Elk Weekly Recap — #23
Yet another new chain launch. Plus: Cronos NFTs hung by the chimney with care. Read on for more as we close out Q4…
Protocol & Partnership News
- Elk launched on IoTeX, bringing the network total up to 16. Read the full announcement for a rundown on the chain, available farms, and tips for moving funds
- CronosMas (™️) is here! We hypercharged our CRO-ELK with matching CRO rewards from now until Thursday, December 23.
- Moose NFT Airdrop! For the first of two Moose NFT airdrops, funds went to Harmony instead of Elastos as originally reported. Check your Harmony wallet if you’re holding a Moose
- Elk Rush xDai won’t quit! Dual-token rewards went up on ELK-PUNK following a smashing AMA last week.
Community Happenings
- Cozy by the fire. To kick off the CronosMas festivities, Ebisu’s Bay–the premier Cronos NFT marketplace–joined us for a special fireside chat in Elk Lodge on the Twitter
- A CronosMas miracle. Several premier Cronos NFT projects, including Cronos Dolphinos, Petite Planets, and CRO CROW warmed up in the Lodge for fireside chats, with prize raffles for attendees. Getting paid to sit by the fire? Yes, please.
- Give-aways galore. The Cronicle (Cronos) launched an epic CronosMas Gleam, with $1k ELK + dozens of Cronos bluechip NFTs up for grabs
Q4 2021 is nearly a wrap.
As a group, the Elk Team is allergic to looking back (with new launches every week, it’s pretty much a necessity), but with the holidays in full swing, it’s been impossible not to indulge in a little nostalgia as we reflect on how far we’ve come.
Elk launched in mid-March, shortly before the end of Q1. ElkNet, the engine that drives the machine, went live in late July. In other words, Elk as a functioning multi-chain workhorse is still only 5 months old. It took a full month to reach our first major network milestones: 1M ELK transferred, 500 unique users, and 3,000 total transfers. But just one month later, volume had risen to 1M ELK per week, with nearly 5000 users and 20,000 total transfers.
As of today, with one week to go in 2021, over 37M ELK (nearly $100M for those following along) has passed through ElkNet. We’ve seen over 20,000 unique users make nearly 120,000 individual transfers in that time.
Those are exponential metrics. What’s most impressive about them, though, is that most of what we internally regard as the key catalysts for Elk’s growth trajectory still haven’t been released. We’ve achieved that growth with our secondhand UI; without proxy tokens; without CHFT; without an SDK.
Let’s take one of the most seemingly simple changes coming in the new year and consider how it will radically transform Elk’s value proposition: cross-chain swaps. In its current incarnation, Elk’s DEX is mainly useful for trading ELK to farm or transfer. This makes it more of a DEX in name only, since its usefulness is limited to the ELK token.
But the moment we turn the switch and start allowing cross-chain swaps, Elk becomes a DEX in the proper sense of a place where people come to exchange arbitrary tokens. Not only that, it will be the most comprehensive cross-chain DEX in existence, enabling users to swap tokens between 16 (and counting…) chains. That’s still to come, but unlike some of the other product features on the roadmap, it’s easy to imagine right now exactly what it will look like.
Winter holidays are saturated with nostalgia. One of the most powerful human emotions, nostalgia makes us look longingly at the past and see it as the “good old days.” Whether it’s our children or our growing multi-chain value transfer protocol, it’s natural to look back on those halcyon days of yore with a swelled heart.
Once you see how nostalgia works, however, you can start to realize that it’s a quirk of human psychology. We tend to overestimate the difficulty of present hardships and underestimate the value of present experiences. By recognizing this deeply human nostalgia bias, we are able to see and appreciate how extraordinary our current moment actually is. We are able to redirect those feelings of nostalgia into the present, where we can see what an exceptional moment in our history this actually is right now.
As it turns out, these are the good old days.
