2021 Mid-Year Update: A Letter from Syntropy CEO
Gain new insight into how co-founders, employees, and our most significant supporters understand Syntropy.
Hello Syntropy Community,
I hope all of you are doing well in these volatile but fascinating times.
First off, thank you very much for being with the project at this special time in our history. I deeply love and appreciate every piece of effort we receive from our team, investors, and community — all of you make an outstanding contribution to Syntropy’s long-term success.
I’ve always believed that the Syntropy community is one of the highest quality groups based on the sheer number of intelligent, dedicated, and passionate people who deeply understand our mission’s value. As a co-founder, your support is one of the highest validations that we’re doing something of fundamental importance.
Market cycles in the blockchain space can be intense. There are huge runs and long winters, forcing projects to focus on short-term deliverables versus long-term success. At Syntropy, we remain focused on achieving our long-term vision. Aligning technological progress with business development and marketing serves the growth of adoption — the ultimate goal.
With this letter, I want to share my vision of how Syntropy will grow from its current stage, highlighting which factors will drive our ultimate success.
Let’s start by zooming out, viewing the project in its totality. Let me give you insight into how our co-founders, employees, and most significant supporters understand Syntropy.
Zooming out
Nearly every software company must endure an initial development phase. For Syntropy, this period lasted roughly two years, and we dedicated it to deconstructing how the Internet works, from the most profound details to the highest level of business dynamics.
This critical period laid the foundation for the Internet’s next evolution: upgrading the old, 1990’s technology with the most advanced innovations in blockchain, encryption, and routing protocols.
As tech development matured, we began a gradual release process with the initial launch of Syntropy Stack and the DARP Genesis Node Event, which allowed for initial developer adoption and the genesis of a global routing intelligence network.
Upon launch, Syntropy Stack gained rapid developer traction coming only from organic reach. We now have 2,000+ developers actively using Syntropy Stack. With the recent hiring of Jeff Lacouture as our Chief Revenue Officer, we’re preparing a global marketing push to drive the next phase of adoption for our tech solutions that will give everyone a simple, fast way to ride on our network.
Meanwhile, the Genesis Node Event validated our DARP protocol in a live public Internet environment, proving it can produce an unprecedented number of optimizations across the Internet, improving around 70% of total routes.
Syntropy’s initial development phase is now complete. We’re now getting ready for the key events:
- Essential product release milestones (e.g., network launch)
- Accelerated user base growth
- Our formal establishment in the enterprise market
These are the events we’ve all been looking forward to. Growth over the next six to twelve months will prove an order of magnitude higher than anything we’ve experienced before. Our technology is maturing fast, and the first large sales cycles are already in progress.
The team itself has also never been so strong. We’ve doubled the number of full-time employees to 50 people, including 15 new senior employees to support business development, product marketing, and developer relations. We’re looking to add another dozen employees over the summer to quicken the development and sales pace even further.
On a specific note, we’re substantially expanding the marketing team to create a much broader awareness of Syntropy, aligning the public with the adoption and growth of our technology. We’re serious about growing adoption in terms of users and being widely known and respected across the crypto industry.
Our advisors and investors are all deeply involved in pushing Syntropy to the next level. Having a board filled with executives from heavyweights like Microsoft, AT&T, Cisco, and CoinShares adds confidence that we’ll close deals with some of the largest enterprise users in the world.
The project remains well-funded, with a budget already in place to grow rapidly over the coming years. To my fellow founders, employees, and long-term investors: this is the most exciting and promising moment in our project’s history. Everything is aligned for the team to deliver and enter into the growth phase strongly.
In many ways, Syntropy is only starting its journey in the world. During the upcoming six to twelve months, you will see our technology go mainstream, accelerating user growth and enterprise customers, scaling our operations several times over.
What’s coming
Syntropy has never been so strong. With the initial development phase behind us, we’re ready to execute on all technology and sales milestones, fueled by user growth and enterprise adoption. Let me briefly dive into the vision for this phase.
Developers, developers, developers
Despite 2,000+ developers actively using Syntropy Stack, adoption across developer communities is just beginning. The current user base is significant even though we haven’t started a formal marketing campaign. Operating in this way has given us the ability to listen, analyze, and act on developer feedback to build the product into something developers genuinely love. The initial user traction and feedback period are crucial for any software product’s long-term success.
Taking classical Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) Theory describing an adoption process for any new technology, Syntropy’s technology is in the “Innovator’s” stage. Initial user traction and feedback are crucial for the product’s long-term success.
We launched Syntropy Stack roughly five months ago. In terms of the natural product adoption cycle, we’re in a very healthy stage. After generating initial user traction and integrating the resulting feedback, we’re ready to begin the scaling stage. We’re assembling a world-class developer relations team to accelerate developer adoption, with the first hire recently joining us from Google.
Our focus now is establishing a robust and sizable developer base by the end of 2021, with exponentially increasing users. We want Syntropy Stack to be the critical developer hub for building all types of applications, which can easily ride on the Syntropy Network. Similar to Docker or Kubernetes, Syntropy Stack can become the basis for next-generation programmable networking.
The focus on developer adoption allows our technology to be implemented from the bottom up. In combination with enterprise adoption, we can redefine the internet and networking at its core, with Syntropy as the foundation.
Enterprise is in our DNA
We’ve been actively discussing and testing our technology with major tech and telecom companies from our very early days, directly appreciating how this vast market of private networks and private internet connectivity works from the ground up.
We spent several years working with enterprise market sharks like Ramprate, dedicating hundreds of hours in conversations with industry giants like Shawn Hakl, Roman Pacewicz, and Joe Weinman. All of them spent the last 15 years helping to create the very market we’re looking to disrupt.
Enterprise was always the primary target for Syntropy. By building our initial customer base with industry heavyweights, we can ensure a solid global recognition and adoption of Syntropy technology. Enterprises serve as the cornerstone for shifting the Internet technology paradigm from top to bottom. Most importantly, these customers represent a significant catalyst across developer communities. Both the enterprise and developer markets are intertwined, benefiting each other’s adoption — a crucial advantage for achieving substantial scale.
We have a clear and carefully crafted enterprise sales strategy headed by our new CRO, Jeff Lacouture, who has one of the industry’s best track records of selling innovative network technologies to large, global users. His decade of experience working as Chief of Staff at Cisco, managing relationships with Cisco’s largest customers, is already proving invaluable. We’ll be expanding our sales team aggressively, with Jeff at the helm.
Before the end of 2021, we will have several strategic enterprise customers onboarded, paving the way for substantially scaling our sales operations. We feel confident in reaching this milestone, especially as some of the key relationships we’ve cultivated over the years enter a more substantial adoption phase.
Ultimately, Syntropy will become one of the first blockchain companies to achieve unified adoption from the enterprise, developer, and crypto industries.
Technology Update
With the high-level strategy covered above, I want to dive a bit deeper into some of the essential technology releases coming together in the second half of 2021.
Syntropy Stack
Syntropy Stack is getting a major release upgrade, including an updated representation of nodes in the network, the ability to see, filter, and manage networks between tens of thousands of devices, and formal integration with fully automated and programmable connectivity. In preparation for this release, we’ve already proven the ability to manage thousands of connections every second during internal testing.
Additionally, more DevOps and Developer features and network services will be added, including NAT-Punching, DNS services, improved Network-as-a-Code service, APIs, and SDKs. We had dozens of developers provide feedback as well as use cases for enterprise deployments. Syntropy Stack is quickly becoming the most modern and feature-rich private network management technology, and this next release will add to that momentum.
Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming version of Syntropy Stack, aimed mainly at managing much larger networks.
Even after this release upgrade, the tech will be continuously updated, making the platform better and better aligned with developer and enterprise needs.
Syntropy Chain Launch
Syntropy Chain is the “spine” of the Syntropy Network. It’s a layer that grants network access to anyone and anything, connecting everything into an autonomous and decentralized “Internet” — the world’s first alternative network to the public Internet. It runs right on top of the public internet, providing key upgrades that bring it into the 21st century.
Syntropy Chain will become our technology’s backbone — a public connectivity ledger and smart contract platform which enables programmable networking functionality for anyone in a decentralized way, paid for by the NOIA token. Syntropy Stack will eventually transition to using the blockchain instead of a centralized SaaS controller, marking a huge milestone when Syntropy Stack becomes blockchain-enabled software.
The Syntropy Chain launch enables staking and the first utility of NOIA tokens. An ERC-20 bridge will allow the project to have complete value transfer between value locked within ERC-20 staking and the fully operational Syntropy Chain.
The launch will begin by enabling community members to become validators and nominators in the Syntropy Chain. We will continue by integrating it with Syntropy Stack — this will be the first time in history that all developers and enterprises can use a blockchain-based, decentralized, trustless, secure, and optimized connectivity system without altering any of their existing technologies or infrastructure.
Syntropy Chain brings together a total paradigm shift in how data security and connectivity are implemented. After integrating it with the ultimate developer platform — Syntropy Stack — data security and connectivity for any software development will never be the same.
Here’s an early look at the functional Syntropy Chain explorer:
Syntropy Relay Network Launch & DARP Routing Start
DARP technology has already been thoroughly tested, proving its ability to find the best paths across the Internet. Besides the DARP protocol, the team has been working for two years on the routing technology (SDN), enabling devices to send data through the relay nodes participating in the DARP network, taking advantage of the optimizations. When integrated, DARP becomes truly operational, with the vision of a self-optimized, alternative routing network for the Internet becoming a reality.
The most exciting aspect will be enabling our global community to connect their DARP nodes as Relay Nodes to the Syntropy Network, receiving rewards for sharing their Internet connectivity. We’re preparing to launch the program for thousands of nodes to join the network and thus create the first network in the world that unites all cloud, data-center, and main ISP networks.
Currently, we’re preparing to integrate the DARP routing technology with Syntropy Stack. Stack users will be able to connect their applications using these faster and much more reliable routes across the Internet, sharing results and igniting adoption and further development of the technology.
We see tremendous interest from the gaming community, one of the most significant traction drivers for the DARP routing with Syntropy Stack. Also, Syntropy VPN will eventually be the fastest in the market without any competition existing today.
Down below you can see how our routing technology can consistently improve connection latency results:
Next Steps
The team is currently working on a complete roadmap for the upcoming year, which will give clarity on the launch details and stages. There has never been a more exciting time in the history of the project. I am confident that we will achieve our vision of a completely secure and trustless Internet, for which we have all the resources and a strong team in place. Stay positive!
Domas Povilauskas
Co-Founder & CEO, Syntropy
