XYO’s 2022: A Year of Accomplishments
A year is what you make of it. We’re proud to say XYO made the most of 2022, which proved to be record-shattering for XYO and XY Labs. Some of the most exciting goals we’ve ever achieved were reached in the past twelve months. Let’s talk about how it all happened, how we got to where we are now, and maybe a little bit about what’s coming next.
Q1
We started 2022 with a massive milestone. XYO surpassed four million activated nodes to date, making it one of the largest blockchain networks ever built. We quickly discovered that when we discuss this achievement with partners and business contacts, they’ll often stop the conversation in disbelief. “Four million nodes?” they ask. To someone familiar with blockchain networks, this sounds astronomical, virtually unheard of.
Because it is. XYO harnessed the power of people around the world using their everyday devices — people like you — to generate useful data with no barrier to entry and no waste. We rethought the usual way things are done in blockchain and experimented with something we believed could be better. Would be better. With you, we tapped an untapped well of nearly limitless heuristic and geospatial data. Useful data with astonishing potential.
The results, four million nodes later, speak for themselves, although the year would prove to have more milestones yet to come. But we’ll talk about that a little later.
Moving into February, we did something huge. We launched XYO 2.0. The changes of XYO 2.0 evolved the way XYO works on a fundamental level, permanently separating the XYO protocol from the XYO network, allowing developers more freedom when including XYO in their software products. Further, XYO 2.0 had a vastly simplified and more universal data structure, allowing data to be stored and called from common, human-readable JSON files. We launched new documentation and a new developer portal to reflect these changes and aid developers in fully utilizing XYO in its more universal form.
The month of February 2022 also saw the realization of two of the most exciting partnerships in all of XYO’s history. First, we partnered with HERE Technologies. If that name sounds familiar, you might have seen the HERE logo in the bottom corner of your Amazon delivery maps. This tremendous partnership continues to bring HERE Technologies’ capabilities and customers to XYO so we can reach a wide and diversified range of potential buyers across new applications and markets.
What could match a partnership like that in a single month? Well we also partnered with Outliers Fund to create the $20 Million XYO Ecosystem Fund. This joint ecosystem fund helps fuel the growth of companies and developers who utilize the XYO as long as their projects create value and positively impact the XYO ecosystem.
And, to add the cherry on top, we announced the first XYO Ecosystem Fund recipient, Analog. Analog is the first company that is a true Layer 0 protocol powered by blockchain technology, or in other words, a “time oracle.” Their technology focuses on a proof-of-time consensus mechanism, recording time on the blockchain for verification purposes. It’s hard to imagine a better fit into the XYO ecosystem and we’re proud to call them our partners!
Right around the time XYO was celebrating our fourth anniversary in March, we were also acknowledged as the most active crypto project on GitHub. (A crown we take regularly as one of the most consistently active crypto projects in 2022. We will be again in 2023.) We rang in this milestone with a fresh redesign for the XYO website.
We also brought XYO to viewers of one of the biggest crypto influencers in the world, the one and only Wendy O. herself. We’re still excited about it!
Q2
In April, we continued the release of XYO 2.0 with a new version of Explore, the XYO block explorer, with added functionality, a more user-friendly interface, and a vastly improved response time. We were also pleased to see CoinMarketCap list XYO among its top Metaverse projects. We built XYO to bridge the gap between the physical world and the virtual world, allowing us to contribute to this key ingredient of future metaverses.
We then collaborated with another of crypto’s top influencers, Conor Kenny, bringing even greater awareness of XYO to crypto enthusiasts around the world.
How could we possibly follow that in May? Well, XY Labs, the company behind the XYO brand, released our 2021 annual financial report and it blew everyone’s minds. We let the public and our shareholders know our company experienced all time high revenue which was doubled over the previous year. This would be our biggest announcement in 2022… until September.
In June we attended Consensus 2022, where we welcomed you to meet us at the XYO booth. XYO Co-Founder Markus Levin and the team who joined him took the opportunity to get to know many of you. We hope you were as glad to see us as we were to see you!
What else did we do in June? Well, we haven’t talked about it before, so this is an exclusive for getting this deep into the article. The entire XY Labs team from all over the U.S. met up for a top secret mission. Let’s just say we all wore our camera-ready best. We’ll talk more about that soon, but we celebrated the next day with an elegant party on a rooftop on the San Diego bayfront.
As we wined and dined and enjoyed the games, DJs, and entertainers who joined us, we savored a moment together. It was the first time the core XY Labs team, now featuring members not just from San Diego but spanning the continent, had gotten together since we gave up our beautiful downtown San Diego office space at the beginning of the 2020 COVID lockdowns. It felt like a reunion, and it redoubled our commitment to XYO, to COIN, and to our vision.
Q3
Speaking of our vision, in July we released the XYO one-pager as a series of social media videos, along with static versions so they could be shared by anyone. These posts are from our real corporate one-pager, and they cover the fundamentals of XYO, including how XYO works, how XYO can be utilized, how XYO can be integrated into other technology, and how XYO’s token economy works.
Expounding on our vision even further, Markus Levin was a guest contributor for NASDAQ.com, bringing readers a must-read piece called The Metaverse: Blurring the Lines Between Our Physical and Virtual Worlds.
At the end of the month, we announced that XYO’s main archivist had recorded over 333 million data payloads, a truly mind-bending number that demonstrates just how much data constantly flows into XYO from our millions of nodes represented by millions of users like you.
In August, we released something even better. We began and seeded the XYO dApp Library with two example dApps, learning tools which allow other developers to see how XYO can be integrated into any project. This was a huge step in making sure XYO can be easily adopted and adapted for endless types of software projects.
It’s no wonder that also in August, the CEO and founder of XY Labs, Arie Trouw, joined the prestigious Cointelegraph Innovation Circle, a think tank of blockchain’s brightest minds and cutting-edge leaders conceived by the titan of blockchain news, Cointelegraph. You may have seen XYO’s co-founders, Arie Trouw and Markus Levin, join many crypto content creators for interviews, comment on important tech developments in news articles, and be invited to be speakers or commentators for numerous outlets. 2022 saw a massive boom in XYO and its leaders being recognized as luminaries in the blockchain, metaverse, and cutting edge tech spaces.
Continuing our summer of many conferences, in September, XYO was an official partner for the Token 2049 conference in Singapore. We are so proud to be a global company, with people who work or contract for XY Labs all over the world, not to mention the worldwide presence of XYO nodes.
September also brought our single biggest announcement of the year. XY Labs, the company behind both XYO and COIN, partnered with tZERO ATS to tokenize XY Labs equity shares for online trading. In doing so, we gave our shareholders liquidity, and fans who wanted to become shareholders a way to own a valuable piece of XYO, COIN, and everything XY Labs is making into a reality.
A traditional IPO on a stock exchange can take a company years or even decades to achieve. By embracing a blockchain-based solution, XY Labs, in partnership with tZERO and Vertalo, was able to bring the ability to buy and trade shares of our company to investors in a fraction of the time it usually takes. We made sure that you could be part of our success. Not tomorrow, not years from now, but right now.
Q4
We had to wait until October before our shares received the official ticker symbol XYLB. This allows shareholders to track XY Labs shares via their favorite app, no matter what it might be. This might seem small, relative to everything else in this article. But it made our hearts skip a beat to open the CNBC app, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, or Robinhood and see XY Labs Inc. listed alongside our own shares in companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla.
We kicked off November with a huge win. LA Blockchain Summit reached out and invited Markus Levin to be a speaker at their leading North American blockchain conference and expo on November 2nd. Markus isn’t just a co-founder of XYO, he’s also the Head of Operations for XY Labs and he oversaw the massive logistical undertaking that was the XY Labs ATS listing. He was invited to speak on this topic for the conference’s attendees in Los Angeles, California. We were extremely excited to have him there, but unfortunately Markus fell under the weather just as he was due to attend. Luckily, Arie Trouw was able to step up and take his place.
That’s not the only thing Arie was up to in November, though. He also released something that needed to be talked about, and that still needs to be talked about. He released The Arie Test. This necessary, modern-day extension of the Howey Test explains how decentralized assets fit into the economy, and importantly, why they are not and cannot be considered securities.
In December, we rather quietly let it slip that XYO had surpassed five million activated nodes to date. Are you keeping track? It was in January that we announced that we’d surpassed four million nodes. If you caught that, you’re as observant as an XYO node, but what you don’t know is that we actually reached that milestone in June.
That’s right.
XYO’s network added one million nodes in six months.
And that seems like the right place to leave this accounting of our accomplishments in 2022. Right where we ought to be. It wasn’t all sunshine, obviously we’re here to talk about the peaks rather than the valleys, and the fruits of the labor rather than the often-taxing labor. We talk about this not just because it’s good for our company to do so, though it is, but because it’s what we were striving for. This is what we want to take away from 2022 and into 2023.
As we celebrate the new year, we want to take a moment to thank all XYO community members for your continued support of our project. We are no longer a little fish in a big pond, we are no longer a startup. We’re an elder in this space, a thought leader led by thought leaders, and an unshakeable foundation upon which others may build.
We’re glad you’re here with us.
Maryann Cummings, Head of XYO Operations
