The PhotoChromic Retrospective: 2022

The market mayhem

Of course, we can’t begin to unravel the year without first reflecting on the mayhem of the markets. Let’s not forget, however, that as the global economy tips towards a recessionary environment, every market has had its own sort of mayhem this year. Beleaguered by the actions of bad actors and more, a simple glance at our market landscape has been brutal to bear. We, however, don’t take a doom approach at PhotoChromic. Instead, we set our sights on the long-term horizon. Just as every home needs a spring clean now and then, we see 2022 as the year our market began to clear the cruft and stabilize toward true legitimacy, integrity, and a forward path toward effective regulation.

It’s not just mayhem

While the market mayhem may have persisted throughout much of the year, that has not been a deterrent for growth across our sector. We have witnessed unprecedented growth in the blockchain identity and infrastructure sector. There are many more players in the space, with a small proportion acting in direct competition. Our sector remains nascent but promising as a whole. We have just begun to climb the mountain that we set out to. That said, the next mountain has come into clear view. There is so much we can do with PhotoChromic — most especially in light of all the coming regulatory frameworks and the systemic failures we’ve all seen during 2022. While every crisis presents an opportunity, we also remember that in every opportunity, there will be a crisis. 2022 has shown that to be true in many ways.

The regulatory environment

2022 has proven to be an encouraging year as we move towards building effective regulation across the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, worldwide. Whether it’s proposed legislation, evolving regulatory frameworks, or more, we know one thing is true: We’re ready for it, and we’re building for it. Our team — across legal, communications, and development — have been encouraged by the regulatory headwinds that are set to forge the future, where secured digital identities will protect users at every turn.

We built in the bear

During 2022, we followed our North Star: to build in the bear. That’s why our team is walking out of 2022 and into 2023 with a positive mindset. We’ve unfortunately borne witness to so many respected projects hitting terrible obstacles along the way. While we are disappointed to have seen such carnage across the markets, we have remained committed to ensuring our team and development continues to grow. During 2022, we:

• Deployed our smart contracts, empowering users to mint their unique identity as an NFT.
• Continued to build out our core products. We built, and released, an onboarding product and an effective dApp.
• Released our portfolio of developer tools, enabling other projects to benefit from our regulatory-compliant protocol and pass on the big benefits of user-friendly regulatory governance to their customer base.
• Listed our governance token, PHCR, on Uniswap and Huobi.
• Introduced our governance platform.
• Launched our SoulBound token.
• Revised our White Paper.
• Began to integrate with several significant roleplayers in the finance space.
• Reaffirmed our commitment towards product development and eliminating impersonation.
• Doubled down on ensuring we built a regulatory-friendly protocol that is fully compliant with the proposed regulation.
• Augmented our team to enable further diversity and support at every level.
• Enhanced our approach to strategic communications.

Our team has worked hard to ensure these deliverables enable the crypto ecosystem to set up the NFT, protocol and developer integrations and create long-term value. As exchanges, games and financial institutions begin to integrate with the PhotoChromic protocol and the utility becomes better understood, more and more people and organizations have begun to realize the long-term importance of true utility and portable identity infrastructure. Without the enduring commitment of the team at PhotoChromic, from our content and operations team, to our suppliers, especially Motive Partners, none of this would have been possible. The hardworking, bleeding-edge changemakers in Web3 are our ultimate highlight of the year.

Big things ahead

And, as we look ahead to 2023, our PhotoChromic team is grateful for every learning experience that the past year has brought to our table. As we engineer our way towards 2023, we’re looking forward to:

• Doubling down on our approach to integrate with financial service providers. We exist for our customers’ customers, and there are opportunities aplenty for us to enable enhanced, regulatory-compliant customer experiences across the sector.
• Ensuring we remain committed to our product roadmap.
• Refocusing our attention on our customers’ customers, even further. As we’ve explored our integration opportunities, it’s all the more important to place our customers’ customers into the primary position for our development cycles.
• Growing our partnership portfolio, and collaborating with more organizations to uncover new opportunities to collaborate, and create an enhanced future for the evolving landscape of secured digital identity.

Encouragement for 2023

Just as we’ve seen projects determinedly continuing to build throughout 2022, and investor interest growing in projects that provide truly effective utility, 2023 will certainly continue to follow in enthusiasm for the blockchain-backed space. Projects that have remained committed to their core focus continue to attract investor interest and end-user enthusiasm. Paul Veradittakit has outlined it so well in a recent newsletter:

“Utility NFTs…will grow in 2023. This year, we’ve seen the sector start to develop technologically and creatively, but the space is nowhere near mainstream adoption. While the digital art industry is undoubtedly a massive vertical, using NFTs to permit specific privileges has the potential to disrupt many incumbent sectors.”

And, we will. As we sign off for 2022, we know the work that lies ahead in 2023. Thank you to you, our community, our team, collaborators, advisors, and token holders. While 2022 certainly could not have been predicted, 2023 is teeming with opportunities.

We’ll see you on the flip side, at PhotoChromic!