Anoma 2021: Year in Review
2021 will always be a special year for me, as it marked the beginning of Anoma and Heliax. I’ll be sharing the story and a recap of my experience from the last 12 months.
TL;DR: Watch the video on Twitter!
February: the Journey Begins
At the beginning of February, Heliax hit the ground running with a team of 15. Heliax’s purpose is to make financial sovereignty and privacy enhancing tools more accessible for people, via the development of open-source protocols and goods for the public — a vision that is very much in alignment with Anoma’s. And so it became the first organization to join the ecosystem, tasked with the research and development of the Anoma protocol and any other necessary protocols, tooling, and end user interfaces for the ecosystem.
March: Hello, World!
Within the first week of spring, the first publications and public profiles on Anoma started to appear, a “hello, world” article was published on Medium, explaining Anoma as a protocol for asset-agnostic, privacy-preserving financial functions, and bartering among any number of parties. Briefly after, a very primary version of the website with a blog was released with an article on Aggregatable DKGs.
April: Whitepaper & Anoma Foundation’s 1st Private Sale
In the last weeks of April, Anoma’s whitepaper was published. It explains in a few pages the motivations behind Anoma, its vision, and a preliminary view of the architecture of the protocol. In the beginning of the year, the Anoma Foundation conducted a first private sale with the participation of Polychain Capital, Cygni Capital, Electric Capital, Lemniscap, FBG Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CMS, P2P Capital, and ZK Validator other backers.
May: Anoma Tangram & 1st Interview in the Blockchain Community
As Anoma’s architecture is unusual and unprecedented in many ways, we started an article series named “Anoma Tangram” in May. Each article in this series explains on a high level every piece or component of the project, so readers would be able to get a sense of how Anoma works and are able to visualize its framework, the implication being that the tangram puzzle is completed. In the same month, Anoma was featured in its first virtual interview from the blockchain community, with Erica from KryptoSeoul.
June: Anoma is Open-sourced & 1st Podcast
In June we hit a really important milestone: Anoma’s codebase was open-sourced. In alignment with the vision of Anoma to provide alternatives to existing systems, all the tools must be end-to-end verifiable, meaning that the operators and end-users must be able to verify by themselves the internal functionality of the protocol. Furthermore, they need to be public goods, free for everyone to replicate, customize, and use. This principle extends to any additional protocol, library, tooling for developers and even end-user interfaces– everything should be open-sourced to enable end-to-end verifiability, but also to serve as implementation references for the ecosystem and the community.
During that month, Anoma was featured for the first time in a podcast episode, hosted by Anna Rose from the Zero-Knowledge Podcast team:
July: EthCC in Paris & Anoma’s Vision Paper
July was a busy and really fun month. Anoma appeared for the first time in a physical conference, EthCC 2021 in Paris. It was also the first team conference for Heliax and the very first time team members met in person. My co-founders Adrian and Christopher both gave talks on Anoma, our team had great conversations at the booth, and it was really exciting to see people grabbing all our merch (lucky you, if you grabbed any, because we ran out!).
On the first day of the conference, we released Anoma’s vision paper, an in-depth analysis of existing coordination mechanisms, their drawbacks, and, most importantly, it explained why Anoma was designed as a general coordination mechanism, a universal and versatile protocol that can enable coordination beyond financial transactions.
In August, I took some time off in Barcelona (I’m from this city). During that trip I went running on the beach and ran into someone wearing the Anoma t-shirt! (it was so unexpected that I forgot to ask for a selfie). From mid August, Heliax moved into a new coworking place in Berlin, so we also hung out with the team that was in town.
September: Bandersnatch Paper & Org. Changes
Things got busy very quickly before September began. With a growing team, we took the time to reassess the organizational structure of Heliax and made some changes to get ready to scale even further (at that time, we grew to 25+ people in 6 months). We also saw the first research paper being released about Bandersnatch, a paper on a new elliptic curve, written by Simon, Antonio, and Zhenfei. Amid everything, the teams at Heliax continued building in preparation for a public testnet of Anoma.
October: Team Retreats & ZK Hack
Another highlight was the planning of team-based retreats: a very important aspect for the culture of a remote-first organization like Heliax is the ability to meet once or twice a year. Due to the pandemic, we had to postpone all org-wide team retreats. Luckily, we saw that it was possible to plan for smaller team retreats, which were scheduled for October and November. At the beginning of October, the PLT (programming language theory) team met in Berlin, and had the chance to go through the very long backlog of overdue discussions, work together IRL, and spend some free time with each other. The Engineering, Distributed Systems and Infrastructure teams met at the end of the month, and the cryptography team met at the beginning of November. To add even more excitement to the month & complexity to travels, it was packed with the participation of Anoma in ZK Hack and travels to Lisbon.
November: Feigenbaum & Anoma Foundation’s 2nd Private Sale
On the 1st of November, we launched Feigenbaum, Anoma’s first public testnet — which didn’t run for as long as we wanted, but we learned a ton in the process and gathered a lot of feedback from the community that improved the codebase. We knew it was early, but for us it was very important that the team and the implementation of Anoma got real-world exposure as soon as possible. We also published the first issue of Anoma’s research and development updates in October, with the purpose of sharing every month the process and updates on the research and development in the Anoma ecosystem:
In mid November, 6 months after the 1st private sale, the Anoma Foundation conducted the second private sale. This round saw the returning participation of Polychain Capital and Electric Capital, as well as new backers to the ecosystem, such as Zola Global, CMCC Global, Maven 11 Capital, Blockchain Coinvestors, Olive Tree Capital, Wicklow Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, Figment, Chorus One, Informal Systems, Papers, and the Interchain Foundation. In 2021 the Anoma Foundation raised a total of CHF 30M, and Anoma was featured on Techcrunch, Decrypt, and CoinDesk:
December: Keep building & Prepping for 2022!
And here we are, in December. The team continues to build and publish as usual (there was a new release of the codebase on Monday, feel free to set up your own testnet!). We’ve got lots of prepping to do for next year, as we’ll be 40 people by the end of January 2022 and we’ve got really exciting plans!
Wish y’all great holidays and have a great start of the new year!
