2021 in Review
2021 has brought unprecedented growth to the DeFi industry and Pendulum in particular. Over this year, Pendulum has moved from being an idea of a research project to becoming one of the fastest-growing players in the DeFi industry. Let us walk you through the most important 2021 milestones and take a glimpse into 2022 which now seems to become even more exciting and promising for Pendulum’s development.
The beginning of Pendulum
The idea of Pendulum originated in early 2021 when SatoshiPay’s tech team was looking into opportunities to connect its cross-border payment service DTransfer to an automated market maker (AMM) that would allow fast, transparent, and cost-efficient currency exchange based on the broad stablecoin ecosystem of Stellar.
With no suitable solutions on the market at the time, SatoshiPay began to develop a novel smart contract blockchain Pendulum which is closely connected to Stellar, Polkadot, and Ethereum via trustless bridges — and optimized for the requirements of Fintechs and fiat focused dApps.
Creating bridges between fiat stablecoins in the Stellar, Ethereum, and Polkadot ecosystems would provide opportunities for connecting DeFi to the foreign exchange market, building automated market makers (AMMs) to introduce scalable liquidity pools for fiat currencies, and creating yield earning opportunities for fiat token holders.
The Stellar Development Foundation recognized the importance of interoperability and bridges between networks, and SatoshiPay received a research and development grant from the SDF to develop the prototype of the Pendulum protocol.
Building the prototype
Pendulum is built on the open-source blockchain framework Substrate, a battle-tested framework (most notably, Polkadot is based on it), which makes it easier for third-party developers to write their own apps and smart contracts on Pendulum.
The testnet prototype consists of a bridge to Stellar that mirrors assets from existing Stellar accounts to Pendulum and an AMM that allows swapping different assets.
The latest version with the updated UI and one-click account setup was presented in November at Stellar’s Meridian conference — it now takes less than a minute to set up Pendulum and play with the prototype.
Since then, we have also improved our developer hub and the documentation, and we are eager to hear more feedback as we improve — reach out to us if you’d like to share your thoughts about our testnet prototype.
Oversubscribed $5m Token Presale
Pendulum has received a huge interest among investors that resulted in a $5m oversubscribed presale in November 2021 showing strong demand for the upcoming network and token. New relationships with specialized funds, platforms, and protocols formed during the presale helped establish the Pendulum network and its PEN token as major building blocks of the rapidly growing decentralized finance industry.
Among the presale participants were coinIX, LD Capital, Duck DAO, 6K Starter, CRT Capital as well as high-profile angel investors like Daniel Masters and Shiyan Koh (Hustle Fund).
We are thrilled to receive so much support from the ecosystem — the capital raised through the private sale will be used to continue building Pendulum and growing the Pendulum team.
2022 Outlook
What’s next for Pendulum? Once the prototype is completed, our next goal is to win a Kusama parachain auction and launch a canary version of Pendulum on Kusama. After running some intense testing on Kusama, Pendulum will be ready to compete for becoming a Polkadot parachain.
Pendulum is looking for collaboration with Polkadot parachain projects — reach out to us if you want to start a conversation and see how Pendulum can bring value to your project.
Besides that, we are working on a project for the Web3 foundation — the next step in establishing Pendulum in the world of decentralized finance that would allow us to receive important feedback for Pendulum’s development from the leading experts in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Pendulum team continues to grow — with several new hires in 2022, we are excited to welcome new team members and encourage more talented people to join us to help develop Pendulum.
Keep your eyes on the Pendulum!
Twitter: @pendulum_chain
Telegram Announcements: t.me/pendulum_chain
Telegram Community: https://t.me/pendulum_community
Discord: discord.gg/wJ2fQh776B
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pendulum_Chain/
