Increment 2022: Year Review and Path Forward
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Season’s greetings! From all of us at Increment, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year 🎊
Throughout the course of 2022, we’ve seen a thriving Increment ecosystem supported by developers, contributors, and our growing community. Across our smart contract deployments on zkSync 2.0 testnet and Goerli, we’ve recorded a total of 78,930 transactions and a total of 7416 users that interacted with our protocol. Together, we’ve built up a strong momentum leading up to our launch on zkSync 2.0 mainnet in the coming months!
Before getting ahead of ourselves, let’s recap and celebrate Increment’s milestones in 2022.
January to March
In the first quarter of 2022, Increment announced it will be building on zkSync and also received a grant from Aave Grants DAO.
zkSync is one of the first of its kind, an EVM compatible ZK Rollup being built by Matter Labs. Increment has been accepted to participate in zkSync 2.0 Mainnet Alpha launch coming soon in Q1 2023.
Aave Grants DAO is a community-led grants program to fund ideas submitted by the Aave protocol’s community, with a focus on empowering a wider network of developers, DeFi projects, community builders, and anything that helps the broader Aave Ecosystem. Increment received a grant from Aave to enable multi-currency risk management for aToken holders.
On the development side, we completed a Secureum pre-audit which reviewed the protocol code mainly for common security pitfalls and best-practices as related to smart contracts written in Solidity specifically for Ethereum blockchain or associated Layer-2 protocols.
April to June
In April, we released our beta v1 to over 1800 testers and welcomed thousands of new community members. The main purpose of releasing beta v1 was to showcase an early version of the protocol to our community as well as to ensure that users were able to interact with the core functionalities of the protocol like opening/closing positions. Our smart contract system and UI/UX has come a long way since then and advanced tremendously.
In May, we started our first official security audit with Peckshield. And in June, Increment joined the Startup with Chainlink program, which is an online global community that empowers founders with the resources they need to launch and scale their Web3 startups. We also announced the completion of our $1.56 million seed round led by ParaFi Capital and with significant contributions from Delphi Ventures, Dialectic, AngelDAO, LedgerPrime, and SkyVision Capital. At the time of writing, this current cash treasury provides sufficient runway for protocol development into 2023 and 2024.
July to September
These three months were a heads down building period for Increment engineers aiming to crush the milestone for our Trail of Bits audit as well as the beta v2 launch, and so they did. The Trail of Bits audited was completed successfully; we will be releasing the report as we get closer to Increment’s launch on zkSync 2.0 mainnet.
In September, we officially launched Increment Beta v2 on zkSync 2.0 testnet and within the first 15 days, we have reached a total volume of $24.7 million, 6806 unique users, and 67,807 transactions. Each user was distributed $500 to paper trade.
The UI and UX of our interface for both desktop and mobile has advanced tremendously thanks to our designers, community feedback, and engineers who made this possible.
October to December
The highlight of the last quarter was the Increment Battle Royale trading tournament!
The competition was intense — profitmaxis went head to head on how much profit one could earn across two markets within a period of three weeks. Prizes were awarded to winning traders and a big shoutout to all participants who worked alongside our engineers to further improve the UX of the platform. This event really helped stress test the system.
If you participated in the competition, please don’t forget to fill out our survey: https://tally.so/r/nrD0kl
The Path Forward
In 2023, we are set to achieve several key milestones with the first one being Increment’s launch on zkSync 2.0 mainnet launch. There is a list of things that need to be completed before then, such as setting up an off-chain infrastructure to monitor Increment smart contracts, additional UI/UX design improvements, etc.
The industry is currently weathering a bear market but there are a lot of exciting developments and events to look forward to in 2023 at Increment. Don’t blink, we’ll see you in January 😉
Originally published at https://increment.substack.com on December 22, 2022.
