With recent months having renewed price action we might forget the trials and achievements of the rest of 2023. The year started with a full blown bear market but this did not deter Liquify to build further towards a blockchain ecosystem with less reliance on centralised cloud servers. We can confidently say 2023 was a year of getting closer to our mission’s end goal.
Staying True to our Mission
Liquify was founded in 2021 with a clear vision. Blockchain services are too reliant on a handful of cloud providers that could disrupt entire chains with outages and centralised decisions. The answer to this problem is building more bare metal server options to choose from, creating more reliable and cost effective alternatives and ending the addiction to cloud hosting.
With every new public RPC point we spin up, every new Archival Node going live maintaining the full history of a chain and every new Seed Node helping others have more decentralised options to sync from, we are building towards this end goal. All powered by our self owned bare metal servers, through which we can proudly say we have been well above our 99.95% uptime, as guaranteed by SLA. Thereby providing reliable and robust infrastructure for the many communities we serve.
2023 Was a Year of Unprecedented Growth for Liquify
At the start of the year Liquify was running nodes of about 40 chains, already surpassing most other infrastructure providers by a margin of 10–20 chains. During 2023 we have increased our coverage 50% to just over 60 chains!
RPCs are the bloodline of DeFi, making sure all your favourite DApps pull up the correct historical data and do not liquidate your recent gains by accident. Liquify offers RPCs on all the above chains and runs public endpoints for Web3 foundations. This is well shown in our yearly numbers, growing from 200M RPCs a day to over 500M! A 250% growth, making sure all our partners do not have to worry or waste time on downtime. Read more on node tradeoffs and how Liquify can support your project here.
During the year we have ramped up our validator services and are now staking on 25+ different chains. Our TVL has grown accordingly with ~180% this year to reach $200M. Liquify’s validator services are non-custodial, making it an ideal partner for funds such as TRGC and several Web3 foundations who require consistent uptime and prefer spending their own time on research and development.
THORChain, Aleph0, DFK and Lido, to Name a Few
Our presence is growing through EVM, Cosmos and Polkadot ecosystems. To shine some light on the type of projects we work on we chose a couple projects Liquify works on.
THORChain reached ATHs in volume and became the 3rd most used DEXs during November. Liquify is proud to say that we have been supporting THORChain and the Foundation a lot longer. As bonders in THORChain need to run nodes of each chain THORChain is connected to, Liquify is a perfect match. As we run nodes on around 60 chains, projects like THORChain, Maya Protocol, Paloma and other multi-chain focused protocols, which otherwise mean heavy requirements for most validators, actually are cost effective to run for us.
Early this year Liquify built a prime THORChain dashboard, fully customisable for Bonders to view their personalised performance.
We are committed to providing continuous updates and make sure our bonders have the best service possible! We build customisable dashboards for multiple projects, if you want to provide your community with high quality information, read more about our dashboards here.
Within the Polkadot world one parachain in specific has recently been gaining traction and catching eyes, Aleph0. Aleph Zero is a layer 1 that enables teams to deploy scalable, secure, low-cost, and ZK privacy-enhanced products across multiple verticals — from DeFi and gaming to enterprise. 2023 was the year Aleph0 saw smart contracts going live and community validators representing 80% of the block producing nodes. Liquify among them!
Most of our RPC usage originates from DeFi Kingdoms and its multi-chain deployment. DeFi Kingdoms by now has deployed on Harmony, its own Subnet and the Klayton chain. This GameFi project needs a constant stream of blockchain information to keep its game running smoothly, and each millisecond of latency impacts the gamers experience. To get a glimpse of how much is going on within these kingdoms, check out our recent summary update here.
One of our more recent efforts have focused around the new sector of DVTs. DVT enables Ethereum PoS Validators to be run on more than one node, enhancing resiliency and reducing slashing risks for all validators, thus making staking more robust and accessible. Multiple projects have sprung up to facilitate this new development, among which the clusters of Obol and SSV are now supported by Liquify nodes and used by Lido for its stETH.
True Global Reach, Upped our Security and Tripled our Team Size
In order to support the growing global blockchain community, our inhouse setup had to follow suit. With more chains, higher amounts of RPCs and ever growing TVL, we have been expanding Liquify itself to meet demand.
At the beginning of the year, Liquify operated bare metal servers in four global regions. We’ve now expanded by 50%, adding servers on both coasts of the USA and in Singapore, complementing our existing locations in the UK, Germany, and Japan.
Owning our own servers comes with security benefits, and we take pride in our setup. We are happy to say none of our mainnet validators have ever been slashed and our setups remain secure. This year we have beefed up our firewalls and we are under-going ISO 27001 accreditation with 2 external full-scale pen tests already completed.
Our team has grown from 4 to 12 team members, with a large focus on our tech team, a new front stack member, a SubGraph specialist and a new Head of Comms, the person writing this End of the Year update for you, @zeb_dyor. As someone with 7 years of crypto research experience, I can personally attest that seeing Liquify grow as much as it did during a bear market year, is truly impressive.
Looking Ahead: A Vision for the Future
Our journey doesn’t stop here. As we step into 2024, our focus remains on supporting more foundations, furthering decentralisation through public endpoints, non-custodial validators and running seed nodes. You will also see more content being released, with The Deep Dive, our new podcast, going live during January!
We’re dedicated to service a wider spectrum of partners, thereby reducing outages in crypto through our reliable bare metal servers. Just as we proved within 2023, we strive to deliver on our promise of above 99.95% service uptime.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s with us on this incredible journey. Keep building a future where decentralisation isn’t just a dream, but a reality we live every day!
