2022 & MOI: A detailed year in review
This is our first ever Year In Review about our company, the product and the community we’ve garnered towards a collective vision of Humanizing the Internet.
2022 has been a great deal of progress for MOI. In this edition, I’d like to give the “chronological storytelling” a shot. So, you’ll see a section for each month :)
January
Moiverse 🖼
2022 kicked off with a great deal of anticipation as we were almost finishing off the development of the Moiverse NFT Marketplace (now called as Mint Valley). While 2022 saw a big boom in the NFT markets, we were primed to help users simplify their experience in buying or selling their NFTs.
Then, called as the Moiverse NFT Marketplace, was the first ever NFT marketplace in India to accept fiat payments to buy or sell NFTs.
Amidst the COVID craze, we were able to pull off a small soft-launch of the marketplace. The launch event took place at the Indiranagar Social!
Sudheer! 🧑💻
In the midst of Moiverse release, we onboarded Singham Sudheer Reddy, one of the most calm and composed engineer to our MOI protocol engineering team.
February
Art Thursdays 🧑🎨
Followed by the launch of Moiverse NFT Marketplace, we got a lot of demand from the local NFT artist community to spread the word about NFTs, Metaverse and the simplification offered by Moiverse. So, Balaji from our team hosted a recurring event Art Thursday on every, as you can guess, Thursday! The event gave more of a walk-the-talk vibe as it was hosted on Gather. 🤌
MOI Protocol’s ICS testing 🧑🔬
While the application ecosystem of MOI ecosystem was picking up steam, the underlying protocol was being built from scratch by our core developers Rahul, Manish, Pankaj, and Sai. Interaction Consensus Set (ICS), one of the basic construct of the protocol essential for enabling high-throughput low-latency personalized interactions was being tested rigorously by the in-house team.
Hello, Geetika! 👷
As a DeepTech team composed of mostly nerds, it was a moment of fresh wave when we onboarded a Marketing & Communications professional from the web3 domain with experience navigating early-stage communities like us. Geetika is always packed with happiness and energy, bringing creative ideas to the team about positioning MOI to an average consumer.
March
IOME Mobile App — Beta Test on Android 📱🧪
Another important use-case of web3 which many blockchains are trying to address is the privacy-preserving Identity Management Solutions. We all know how web2 providers own and control our identities. This is a real-world problem looking for a solution. We were so glad to see our community take note of this issue and develop IOME, a Zero-Knowledge Proofs based ID management solution that enables users to share their information based on the relevant context of their digital or real-world interactions.
While IOME web app was very much live in 2021, there was a demand by the community to have a mobile app with features such as WalletConnect integrations to make use of the features provided by the wallet in both web2 as well as web3 scenarios.
The developers launched the Android Beta on the Play Store and we were so excited to use it. The app was used frequently by the local blockchain communities to onboard new crypto users in a web2-like UX and award them a goodie or food at events.
April
Binance Blockchain Week @ Dubai 🥂
Our MarCom team won the tickets to Binance Blockchain Week and we were so happy to be sponsored to attend the event. We met so many fellow crypto entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world. Many solid interactions about the benefit of MOI and partnerships at the event. Fond memories 😊
ETHDubai 🐪
We attended ETHDubai and interacted with many app developers, entrepreneurs, and investors who were interested in MOI. It was also a great learning experience for us to know about the startups trying to make web3 more secure and sophisticated.
HackSuite launch 📝
So many of us have been around in the crypto space long enough to call the use of Google Forms at an event an oxymoron.
It was time to fix this and so happy to see the Dubai community welcome the benefits of a privacy-preserving app: HackSuite.
While the app was originally built in 2019 for a global hackathon, it did not see the light of its day because it was “too early” :’) However, 2022 was right in the spot for web3 to walk the talk.
Hacksuite was used at some local Dubai meetups to help event visitors share their information in a privacy-preserving manner. It was powered by IOME web and MOI Bit, a truly personalized storage service.
MOI Pod Beta Testing 🧪
Amidst many meetups and chats with investors, and fellow entrepreneurs for partnerships, we were finishing the testing of MOI Pod, a consolidated binary that offers a client to run and join MOI networks. This was major alpha back in the days and talk of the town.
Team outing ⚽️
After a long trip of meetings, conferences and engineering, it was time for us take a small break before the big launch of MOI testnet in April. It was so much fun. We all laughed and played too many outdoor games than we probably ever did in the entire year! XD
May
INDUS Testnet launch 🎉
After months of development and testing, we were finally confident of sharing our work to the open world. A group of features, functionalities, and capabilities are grouped together and tested in these testnets. INDUS, named after the Indus Valley Civilizations, was a special one — the first.
Another special thing about INDUS is that it’s an incentivized testnet. While 2022 saw many incentivized testnet launches, I am so happy that we have one of the highest nakamoto co-effienct, which speaks for MOI as THE people’s network.
We launched the testnet on 21st of May and received support from more than 100 node operators this year from individuals and organizations all across the world. If you missed the launch, the livestream recording is still available on our YouTube channel.
If you are not yet hosting a node for MOI, what are you waiting for? Visit our microsite https://validator.moi.technology/ and sign up now!
Voyage — Beta Launch 🦄
To navigate a testnet packed fully with features and functionalities, you obviously need a simple network explorer that can help you navigate through interactions, proofs and tesseracts. Enter Voyage — our vision for simplifying the human-network interface.
Voyage has been a great tool for the community to constantly understand the activities taking place in the INDUS test network.
While Voyage currently displays some real-time information neccessary to monitor the INDUS Testnet, the original design is yet to hit and I’m sure it’ll melt your brains in 2023.
June
Outreach — Twitter Spaces 🗣
The MOI Project has been one of the most dedicated project in the space with original Research and Development dating back to 2017 at the least.
However, as a bunch of computer scientists and engineers, we mostly overlooked the importance of outreach in our early days and waiting to ripen our thesis for unraveling the true nature and purpose of internet.
2022 gave us a fresh breather to finally come out of our closet, speak openly with all about our Vision, and the Mission.
We kicked this off with a Twitter Space with our Founder & CEO, Mr. Anantha Krishnan — who is a firm believer of personalization with a strong and clear mind.
After AK’s Twitter Space, many such online sessions took place with active participation from the team and early community members of MOI.
If you’ve not listened to AK’s session, please check them out here. Spoiler Alert: It mind-blowing. (MOI Bytes)
Wednesday Validator Catch-ups 👋
We were so elated to host a regular Zoom call with our Validators every Wednesday since June. These community calls attracted attention from validators who are hosting nodes from all over the world to discuss about their experience hosting a node, discuss about MOI protocol and take feedback from their experience.
July
IOME Mobile App — Beta Test on iOS 📱🧪
IOME Mobile App was successfully published to TestFlight with Beta access to our community members. It was great to learn from active wallet users who provided their feedback to make the app features more understandable and easily usable for people from all walks of life. Such is the spirit of IOME, to offer a web2-like experience to onboard the next billions users confidently to web3.
POLO — An encoding scheme for open networks ⛓
Manish, our core developer @ MOI Protocol deeply understood the limitations of the encoding schemes used by blockchains and came up with a better working encoding scheme, primarily focused on deterministic serialization among other things. You can read all about it from his blog post here. And the benchmark of POLO encoding scheme will be made available soon.
Hello, Vishal! 👷
We were happy to welcome Vishal Kothari as our Community Manager. Vishal is a cool community cat who has been there and done that in the web3 ecosystem. He is one of the most silent guy because his work speaks a lot louder. :D
August
MOI Bit SDK in Go 🧑💻
The Go SDK for MOI Bit was in demand for some back-end applications and our devs addressed them over a weekend hack at the Skillenza Hackathon. You can check out the SDK over here.
The team also came up with a simple docstore wrapper for MOI Bit applications and you can find the hack over here.
What else did we hack? Read on below :P
TownSquare wins @ Skillenza Hackathon 🧑💻
AK, Rahul and I hacked around the premise of the need for privacy in governance applications used by the municipal officials and elected representatives. So we came up with an app called TownSquare, a web app that allows residents to file complaints or issues in the constituency in a private manner without disclosing their identity using ZK-proofed IOME wallet. The Election Commission of India issued Voter ID Card can be used to filter out issues by respective wards.
The hack was pitched in front of Hon’ble MP of India Mr. Tejasvi Surya, Sequoia Capital, the leadership of CoinSwitch Kuber and many other dignitaries.
Out of 6 hacks shortlisted for finals, 3 including TownSquare were built by our team. And we were elated when TownSquare was announced as the winner.
Special mention to Sai and Arun for helping the team write the app. :)
KYB Support in IOME 🏢
In order to support more real-world enterprise use-cases and also onboard institutional validators, we enabled Know Your Business (KYB) feature in IOME web.
IOME Mobile App — General Availability 🎉
After months of meticulous efforts to please Apple and Google, we finally made it. IOME is now available for the general public to use the app and create a web3 wallet in a web2-like experience, yet preserve their identity and share it responsibly to apps contextually. You can download the app from Play Store and App Store. If you prefer to use IOME as a web app, you can simply visit https://iome.ai/ too :)
Hello, Akshay! 👷
With a slew of applications and middlewares built around MOI, it was high time for us to onboard a web-native UX expert who could simplify the journey for a new consumer looking to understand web3 and identify daily use of the technology, wherever applicable.
Akshay was a blessing in disguise to us, as he packs with a very simple and coherent thought while helping the team & the community design for MOI.
University events 🎓
While the web3 community was picking up steam with MOI, the outreach team made an effort to communicate about web3, and its benefits in exchange for a cup of chai.
This was demonstrated with the help of HackSuite application.
September
Ekam — Convergence of Web3 Tech, Philosophy and Math 🎙
Ever since we started hosting Twitter Spaces, we observed that people are passionate about the idea of personalization and need us throw the light on it from a prism of 3 different angles — across technology, math and the underlying philosophy.
Ekam was a great culmination of minds from Sarva, the company building MOI and the investors & advisors of MOI who are guiding us in this journey.
Ekam videos are being processed as we speak and will be made available soon in 2023. I suggest you to keep an open tab on our YouTube channel here.
PISA — A new runtime for web3 🔮
MOI offers it’s own runtime that supports personalized interaction across the web. This is made possible with a complete reimagination of distributed compute that can ensure a safe and deterministic execution of interactive logics.
While 2022 has been a year of heads-down development for PISA runtime, we step into 2023 with a lot of hopes to test it in our upcoming new testnet.
So, keep an open tab on https://validator.moi.technology/ for our new and upcoming testnet. Host a node and checkout PISA!
October
Bcrypt 🎙
MOI sponored a few meetups across South and North India states to evangelize web3 to developers in mass.
November
Outreach on steroids — Dubai & Bengaluru 🗣
MOI participated at Dubai Design Week 2022 as the technology enabling partner, and rebranded Moiverse as Mint Valley in the presence of international artist and designer community.
MOI also hosted a stall at Invest Karnataka 2022, inaugurated by the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi and interacted with government officials, overseas investors and business owners over the globe.
Our team was also invited to the Dubai Global Blockchain Congress by end of November to interact with investors and business owners from the Middle East region for partnership and investment opportunities.
In parallel to all these busy outreach engagements, MOI Nation was formed as a community front for MOI action at the grass-root level. MOI Nation hosted events at a few engineering colleges in Bengaluru.
Hello, Sahith! 👷
We recently welcomed Sahith Narahari Reddy, a software engineer from Tendermint team. Sahith is working with the MOI Protocol’s engineering team to increase Quality of the software.
December
ERC20 token implementation 📜
The MOI Protocol Engineering team recently demonstrated the ERC20 token contract implementation on MOI Chain, executed on PISA.
MOI @ ETHIndia 2022 🧑💻
MOI team was available at ETHIndia as well as the side events to help developers use MOI Protocol, and the middleware to build their hack. We also sponsored a job fair in association with OGClub DAO.
See you in 2023!
Well, that’s a wrap! There are many more untold stories, partnerships, investments and adopters due in respect to NDA obligations and regulations, but I’m sure we’ll talk more about them next year ;)
Author Credits: Ganesh Prasad Kumble
