Neon Labs’ Year in Review: Our Most Important Moments of 2022
What a year! 2022 has certainly been one for the crypto history books. We’ve seen crypto markets tumbling back to earth following last year’s bull run — from multiple market failures and exploits to growing scrutiny from regulators.
Despite these challenges, we at Neon Labs team focused on what we do best, building with the support of partners and the wider community.
What we built in 2022
To grow our ecosystem effectively throughout the year, we focused on six key areas that will create a robust product and strengthen Neon EVM:
- Making Neon EVM as compatible as it can be
- Enhancing Neon Proxy Server which will help process Ethereum/Neon transactions into Solana transactions
- Introducing the Tracer API to obtain traces of transactions needed to enable functionality for our Graph node
- Solidifying the Neon Pass to allow transactions to pass between Solana and Neon EVM via the Wormhole bridge
- Deploying Neon Faucet for users to obtain NEON and ERC-20 test tokens
- Consolidating Neon DAO’s governance to enable the community to be the governing body of the Neon ecosystem
But that’s not all we did in 2022, so let’s take a look at our key highlights from throughout the year:
January
Kicking off the year, our CEO Marina Guryeva, was interviewed by Morgan Phuc, 👩💻 diving deep into the inner workings of Neon Labs.
We also announced our partnership with Swing.xyz on a cross-chain liquidity solution that spans both Solana and Ethereum. 🤝
February
Moving onto February, we introduced NeonPass, linking Solana and Neon to support a low-friction EVM-compatibility solution. We developed two infrastructure components that are crucial for blockchain environments — the dashboard in partnership with Aleph and the integration with the Solscan block explorer. On top of that, we started testing the Neon Web3 Proxy on Solana Devnet!
March
March was a big month for building. Neon Web3 Proxy’s functionality was enhanced through the Neon EVM Gas Metering System. We developed tools to support the Operator economy. Neon EVM was upgraded to version 1.9.12 of Solana to leverage Solana’s transaction-wide Compute Budget. We also updated NeonScan by introducing the Indexing Dashboard and a user tooling package.
We also found time to present at the Prague Hacker House, one of Solana’s world tour highlights. Finally, we launched our new website revamp and updated our docs for dApp developers.
April
April was a month filled with launches. We kicked the month off by launching Neon EVM Alpha on Solana Devnet. We then followed up by launching NeonPass, formally introducing the Operators economy.
We finished the month with the Neon Talks event at Paris Blockchain Week 🗣️ featuring influential personalities across Web3.
May
We started the month strong by publishing our solution for processing iterative transactions 🔄. By blocking accounts associated with other transactions we can prevent Solana state from changing while each transaction processes and executes.
As the skies opened during the rainy month of May, we deployed Neon Faucet allowing users to get NEON and other ERC-20 test tokens on devnet. We also started security audits for Neon DAO and Neon EVM.
The Neon team kicked off their summer of conferences by jetting to Bengaluru, India 🇮🇳 to attend Solana Hacker House, with many amazing activities organized by the team with the first-ever Neon Race and workshop. workshop.
June
In June, we implemented two vital cogs in the Neon EVM ecosystem. First was the Neon Proxy Tracing API which helped developers better test, debug, and understand their smart contracts on Neon EVM. Second was the Neon Transfer Module helping to bring assets in and out of the Neon EVM platform.
We also worked on extending the Maximum Storage Unit, presented our case study — Neon’s ERC-20 Wrapper, and major updates to our documentation.
Following the software developments, we continued our summer of conferences by paying a visit to our Ethereum friends at EthPrague and EthNewYork. Without a break, the team got ready for Barcelona Hacker House which went off with a blast! 🔥 Our team also participated in technical workshops and held the third Neon dApp Race!
Capping off June, we welcomed Hoprnet 🤝 to the Neon ecosystem and partnered with Mixbyte to perform audits of Neon EVM.
July
July continued to bring the sunshine as the Neon team attended Solana Hacker House in Belgrade. The team then hopped over to Paris to attend EthCC and the Metaverse Summit. There, the team held a developer-focused NeonTalks event hosted by Ivan Loboda, and a workshop held by our CTO, Andrey Falaleev. With EthCC ending, Neon finalized its integration with Pyth Network, enabling developers to access on-chain market data! 📈
On the tech side, we optimized storage to reduce the number of Solana accounts used by Ethereum dApps in each transaction. To achieve that we combined storage for complex data structures into a single Solana account instead of storing each slot in a distinct account. As an example, we decreased the number of accounts for Aave V2 from 100+ to 66 accounts 💪
We then released a series of step-by-step tutorials on connecting MetaMask to a remote Neon Proxy and a guide to using Neon Faucet.
August
In August, we contracted Halborn and Ackee to audit our governance solutions on Neon DAO and the security of our platform on Neon EVM. We also migrated to Solana’s Transactions V2 which manages on-chain address look-up tables.
Following the audits was our integration with The Graph Protocol which allowed users to build and publish dApp-specific APIs, powered by subgraphs. We then raced off to South Korea to attend Seoul Hacker House, hosting workshops and a Neon Race. We couldn’t leave without making guest appearances at EthSeoul and Korea Blockchain Week. 👋
September
As we turned to leafy autumn, the Neon team flew to Berlin to attend Dappcon and EthBerlin to connect with the developer community. There, we raised the roof by hosting our Neon Party, enjoying an insightful keynote, drinks, and great conversation! 🍹
Meanwhile, Neon EVM celebrated MixBytes’ deployment of Uniswap V2 which began our AMA sessions with partners MixBytes and Robonomics Network. Drawing an end to September, we released a tutorial on how to deploy dApps using Remix, an IDE for Solidity programs.
October
October continued to bring the heat as Robonomics Network and Zpoken successfully executed forks of the several Ethereum dApps on Neon EVM. We released a guide on how to deploy dApps using Truffle and Hardhat and completed our two sets of governance audits with Halborn and Ackee.
In the meantime, our BD team were on their way to Devcon to meet up with fellow builders in Bogotá while the rest of our team met the local Web3 developer community in Yerevan! Our CEO also spoke at the Cyber Academy in Tbilisi! 🤩
And to top off an amazing month, we held several exciting AMAs with amazing guests, including Kana Labs and Halborn.
November
Despite the chill of November, we had a whale of a time at Solana Breakpoint in sunny Lisbon. ☀️Culminating months of work, we were excited to announce the launch of Neon EVM on Mainnet as Marina spoke on the main stage.
Our COO, Konstantin Goldstein, caught up with Anatoly Yakavenko and they co-hosted a workshop, holding an in-depth discussion over the future of EVM scalability through Solana. We also hosted an insightful panel ‘Layer 2: Scaling Ethereum Together’ with Fuel Network, Aurora, and Polygon.
It’s safe to say it was a busy few days for all!
December
Following the recent storm in the crypto market, we made the difficult decision to delay our Mainnet launch as Neon Foundation finalizes its documentation and arrangements with Neon Labs. We recognized that we must sometimes make some difficult decisions to properly fulfill our vision of uniting the best of two worlds: Solana and Ethereum.
2022 was a challenging year, to say the least. But amongst all of the difficulties, we are proud of the amazing work our team has achieved over the last twelve months. Looking ahead to 2023, we want to continue overcoming some of the most challenging technological hurdles in blockchain.
There’s much more to look forward to! Here’s to making 2023 an even better year. 😉
