Keep 2020 — Year in Review
A short retrospective on the year.
The holidays have arrived, and with them the end of 2020 — a year that has seen a number of important milestones for Keep. Before we welcome 2021, we want to revisit some of the past year’s key achievements and look ahead toward some of what is to come for the network and community in 2021.
2020 saw the launch of both Keep and tBTC, the first app built on the network. Keep’s launch began with deployment of the KEEP token contract, all custodial contracts and staking contracts.The launch received strong support from the DeFi community, with over 40 industry-leading partners signed up for initial support of the project. These initial partners included decentralized platforms, aggregators, exchanges, and wallets as well as stakers, signers, auditors and custody providers.
Initially, there were 80 stakers in the network including some of Keep’s major investors. The group included Paradigm, a16z, Fenbushi Capital, Polychain Capital and Draper Associates. The total number of stakers in the Keep network has since more than doubled to 175, including many community members and individual project supporters. Furthermore, around 10% of the total KEEP token supply is currently staked. In addition, Keep stakers this year have earned around 45M Keep in rewards (currently around $9M USD) and the current APY for stakers who lock ETH to sign for tBTC is about 200%.
The team identified an issue in the first alpha launch of tBTC, known as rc0. This triggered a 10-day pause of deposits allowed by the tBTC System contract. Ultimately no user funds were lost, in part due to this swift action and the presence of established safety measures built directly into the contracts. tBTC’s ultimate launch in September included only the strictest security measures. In fact, this year Keep and tBTC have passed an unprecedented 5 security audits. A graduated supply cap was placed on TBTC to help quantify the readiness of the system in terms of monetary value. In the first month the supply cap was 100 TBTC. Since then almost 11k TBTC have been minted, the total number of TBTC holders has passed 770 and the total deposited value in tBTC exceeds $41M.
Following the network launch, numerous quality partnerships, integrations and listings went live, which greatly increased the accessibility of Keep across the DeFi community. More specifically, Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, listed both KEEP and TBTC. Coinbase Custody and CoinList directly supported TBTC minting. All of this contributed to the growth in TVL across the Keep network to an excess of $130M and helped transition the network into the beginning of a wider ecosystem in which the number of KEEP holders grew to over 3,000. None of this would have been possible without the invaluable and continued support of the Keep community.
And 2020 was a huge year for the Keep community! This year we migrated the community to Discord from Slack, and worked hard to make Discord our main team communications platform to engage with the community. Since then, the Keep Discord server has grown from a couple hundred people to nearly 10K highly engaged members. Given this enthusiasm, we created a second Discord server specifically for tBTC that is rapidly growing.
The past year saw the launch and continued operation of our incentivized testnet program Playing for Keeps. Over 12M KEEP has been awarded to active and helpful community members who have been running Keep nodes on the Ropsten testnet and contributing a wide variety of content and code. Several of the projects built through Playing for Keeps have become key tools for both stakers and depositors — All The Keeps, KeepScan, Keep Tools, Keep Stats, Keep Explorer, as well as many more bot projects and documentation. Our community members also helped take the project global, through translations of Keep materials into over 40 languages — we now have regional chat communities for many diverse areas (Wechat, Kakao Chat, Telegram, and others). If you are interested in a larger list of top contributions from Playing for Keeps, check out this summary blog post.
There is still time to take part in our last round of Playing for Keeps, which runs from November 1st to December 31st. For more details, check out our explainer blog post.
As the network of signers supporting tBTC launched, much of the early activity was bootstrapped and run by active community members, rather than the Keep team directly. This is a clear indicator that a strong, active, and technical community has grown up around the project. Keep is one part of the broader Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, and we do our best to give back and participate in events that are important to each group. In 2020 Keep sponsored and participated in several hackathons — ETHDenver, Protecting Privacy, Festival, ETHOnline, and the Gitcoin G8 Hackathon. We hope that if you encountered us at one of these events you joined the community to stay connected, whether to continue work on your project or simply to keep in touch and up-to-date on new and exciting developments.
2021 promises much to look forward to. Specifically, the launch of tBTC v2 will bring important improvements to the network and ultimately increase capital efficiency without reductions in system decentralization. The team projects continued steady growth for Keep in terms of TVL and the surrounding community in 2021. Finally, there will be a transition in governance of Keep towards one in which the community retains far greater control of the network. This will start with the introduction of a Keep and tBTC DAO in early 2021, accompanied by a growing Keep Community Ambassador Program and many more Keep Developer Grants.
2020 was a fantastic year for the Keep team and Keep community. Together we successfully launched the network and achieved many significant milestones. The Keep team sincerely wishes everyone a fantastic holiday season, and we look forward to continuing to build out the Keep network together with our amazing, growing community in the new year. If you haven’t already, join our communities on the Keep Discord server and the tBTC Discord server.
Onward and upward!
