Presenting the Reef 2024 Roadmap
2023 was a year of building at Reef. Building new RPC infrastructure, building new protocols into Reef’s core, building the Reef Labs accelerator, building new developer documentation, building ReefSwap, and more.
2024 is a year for launching. Launching the mobile app, ReefSwap on mainnet, Reef Labs projects on Reef Chain, and so much more! Here we proudly present Reef’s 2024 roadmap, which is going to take us into a whole new era for Reef, its community, and builders.
Reef Mobile App
One of the first things Reef’s core team is delivering in 2024 is the Reef mobile wallet app. We know eagle-eyed community members have been paying a lot of attention to Reef’s GitHub repositories, and you can see changes happening frequently. Reef’s mobile wallet app promises to push Reef Chain’s capabilities far ahead of where they are now, offering developers a variety of new options to make Reef apps easier to access and use, and therefore easier for users to interact with apps as well!
Release ReefSwap on mainnet
ReefSwap has been running on testnet since September 2023. First on a whitelist-only format, and then open to the public as an incentivized testnet starting in November 2023. This has been a fantastic learning experience for ReefSwap users, and also for the developers. ReefSwap has attracted over 15,000 testers, many of whom provided high-quality and actionable feedback, which has led to many improvements to ReefSwap’s code base, developer tools like Subsquid, and RPC infrastructure.
Next up is to polish up ReefSwap and deploy it to Reef Chain mainnet! This will allow Reef, our partners, and anyone else to easily deploy tokens, create liquidity pools, add & remove liquidity, and start trading on ReefSwap. All of that with terrific charting tools to match!
Grow Sqwid
While Sqwid has witnessed some artists leveraging its platform, and numerous collections minted through the protocol, there’s still ample room for growth in attracting more digital collectible buyers, artists, and the development of full-fledged utility collections. The team has a roadmap for bug fixes to be completed and new features to be added throughout 2024. Additionally, we have people tasked with building relationships with great artists, projects building NFTs with utility, and others who will bring more usage to Sqwid. These new minters and buyers will also help inform Sqwid’s roadmap, helping us triage the new features and prioritize them based on need.
Launchpad/IDO Platform
There is a team working on launching a Reef-native launchpad/initial DEX offering (IDO) platform. This platform will contain all the best features from launchpads on other blockchains, but will also offer Reef users the opportunity to back terrific teams building great products on Reef Chain! Watch out for this to launch in the coming months, hot on the heels of Reef’s mobile app and ReefSwap.
Secure a bridge partnership and launch
As of right now, we feel we’re in the final stages of securing a partnership with a high-quality bridge that’s been battle-tested and can accommodate our community’s needs. The primary need is connections to Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Reef Chain, allowing us first to bridge REEF over to Reef Chain, making it easier for people to access Reef Chain validating, nominating, and using native Reef apps.
The secondary need is opening up the same bridging opportunity to Reef Labs accelerator participants, and to tokens of other projects building on Reef Chain that are interested in bridging their token to and from Reef Chain.
A new Reef browser extension
Let’s face it, Reef’s existing browser extension does not provide the smoothest experience. While it’s a fork of Polkadotjs, which has proven to be very secure and trustworthy over the past few years, “easy to understand” is not a label anyone would apply to it.
We are in the planning phase of a brand new browser extension for Reef Chain. This new browser extension will feature the ability to more easily create accounts, add/view other tokens besides REEF, view all those great and beautiful NFTs you’ve acquired on Sqwid, and more! It will bring the desktop experience on Reef Chain much closer to rivals, and offer a much better user experience compared to today.
Bring stablecoins to Reef Chain
For a variety of reasons, stablecoins are a necessary part of any stable blockchain ecosystem. Native stablecoins minted on-chain and wrapped stablecoins coming from other blockchains are both necessary because:
- Stablecoins make it easier for people to compare other tokens’ prices
- Many people like swapping more volatile tokens for stablecoins and vice-versa
- Stablecoins are highly interoperable with other protocols
With Mosaic Protocol launching this year, and the launch of a bridge that will allow for stablecoins to be brought over, we’re confident Reef Chain will soon have a budding amount of stablecoins on-chain. We expect some of those will end up in ReefSwap liquidity pools, on lending platforms, used to purchase NFTs, and enabled for other use cases!
Reef Name Service
Reef is currently in discussions with a team that provides name services to a variety of projects, and interoperates with several existing name services, to allow for the registration and management of .reef domains! We can’t wait to share more about this exciting opportunity with our community, and we have no doubt you will all enjoy competing for a whitelist spot to get your own .reef domain as early as possible.
DAO infrastructure
Going hand-in-hand with the upcoming launchpad, DeFi protocols, and many more tokens to launch on Reef Chain throughout 2024, we know DAO infrastructure is becoming increasingly necessary. There are lots of examples of good DAO tooling and infrastructure already in existence, and we plan to attract at least one excellent provider of this infrastructure over to Reef Chain this year. This will allow DAOs to form, raise funds, conduct governance, and more. All the basics you expect from a DAO, and tools to enable other platforms to interoperate with a DAO platform, like token-gating Discord and Telegram communities.
Start looking into zero-knowledge proofs
Yes, we know you’ve heard this one before! In 2023 we dedicated our time and resources to ensuring Reef Chain in its current status becomes easier to access, use, deploy on, etc. A lot of that work is finally coming to fruition in early 2024. Later this year we will start earnest research into what zKP looks like on Reef Chain, and aim to secure at least one zK infrastructure partnership that can help us deliver it late in the year or 2025. This isn’t a huge priority for us in the first half of the year, but as other items are launched and Reef Chain sees more usage, zK will come more into focus.
More developer education programs
2023 was a great year for Reef developer education! Reef Season of Docs was a huge success, and we sponsored a few hackathons throughout India too. In 2024 we are bringing more developer education to the forefront, enabling greater access to example code snippets, more boot camps, and expanding beyond our current geographical footprint to reach many more developers.
Reef Dev Arcade launch
Reef Dev Arcade is the direct result of Reef Season of Docs. We had dozens of developers participate, and they output a lot of amazing documentation that will make it much easier for developers to get started on Reef Chain! We can’t wait to launch Reef Dev Arcade, and look forward to developers’ feedback on how to continue improving it.
That is the Reef Chain roadmap for 2024. We believe that we have the team and resources needed to accomplish all this and possibly more, and are very excited to get this all out there for the Reef community to use and enjoy!