Eden Evolution: Looking Back at 2022 and to the Future
If 2021 was the year Eden Network entered the limelight when it rebranded from Archer DAO (launched in November 2020), 2022 was the year we focused on investing, building and shipping towards a sustainable long term project vision.
The Year of Delivering Product
2022 began with Eden Network making public our intention to embrace our unique market position and focus on growing and building a product set for the multichain future. In retrospect and unforeseen at the time, it turned out to be the perfect year for us to utilize our healthy runway on product R&D, and put our heads down and build.
In February, we announced our new partnership with Yield Yak and Geode to launch the liquid staking derivative, $yyAVAX. It launched in July and remains to this day the highest yield liquid staking derivative on Avalanche. The success of this product opened doors for Eden and in May we announced our first subnet validation partnership with the mobile hit game, Castle Crush from billion dollar gaming giant, Wildlife Studios.
While, during the first half of the year, much of our public discussion and focus was on the Avalanche ecosystem, it was clear that Ethereum would continue to be a dominating player and behind the scenes we were busily preparing for the launch of our post-Merge products, which we announced in September.
The Merge successfully completed on September 15th which also saw Eden launch two new products: Eden Relay and Eden Bundles, as well as the migration of Eden RPC. On top of that, we also launched a block builder that interacted with Eden Relay.
Eden Relay launched with a deliberate approach, connecting to only a few thousand validators while we did deep performance and market analysis. The two subsequent upgrades saw Eden Relay gain extremely quick adoption with well over 200,000 connected validators by the end of 2022, validating our product and approach.
There was mirrored success in the whole Ethereum product set as we saw Eden RPC back to over 80% network coverage by the end of 2022 and Eden Builder consistently providing Eden Relay (and connected validators) with the most profitable blocks on Ethereum.
Investing in Talent
Investing in talent is a key factor that should not be overlooked for any protocol’s success.
Eden Network recognized its importance and made a significant effort in 2022 to almost double its headcount, with the aim of accelerating and expanding its product execution in 2023.
Here is where that headcount grew from at the beginning of the year:
- Development: 10 (+5)
- On-Chain Data Analytics: 4 (+3)
- Community Focused: 2 (+1)
- Operations, Marketing and BD: 4 (+/- 0)
Other Notable R&D Projects — Not Yet Publicly Launched
R&D is an important part of Eden’s innovation and during 2022 we worked on a number of projects to learn about specific areas of blockchain infrastructure.
Not everything we researched and developed has been released (some may never be) but here are some honourable mentions that we may see more of future:
- Conceptualised, researched and developed a first-of-its-kind 100% on-chain liquid staking protocol that guaranteed user yield rather than estimated it
- Researched and developed a fully working Avalanche Stablecoin Settlement Subnet
- Data tooling for block building research and iteration
- Tx Distribution Network — extremely high speed blockchain tx execution solution
*While there are other R&D items the above provided us with the most insight and value.
2022 is now history, where are we at today?
Today, Eden Network has built a cohesive and unique product set with widespread usage and adoption:
- Eden Relay — Over 250,000 Ethereum validators connected and growing
- Eden Block Builder — Consistently delivering unique blocks with the highest average block reward on the entire network
- Eden RPC — Over 80% network coverage on Ethereum
- Eden Bundles — A secure, trusted and reliable endpoint for searcher bundles
- Eden Validator Infrastructure — operating validation infrastructure and other services to help users realize goals around staking and MEV
This product suite, covering almost the entire spectrum of the blockchain transaction execution infrastructure (everything that happens after you click send in your wallet), was carefully crafted so that each product adds unique value to another, resulting in Eden driving the highest in market APY or block rewards to the end user (which can already be seen).
Successfully building, launching and driving adoption of this product suite was the key output in 2022.
And though we have not yet realized it, the inherent long term value from just part of Eden’s product set can already be seen by looking at Blocknative’s 34m total funding round to build blocks on Ethereum or bloXroute’s $70m series B investment round.
Building the future based on tangible results and outputs
Taking a heads down and build approach to 2022 delivered tangible results for our entire product set. Coupling this with the fact that the Proof of Stake infrastructure product ecosystem is still young and evolving for all market entrants, it is clear that we should continue on the same path: keep our heads down, invest and continue to build for future value.
Talk is cheap, it’s the outcomes that matter.
In the first quarter of 2023, a key focus for Eden Network is continuing to work and build on our block building infrastructure stack. While block building is a relatively new product category, it is clearly going to be a large stakeholder in PoS moving forward and adds amplified value to almost every other product Eden Network offers.
The next piece in the “Eden Evolution” series later this year will deep dive into the 2023 focus and the value opportunity it presents.
