Witnet 2020: Year In Review
2020: a year to remember. From Mainnet Launch, to the release of Sheikah Wallet, a growing community, and a successful Testnet Incentive Program, 2020 has been monumental for Witnet. Thanks to all those community members who have played a part in Witnet’s biggest year to date 🚀
🏁 Oh how far we’ve come
Since its inception, the Witnet community has been on a mission to connect smart contracts to the rest of the world in the most decentralized, secure and “trustless” way possible.
In 2020, the Witnet community made huge leaps towards fully realizing this goal. At the start of the year, Witnet was running on a Testnet, with incomplete or non-existent tooling. Despite the fact that the network was live and functioning, the protocol was still missing many of the components necessary to allow it to scale and monitor data requests on Mainnet.
Here’s an overview of how far we’ve come in 2020.
🚀 Witnet Mainnet Launched
After 3 years of development and countless iterations, improvements and in-depth testing, Witnet moved to Mainnet in October.
Early estimates indicate that the actual number of nodes “waiting in line” for their opportunity to mine a block is close to 1 million. This number seems credible, since we verified the existence of more than 300,000 nodes in the last Testnet, where the incentives for mining were fewer. This makes Witnet the largest blockchain network that we know of.
✅ Improved the Witnet Protocol:
- Built a functioning Ethereum<>Witnet bridge, which will be further optimized and decentralized in 2021, and will form the basis of integration with other popular blockchains.
- In June, Witnet’s smart contracts went through an external security audit (carried out by the reputable Red4Sec). Witnet passed with flying colors, and the results of the audit were published in this blog post.
- … and a range of other innovative optimizations and improvements, including the implementing superblocks, all of which can be reviewed on the Witnet Monthly Report Blogs.
🧰 Released and improved tooling
This year, the Witnet community:
- Built, released and improved upon Sheikah.app — Witnet’s native Desktop Wallet and Data Request editor.
- Built a live and functioning Witnet Block Explorer, which allows for anyone to search and review the entire Witnet blockchain.
- Built a live and functioning Witnet Network Dashboard, which gives an overview of the network’s state and activity.
- Built a live and functioning Witnet Telegram Bot which allows anyone to monitor the activity and status of their nodes.
- Put in measures to ensure that the network is adequately distributed across a range of IPs, allowing nodes to communicate quickly and effectively with all other nodes on the networks.
👨👩👧👦 Community engagement and Outreach
- The community has grown significantly this year, with the Witnet Telegram group reaching the 1k milestone, and the Witnet Twitter approaching 2,5k followers.
With the help of a range of community members, we’ve seen:
- Greatly improved documentation and walkthroughs, with a better structured Github and a new website coming in 2021.
- Witnet participate and play a crucial role this year in the formation and efforts of the Alliance of the Decentralized Oracles, holding a public demo of proposed EIP-2362.
- Fortnightly community sprint reviews, all of which can be viewed on the Witnet Community Youtube channel.
- An Interview with Tom Heavey — crypto-influencer, as well as Witnet reputation at various events including CogX and EthCC and EthDenver.
- Launched the Witnet Bug Bounty (Note: still live for any keen bug hunters 😉)
- Successfully distributed 12,500,000 WIT tokens and 16,000 DAI to over 200 participants during two phases (1)(2) of the Witnet Testnet Incentive Program,
🛣️ The Road Ahead
This is just the beginning, and 2021 is on track to be huge, with potential partnerships, new integrations, a new phase of the Incentive Program, and a growing, committed and dedicated community in the pipeline 💥.
Here’s to 2021 🥂.
Read more about the community plans below:
