A year after building India’s native blockchain protocol: The Eleven01 Story
Eleven01, being India’s first-ever native blockchain protocol, is constantly working towards fulfilling the objective of aiding and expediting development of emerging technologies in India. We launched Eleven01 back in August ’18, since then we’ve grown, made significant strides in establishing our protocol. Over the past year, we’ve proliferated our ecosystem in strength and numbers, and all of this was possible through the support of our community; we would like to share our journey and its progress with you as we express our gratitude.
The Genesis
In the early days of 2018, our founder and CEO, Ausaf Ahmed, was looking at problem areas that can be solved with the help of blockchain technology. Despite innumerable attempts at solving scale and speed at the protocol level, there is still a lot to be desired. Furthermore, India as a market was full of interesting problems that could be solved by blockchain. The seeds for Eleven01 were sown here.
It came together when Eleven01 was launched at the International Blockchain Congress — 2018 when CP Gurnani — CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra — called it an “ambitious initiative” that will “power the Indian blockchain ecosystem”. It was the beginning of a remarkable journey that has helped us materialise a budding blockchain protocol today that will help us bring blockchain technology to the next billion users.
The Eleven01 Ecosystem
As a part of our endeavours, we work with a set principle to take a collaborative approach amid a competitive industry. With this approach, we believe that we will provide India with a wholesome blockchain development platform with the help of all its stakeholders. We have created a synergy with the help of several established industry-level players who have helped us grow Eleven01 by sharing their skill, expertise and influence in this space.
Tech Mahindra — an Indian Fortune 500 digital transformation company, and Microsoft — the multi-million dollar software company have joined hands with us to help us further our cause. With their support, Eleven01 has expedited its technology development and will further assist Eleven01 in expansion strategies.
We have also received support and encouragement from the state governments of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Goa to further blockchain development and create blockchain infrastructure solutions for government-based usecases.
To bringing exposure to Eleven01 among developers — the early adopters of blockchain technology, we have partnered with several established accelerators, centres of excellence and incubators. Through these efforts, we hope to evangelise blockchain to upcoming startups and projects and provide a platform for the development of blockchain-based products and solutions. Moreover, we have forged 15+ dApp partnerships with up-and-coming startups and companies that are building their applications on the Eleven01 Protocol, and we have a developer community with over 4000 beta testers signed up to work on the Eleven01 Testnet.
In addition to evangelising blockchain among working professionals, we have also collaborated with over 50 major educational institutions to support the future blockchain engineers of India. We are partnering-up with these institutions to provide mentor sessions, boot camps and hackathons to bolster blockchain learning. On that note, we are also co-hosting Genesis Hack, a blockchain hackathon; Genesis Hack is currently the largest blockchain hackathon in the world with over 3,700 participants.
Eleven01 Roadmap
The Eleven01 Ecosystem was a product of the value created by the Protocol as a means of enabling blockchain development in India. Many of our collaborators, in their respective capacities, joined us due to the quality of the Protocol, and we believe that our efforts were beginning to pay off when others wanted to be a part of our vision. We crossed some important milestones in building the Protocol, and it all culminated when we launched the Eleven01 Testnet in December 2018.
The Eleven01 Testnet is built to support Solidity as the smart contract language, making the platform flexible from a development standpoint. So, blockchain developers can build applications that can be integrated with the existing infrastructure. Currently, the network has more than 350K+ blocks created in the chain.
Users can search for blocks and transactions on the Eleven01 Block Explorer. The explorer displays various details ranging from hash details, average block produce time, average transaction per block, previous block hash value, active network nodes including their up-time which gives a very detailed analysis and trend line on the health of the network. Following this, the Eleven01 Testnet was made available in TechM Enterprise Marketplace & Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This was a huge deal given that Ethereum and R3 Corda are the only other counterparts available on Microsoft’s platform.
Following this, we went on to cross the platform verification stage which makes Eleven01 a far better, reliable, secure, and overall robust platform. In this capacity, we can enable the development of 15+ dApps partners on the platform. In addition to the demo dApps we have showcased on the Eleven01 website, we have developed two dApps with dApp Partners Khethinext and DocsinBlocks.
(You can read about the testnet in detail here.)
Building the Eleven01 Community & Network — both locally and globally
The Eleven01 Team has done some exceptional fieldwork to build our community by being where the industry’s whos-who were present. We attended several events, created purposeful collaborations and positioned Eleven01, not only as a robust blockchain protocol but as a strong united front representing India’s blockchain ambitions. As a result of our efforts, we’ve partnered with blockchain-based companies from around the world: BlocMint, Klaytyn’s GroundX, and Hdac, in addition to several Indian startups and companies that are building their products on the Eleven01 Protocol.
(Learn more about our participation by visiting the Eleven01 YouTube Channel or by signing up for the Eleven01 Newsletter on the website.)
Aside from expanding our professional circles, we also garnered overwhelming support from the retail institutional investor community and of course the developer community too. In a matter of three months, Eleven01 had a Telegram community of over 60K members, and we presently have a developer community of over 4,500 developers signed on for DEV01 — Eleven01’s Developer resource and as beta testers.
Looking ahead
In this year (and the last), we have gotten several steps closer to our goals, but this journey has just begun. We are looking towards creating greater opportunities for blockchain development in India by developing our Protocol.
We are so grateful to you for joining us on this incredible endeavour, and we hope that you will continue to support us. We urge you to stay connected with us to stay posted about our accomplishments.
