Gelato 2021 Year in Review
Happy New Year, Gelato fam!
First off, we’d like to wish you a happy and safe 2022. Next, we’d like to thank you — you’re an important part of our community, and we wouldn’t have made it here without you. 2022 is going to be an exciting year, and we’re glad to have you along for the ride.
2021 was a big year for us! In this post, we will be talking about all the important developments and achievements of Gelato in the last 12 months.
Becoming web3’s most widely used multi-chain automation protocol
2021 was Gelato’s breakthrough year. Gelato’s usage skyrocketed thanks to top-tier projects (listed later on) in DeFi, gaming, bridging, and NFTs integrating Gelato’s infrastructure to automate their smart contract executions. To handle this growth, Gelato’s core team grew 4x from 5 to 20 members, bringing on some of the best developers and business talent in web3.
The total number of transactions executed across all networks is our Northstar metric — it’s what we use to best track Gelato’s usage. This total transaction figure grew dramatically over the course of 2021, reaching a total of over 458k transactions for the year. This number manifests Gelato as the “most widely used multi-chain automation protocol” in the whole web3 by total transaction executed.
Key growth drivers in 2021
This steep growth rate was fuelled by three main reasons:
- Continuous developments and new product releases
- Being the first mover to go fully multi-chain
- A growing number of projects realizing the value proposition of outsourcing all of their web3 DevOps needs to Gelato
Continuous developments and new product releases
In 2021 Gelato’s development team worked tirelessly to continue driving usage to the network.
Here’s an overview of all of the new flagship products that were released in 2021:
- Gelato v2 is the second iteration of the core automation protocol. It makes it easier, more reliable, and cost-effective for Executors to execute arbitrary tasks created by web3 developers. The release included a round-robin Executor coordination mechanism, accepting arbitrary tokens as payment, and significant gas savings over the old version.
- Limit orders is one of the most widely requested features for AMMs across all EVM compatible networks. This is why we created the easiest to integrate and most reliable Limit Order SDK. We’ve made it available as an npm package, which is used today by some of the most widely used DEXs in web3 like QuickSwap, SpookySwap, SpiriSwap, and many more.
- One of the most interesting automation use cases in DeFi right now is automated Uniswap v3 LP management. This is why we built G-UNI. Using G-UNI, users can finally sit back and relax as all the complexities that come with providing concentrated liquidity on Uniswap v3 are taken care of by Gelato. In just 3 months after launching G-UNI, it already catapulted itself to be the largest Uniswap v3 LP management system by TVL on Ethereum, capturing an astonishing 6% of Uniswap’s total TVL at its ATH!
- As our “feature playground,” we released our in-house UI Sorbet Finance. This enables end-users to interact with a variety of our products, such as limit orders using Uniswap, QuickSwap and PancakeSwap, and of course G-UNI.
- Gelato Ops is web3’s most reliable and easiest to use multi-chain smart contract automation hub. It’s the interface on top of Gelato Network, enabling developers to easily automate arbitrary smart contract functions on all EVM-based compatible blockchains with just a couple of clicks. Gelato Ops is being used in production today by established projects like MakerDAO, Abracadabra, QiDAO, and many more.
- At the end of 2021, we launched the private beta of our latest product, the Gelato Multichain Relay API. This product focuses on what we call “real-time automation,” enabling web3 developers to offer gasless transactions to their users across all EVM compatible networks using a single API.
Being the first mover to go fully multi-chain
In 2021, Gelato was the first major automation protocol to be deployed on Polygon, Fantom, BSC, Avalanche, and Arbitrum. Given that transaction fees are more cost efficient on these networks, previously infeasible use cases like gasless transactions and dollar cost averaging strategies on Ethereum are emerging as exactly what web3 developers are looking to integrate.
Deploying and running a reliable automation infrastructure on younger networks can be tricky. Certain basic infrastructure pieces like reliable rpc endpoints are not always a given, making going multi-chain for dapp developers very difficult. This is why Gelato adds a lot of value to the multi-chain universe. Developers can now interact with a single API for managing their automated tasks — abstracting all the complicated quirks of younger and faster blockchain networks. Think of Gelato as a plug-in for public blockchains, which adds an easy-to-use and reliable automation layer on top of it. We’re making the lives of web3 developers significantly easier.
More and more projects realizing Gelato’s value proposition of outsourcing all of their web3 DevOps needs
Gelato’s hypothesis is that there will be a cambrian explosion in the number of dapps created in DeFi, gaming, social, and NFTs over the next 5 years. Without being able to run the underlying infrastructure themselves, all these protocols will require a reliable automation infrastructure for automating user interactions and other processes. Thanks to the emergence of the multi-chain universe, 2021 already saw a huge increase in the number of new developers joining web3, increasing by 67.7% from 20,505 in 2020 to 34,391 in 2021. A huge increase that we expect to continue trending upwards in 2022.
Gelato 2021 in numbers
In 2021, Gelato grew to over 23k daily transactions across all networks, with more than 40+ projects integrating with Gelato’s products this year alone.
The overview of total transactions on Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC):
We showed remarkable growth on Polygon in 2021. At the end of December, we had 41,054 weekly transactions, which reached the all-time weekly high. The total transactions peaked momentarily, surpassed 305k, and became the main driver of growth.
Fantom was one of the blockchains that thrived in the DeFi space last year. We had steady growth with more than 58k transactions on Fantom.
Gelato was launched on BSC in Q4 last year. Within just less than three months of launching, the transactions on BSC quickly rose to prominence, growing 219.6% month-over-month.
G-UNI officially debuted in June 2021. It has become the standard for protocols that want to deploy, aggregate, and incentivize UniV3 liquidity.
G-UNI surpassed $200 million TVL in 2021, more than 6.1% of Uniswap v3’s entire TVL, making it by far the most used Uniswap v3 wrapper.
We’ve been working with the world’s leading projects in the blockchain space, from public blockchain protocols to DeFi dapps to wallets. In 2021, our ecosystem grew 10x from less than 5 projects to over 40.
A growing decentralized community
In 2021, we finally launched the GEL token, released our first Gelato Governance Proposal, hosted several in-person events, launched our The DeFi Scoop podcast, and sponsored our first ETHGlobal hackathon. Take part in shaping the future of the GelatoDAO and vote on upcoming Proposals via the Gelato Snapshot Space.
$11 million Series A
In September, we raised $11 million in our Series A funding round. This was a huge milestone for us, and not just from a capital perspective. Since then, we’ve had some of the most influential VC funds and Angels, such as Dragonfly Capital, ParaFi, and Stani Kulechov become active backers of the project.
A quote from Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner of Dragonfly Capital:
“Automation is the heart of DeFi — instead of people and companies, DeFi uses self-executing autonomous code. Gelato takes this principle a step further to allow bots and scripts to become self-executing and autonomous, completely obviating costly protocol DevOps. We believe this is a core building block of Web 3.0 — think Heroku for blockchain bots.”
The future of web 3.0 is automated, and we’re just getting started.
That’s a wrap for 2021.
Once again, we’d like to send a massive THANK YOU to each and every one of you. Your support has helped us get to where we are today.
We can’t wait to continue growing Gelato together in 2022!
P.S. We will be sharing our plan and road map for 2022 soon. Please stay tuned!
About Gelato Network
Gelato Network is web3’s premier automation network, enabling developers to automate a wide variety of arbitrary smart contract executions on and across all EVM-based compatible blockchains such as Ethereum. Examples of use cases developers have built on top of Gelato include Limit Orders on AMMs like Uniswap, automatic compounding of yield farming vaults, Aave liquidation protection, MakerDAO debt ceiling updates, automated liquidity management, and even the petting of Aavegotchis.
Our ultimate goal is to automate everything and by giving developers the reliable tools they need to do this, we can empower their users to get the most out of their Web3 experience.
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► Check out what we’ve been working on at https://www.gelato.network
► Automate your smart contract at https://app.gelato.network/
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