to launch their DEX soon! Carbon Token, which is a project building a suite of Web3 solutions from DEXes to L2 Scaling solutions, has detailed their CarbSwap launch in this blog article.
We’re excited to see new DeFi protocols launching within our ecosystem, giving users a wider array of options on how to maximise their assets on our blockchain. Make sure to follow Carbon to stay updated on their launch timelines!
Huobi SSN is now live!
Huobi now runs an SSN for Zilliqa. Huobi has joined our family of SSNs, running their own nodes to allow their users to stake with them — in turn, enhancing the accessibility of our staking options to centralised exchange users.
Language and Platform Updates
New Scilla features in the works to help developers!
- We are now testing compiled Scilla on the isolated server internally and plan to soon make this available for public testing. Here’s why this is crucial.
- Meanwhile new Scilla features, such as support for time stamps and code hashes are in the works and are planned for the next Scilla release.
- The Scilla cookbook has also been introduced. A community-driven resource, the cookbook aims to help aspiring Scilla developers with learning Scilla through recipes that relate to certain functions of a Scilla smart contract.
- We also plan to enable the Scilla external library in the upcoming release. A mainnet upgrade will be scheduled in the near future to integrate this new release, as well as the next Scilla version.
Platform Updates
We are currently in the midst of preparations for the next release of the Zilliqa core (v 8.2.0), which will mainly include bug fixes and improvements around data syncing and network communication.
The availability of Zilliqa Research-operated seed nodes is also something we are addressing in the core protocol. These nodes service blockchain data requests from both our public API and community-owned nodes. Until now, these seed nodes have been associated with their static IPs, in a similar way miner nodes are identified upon joining the mainnet. By integrating a DNS service around the seed nodes, dynamic IP changes (as well as seed scaling to adjust to real-time traffic) will now be visible to other nodes in the network.
Network Stats
In January, we recorded an increase in transactions made compared to December. The network saw a growth of 82,000 transactions (an approximate 5% growth vs December 2021). This could be attributed to another XCAD’s new DEX in our ecosystem, which became the DEX with the highest total value locked a mere month into their launch.
Another token that is driving up on-chain activity in our ecosystem is LunarCrush’s LUNR token. Launched in November 2021, the LUNR token grew to approximately 52,000 holders, with about 560,000 transactions being made on the token. With more dApps being launched soon such as Carbon’s CarbSwap, we can’t wait to see our network activity grow in the months to come.
Looking ahead
2022 kicked off on a solid note, and now we turn our attention and energies to the big goals we’ve got for the upcoming months. As we march towards our goal of being the layer-1 metaverse platform-of-choice for brands and creators, Zilliqans can also expect a detailed tech roadmap this Q1. Keep an eye out on our social media accounts and blog as we continue to reveal exciting updates across partnerships, launches, events, community strategy, hiring and more!
For further information, please refer to:
- Telegram
- Discord
- Github
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2022 was originally published in Zilliqa — Official Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.