Goodbye, 2022 and Hello, 2023. No doubt that this year has been challenging for most crypto projects. 2022 has tested our strengths, set challenging tasks and encouraged us to show creativity and perseverance. At the same time, for Spin, 2022 was the year of the initial formation of the brand, the cultivation of the audience, and the strengthening of ecosystem relations. No matter how challenging the conditions were, we succeeded to release Spot, Instant Swaps, and Perpetuals trading to the NEAR Protocol mainnet, multiplied our product and marketing metrics by over 10 times, and became one of the strongest brands on NEAR.
Today, we invite you to have a stunning journey back to the very beginning of 2022, and remember the most important milestones achieved.
Q1 2022
In late January 2022, Spin made a very important strategic decision to focus the development of the platform on NEAR Protocol. In Q1 2022, there were no other DEX with a similar vision on NEAR, and considering the technical advance of the blockchain and its rapid growth, the idea of building the first CEX-competitive trading platform on NEAR seemed lucrative. Shortly after this decision was made, we released the first on-chain order book DEX on NEAR’s testnet and announced the seed round raise of $3.75 million. The funding round was led by Lemniscap with participation from GSR, Spartan Group, ZMT Capital, Longhash Ventures, and AngelDAO.
In Q1 2022, we also entered into strategic partnerships with NEAR’s top projects — Ref Finance and Paras, and in early March released our utility NFT collection of 2022 randomly generated JPEGs — Freaky Elves. The collection was instantly minted at 0.7 NEAR per NFT and as of today the floor price increased by almost 50 times thus making Freaky Elves one of the most successful NFT collections on NEAR with the ATH floor price of over 90 NEAR.
Q2 2022
The most important event in Q2 2022 was the release of our on-chain order book DEX to the mainnet. The release took place on April 25th, and since then spot trading volumes on Spin have exceeded $15 million. Shortly after that, we released Instant swaps — a tool that allows users to quickly exchange one asset for another using the liquidity from the order book. Because of that, Spin’s Instant Swaps are ~3 times cheaper than swaps on AMM DEXes and have more accurate pricing.
In Q2 2022, Spin started hosting our well-known trading tournaments and entered into more partnerships with NEAR ecosystem projects including Stader and NearPay. The team started working on on-chain Perpetuals — the first on-chain derivatives instrument on NEAR Protocol.
Q3 2022
Right before the NEARCON event that took place in September 2022, Spin released the first invite-only version of Perpetual contracts. The release was warmly welcomed by the community and over 400 people took part in the release testing. The release of Perpetual contracts paved the way for more sophisticated traders to join Spin and NEAR. The community grew extensively even though the sentiment on the market became more and more pessimistic and most projects witnessed heavy outflow of users.
In Q3, Spin also continued expanding our relationships both with the NEAR-based projects and with external communities. We attended NEARCON and met in person with the founders of NEAR-native projects and established many new business connections. We partnered with Calimero — a sharding solution based on NEAR and Axelar — a cross-chain communication infrastructure for Web3.
Q4 2022
The last quarter of 2022 was full of events for Spin, even though the market in general was bloody red. Perpetuals were publicly released to the mainnet, and since late October, Perpetuals trading volume on Spin has exceeded $5 million.
One month after, we announced having a retrospective airdrop for early users of Spin which resulted in a heavy influx of new users. The airdrop was allocated to NFT holders, active traders, and community enthusiasts and was accompanied by many engagement events like Guild Wars that were warmly attended by the community.
While users were competing to get the desired airdrop, the Spin team was working hard on building DeFi Option Vaults — the first Automated Investment Product to be released on Spin. We plan to have vaults live in January 2023, and this product will open more opportunities for passive investors and yield hunters.
Goodbye, 2022. Hello, 2023.
2022 was packed with many news, achievements, and challenges. We have succeeded to become one of the largest dApps on NEAR Protocol, and now our plan is the expansion of our outreach to other networks and spreading the word about Spin across all sites in Web3.
Nothing could have been achieved without the devoted team of Spin, our partners, and without the community that we call our family (because they really are that). Everything we’ve achieved is your personal success as well, so let’s continue our inspiring journey!
2023 is planned to be a very important year for Spin. Airdrop 2.0, the release of DeFi Option Vaults and other Automated Investment Products, TGE and public token sale, the release of token incentives… That’s only a small part of everything we have planned for the new year. Let’s make 2023 a success together.
So stay tuned, and Happy New Year, Spinions!
