As we all know, 2021 has been a strange, often difficult, and occasionally wonderful year 👽🙀🧝🏼♀️. However, amidst difficulty lies opportunity, and blockchain has certainly found a strong foothold throughout the world over the past 12 months.
Overall, the xDai (now Gnosis) Chain experienced a ton of growth, adoption, and usage in 2021📈! Due to an enthusiastic user base and dedicated projects, the number of transactions, accounts and other chain metrics reached new heights🌳.
Here are a few highlights from the year that culminated in a new name - Gnosis Chain (GC) - and an exciting new direction for 2022!
The year began with some important integrations
Dune Analytics support gave us a way to track usage from many different viewpoints. Our resident Dune guru maxaleks has since created many dashboards to look at usage, merge statistics, bridge transactions, specific projects like Tornado and Curve, and anything else you can hope to track on the GC. His dashboards can be found at https://dune.xyz/maxaleks
Perpetual Protocol also integrated with the chain shortly before the new year, and celebrated 1 month on the chain in January 2021. Their growth and influence in the space has exploded, and are still responsible for the majority of transaction fees by project per day on the GC.
→ In January 2021, the xDai chain celebrated 10 million transactions!
Over the following several months, many important projects onboarded. RealT, Origin Trail, Hopr, SushiSwap, Orchid, Giveth, Superfluid, Eporio, Cardstack and many others announced integrations. Chainlink Price Feeds continued to expand on xDai, allowing many projects to onboard and use their data oracles.
In March, the xDai chain announced a $2M bug bounty on Immunefi for the Omnibridge. At the time, this was the largest bounty in the space and highlighted the commitment to security the chain is known for. Once projects were in place, more services came onboard. DeBank announced an xDai integration, and API support came from Ankr, Anyblock and GetBlock.
When May rolled around, the chain was ready for the Berlin HF, fulfilling the directive to stay closely aligned with Ethereum. Two new projects also launched at that time, cementing the xDai Chain's reputation as a progressive environment for unique projects. DarkForest launched v0.6, and Crypto stamp from the Austrian Post dropped their first NFT stamps.
The Summer of Scaling
In June, transactions and accounts had a big upswing due to Dark Forest v0.6 Round 2 (transactions) and Swarm onboarding (daily active accounts). This continued throughout the “Summer of Scaling” where we saw a Curve deployment, Sushiswap incentives for users, and Nethermind and Cowswap brought MEV (Miner Extractable Value) to the chain. A Tornado Cash deployment increased user privacy, and several security audits were completed for new functionality related to consensus and bridging.
As Autumn approached, Agave launched a much needed lending application, and xDai Punks and xDai Tigers brought scalable NFTs to the ecosystem.
The team was able to attend LisCon in October, a welcome return to in-person conferences and a chance to reconnect with friends. It was in some of these meetings that the idea to combine Gnosis and xDai forces started to become a reality.
Soon, in November, a merge proposal was advanced, and the teams participated in an AMA to answer community questions and concerns. EIP-1559 was implemented a few weeks prior to voting for the merger, which began in early December.
The results were clear when the voting was finished on December 7. A vast majority of the community (90%+) supported the merger, and the name was officially changed from xDai Chain to Gnosis Chain.
That’s a lot packed into a year!
And it doesn’t include many of the smaller, homegrown, DAO-focused and experimental dev-focused projects that make Gnosis Chain so special. We’ve followed a winding path to get where we are - choosing an organic and sustainable approach to growth. In 2022, we are primed for expansion on a much larger scale due to the merger, but will always keep in mind the dev and user community that has supported the chain from the beginning.
In 2022 the focus for the Gnosis Chain will turn to the Eth 2.0 merge and how we can compliment, support, and provide a vital front-running network for the massive scalability coming to the Ethereum ecosystem. The Gnosis Beacon Chain is live! We will see many more validators and projects onboarding in the new year. It’s an exciting time, and we can’t wait for what’s to come!
See you on-chain,
The Gnosis Chain Team
PS. Remember that 10M transactions in January? It now stands at over 80M! Many thanks 🙏to the projects, participants and supporters of the Gnosis Chain!
Good program
The best