March community call and monthly roundup
This is a very brief rundown of our last 2 months, as we skipped our Feb call in light of the Witnet presence at ETHDenver. This article will reflect both February and March.
TVS metrics
If you haven’t heard or have been living under a rock these past few months, Witnet is becoming the bedrock for which to build truly decentralized financial applications as people flee centralized oracle providers.
Witnet is the 9th oracle by total value secured metrics and if you remove the oracles that were built by protocols like MakerDAO and Tron, Witnet is actually 5th. This truly is a mind-blowing metric as our secured value nears $247,000,000 USD at the time of this writing. Check out our DeFiLlama page, there’s more coming soon!
We’ve added protocols like Mare Finance on Kava and Quickswap on Polygon. In addition to this, we are also aware of dozens of protocols that are using Witnet in a permissionless way. Of course, this makes it hard to find these protocols as there is a lot of code backtracking required, but we are actively looking so that the Witnet Foundation can help support them in any way. If you are reading this and using Witnet, reach out to us with one of the links at the bottom of this article.
The $WIT coin
We’re all happy about our beloved $WIT coin going on a rampage this month. We can attribute this to our ETHDenver presence, the new burning mechanism, and people finding out about the power of the Witnet oracle network. Of course we don’t promote or talk about the price of the WIT coin, but there are still metrics we can discuss that showcase that we are seeing an increase in people learning about Witnet. Some of these include volume, network activity, and Twitter engagement.
As you can see from the charts above, the $WIT coin is being traded at its highest levels in a while. The top chart shows volume increase on MEXC and Gate.io since the start of 2023, and the chart below is volume growth since the beginning of March. These charts are showing that there has been a natural growth in volume and it forecasts many exciting developments to come. More volume gives the Witnet Foundation more flexibility when it comes to listings!
The community
Our social networks have also seen astronomical growth in both engagement and new community members. For example, since the start of the quarter we have seen 531 new Twitter followers, 30 new Telegram members, and 22 new Discord members. While these numbers aren’t staggering at first glance, we are super excited about the March statistics.
On Twitter, we have garnished a total of 334 followers in the month of March. Telegram and Discord have grown at a relatively consistent rate seeing 104 new members and 23 new members, respectively.
We also just concluded our AMA week. Starting on March 22nd, we had 6 AMAs in 8 days. Each of these AMAs saw about 70 or so people each and allowed us to discuss the importance of Witnet with protocols that are using the oracle, will be using it, and have interest in using it. They are linked here: Toreus Finance, Mare Finance, DoDAO, Pinjam, Solus, Single Finance. We also hosted one in the middle of March with PocketDemons.
In addition to all the fun stuff like AMAs and new community members, we also had two awesome $WIT giveaways. The first one got people to guess the total number of burned $WIT by Sunday, March 26th. The winner of this giveaway (of which there wasn’t one) would’ve gotten 2,000 $WIT coins. If the winner was already in our Telegram or Discord, they would’ve gotten 3,000. The closest guess was only 100 $WIT off! The second giveaway was with our partners Quickswap and it got people to read a thread about the partnership and find a typo. The first 100 who followed all the rules got 1,000 WIT. This second giveaway crushed our expectations and is part of the reason that we are seeing such an explosion in our Twitter right now (but the best part is that people needed to learn about Witnet while doing the giveaway!).
ETHDenver
Back in late February and into early March the Witnet team was a sponsor for the entire ETHDenver event. Not only were we a sponsor, we were the official game providers. We ran “WittyPixels” which allowed people to earn pixels by interacting with other players at the conference. These pixels were then placed on a shared art canvas, and this canvas was minted as an NFT. The NFT itself was auctioned off and sold for 5.2 ETH. Half of the proceeds of the sale went to a charity, and half went to the players for their contributions. We partnered with ETHDenver and The Giving Block to help run the game and facilitate the donation. The player who painted the most pixels (2,300) won over $250 in Ether.
The entire game spanned 2 weeks and had 1907 players who painted over 41,000 pixels, roughly 62% of the entire canvas size. You can track the entire canvas day by day here, and you can see all of the cool promotions we did here.
Witnet Improvement Proposals
The Witnet network underwent some incredible changes this month. The network signaled support for, and upgraded via TAPI. TAPI is short for Threshold Activation of Protocol Improvements and essentially requires 80% of nodes to agree to upgrade or else it will fail. If you have been in our community for a while you’ll know exactly what we are talking about. Here is a summary tweet thread about the updates, and here is a full article that goes into detail about each proposal. You can also see the TAPI in full here.
The proposals that most people are really excited for are WIP-0023 and WIP-0022. The former burns all slashed collateral from nodes that misbehave or provide out-of-consensus information instead of redistributing amongst other nodes like previously. The latter changes the reward to collateral ratio so that nodes no longer will be fulfilling data requests where the requested collateral is 125x the reward amount. This makes running a node easier, more profitable, and capital efficient.
It is very important to take care and understand the protocol enhancements, and how they will add extra layers of security to all the protocols Witnet serves.
Ecosystem updates
The Witnet block explorer got a nice update in March to version 1.4. You can now see the state of the network via some very cool charts that showcase total staked, lie rates, rewards, and much, much more.
We had a lot of newcomers in our community these last few months, so we have created an article about how a basic data request in Witnet works. It goes through the various transactions like commit, reveal, and tally. Find that article here.
We continue work on our upcoming lightwallet release. The lightwallet is a mobile first wallet that allows people to store their $WIT coins directly on their phone. Another really cool aspect of this wallet is that it can function as a desktop or browser plugin, allowing users to import keys on multiple devices and have access to their $WIT wherever.
The grant program
The Witnet Foundation launched its grant program in September of 2022 and since then we have funded $40,000 to a dozen different projects including Quickswap, Toucan Protocol, stETH PoolTogether, Argo Finance, PocketDemons, Digemart, DoDAO.dev and much more. Check out all of them here.
All these projects have been using, or will use Witnet and they have shown great promise. The ethos of the Witnet Foundation is to foster decentralized technologies via the Witnet oracle, and these projects are helping us achieve our goal so we are so excited to continue working with them.
That’s all for this month!
This was a fantastic two months and will go down as the most amazing in Witnet’s history. There were so many milestones hit like $200,000,000 total value secured, $1,000,000 in daily trading volume, 10,000 total nodes in the active reputation set, and new highs for staked collateral.
Witnet is becoming the bedrock on which to build financial products because it is the most secure system. Remember, real DeFi is built on Witnet.
