GM! It’s that time of the year again when we review the highs and lows of crypto and all things ZKX 🚀
The Past 364 Days
The year began with the looming shadow of the FTX saga and the ensuing legal challenges. However, a significant shift in sentiment occurred in the middle of the year. Blackrock’s filing for the Spot Bitcoin ETF and Grayscale’s legal victory against the SEC uplifted spirits but also added legitimacy to the ETF effort, indicating a growing appetite for Bitcoin in TradFi circles — a win-win for everyone.
In the CEX space, it was a challenging year, marked by SBF’s conviction and CZ’s resignation with a hefty $4 billion fine. Meanwhile, things looked better on the DeFi front. The year unfolded with signs of growth and maturity, a departure from the bearish sentiment of 2022. October’s data revealed impressive figures, revealing derivatives trading volume at $1.94 trillion, constituting 75.4% of the total trading volume.
On top of this, Infrastructure witnessed major movement this year with account abstraction, new L2s in the space, and cross-chain stablecoins. These developments elevated the user experience and reignited the builder-entrepreneur excitement, which aided in overall adoption and optimistic sentiment.
There was not all! This year, we also had the Bonk phenomenon, Base Onchain summer, Friend Tech, and Solana revival. With the market heating up again, DeFi summer is coming and here to stay!
But wondering about what was up with us? Jump into the next section.
Navigating ZKX in 2023
2023 for ZKX was a year full of action!
Turning back, we were laser-focused on building and always asking ourselves, “HOW to bring stickiness to Traders?”
To answer this, we hit the ground running with the launch of our ZKX Yakuza Community Incentives Program — including the Contributor and Ambassador Program. The core idea behind this program was to bring something new to DeFi with a storyline and gamification and simultaneously provide value and opportunity to our community.
Our second step was the Testnet launch of the Advanced Trading Terminal. The ZKX testnet had over 58K unique accounts deployed, more than $1B in volume, accompanied by over 1M quests completed by our community on Zealy. Best part? The real-time feedback from our community was invaluable. You will soon get to experience it in Q1 2024.
Zooming into our hot girl summer, we did another cool campaign called the ‘7 Sins’ and dropped one announcement every Wednesday throughout September and October. Each release marked a piece of the puzzle towards the full ZKX DEX release, necessary to scale and bring the best UX we can deliver. First on our list was the ZKX Appchain, our answer to delivering a seamless user experience, enabling gasless trading and a unified orderbook across different networks. The second major milestone was the ZKX Account — a seamless solution empowering users to effortlessly transfer funds from any Ethereum wallet to their ZKX account on Starknet, eliminating the complexities of bridging while maintaining complete control of their funds.
After these milestones, it was time to reward our early contributors for their hard work throughout the year with our Yakuza NFTs and Phase 1 of our airdrop. While September & October were about delivering on the 7 Sins campaign, November was spent in planning, building and testing the OG Trading. Lots of coffee and Google meets later, we jumped into December with the launch of our DAO Contributor Program, followed by the audit completion of Starkway, our native bridge with Nethermind.
And finally, we ended the year (almost) on a high by releasing our plan for Q1 and revealing OG Trading as the first in our product lineup for 2024. It was a productive year for us, and we are very excited about what the Year of the Dragon has in store 😉
Want to know more? Here’s the Chronology of Everything -
January: Kicked off the year with the launch of ZKX Yakuza: Our Community Incentive, including the Ambassador and Contributors Program.
February: Attended StarkWare Sessions in Tel Aviv, marking our first event of the year.
March: Released our first technical paper on ZKX Funding Rate: Adaptive Balancing Rate and launched the ZKX Yakuza SZN 2. We also attended ETH Dubai and earned a spot in the Top 25 Web3 innovations project by YourStory.
April: The first Public ZKX Testnet began with the Polaris Trading war.
July: Got ready for blockchain & baguettes at EthCC! Attended 7 events in 6 days!
August: It was monsoon szn & had a good time connecting w/ the OGs at Coinfest Asia & Stanford Blockchain Week. That was not all for August! We also translated our blogs into 11 languages, making it 484 blogs!
September: September started with the launch of 7 Sins campaign, unlocking major milestones one Wednesday at a time. The first was the ZKX Appchain, followed by the release of $ZKX tokenomics. In the middle of this, we represented ourselves at Token 2049 and ended the month by releasing the ZKX Account, our first product on mainnet.
October: Airdrop phase 1 & ZKX Yakuza NFT went LIVE!
November: Participated in DevConnect in Istanbul, and Vitaly, our Co-founder & CTO, joined the DeFi committee of Starknet.
December: Most of November was knee-deep in planning the plans for December. We started with launching our DAO Contributor Program, followed by audit completion of our native bridge Starkway with Nethermind. We finally ended the year on a high with the release of Road to Mainnet in Q1 2024, with OG Trading hitting the ground first in Q1 2024.
Now, What’s Next in 2024?
We had a community call last week regarding our plans for next year & what you can expect from OG Trading. ICYMI here’s all you need to know about our plans for next year. 👇
- OG Trading Unveiled: OG Trading, a gamified perpetual swap exchange will launch in Q1 2024. Traders will get to compete in 30-minute competitions for rewards in the following categories: volume, loss, and profit.
2. Inclusive Reward System: Unlike traditional reward mechanisms, ZKX will reward the top 10%, not just the top few, making participation accessible to a broader range of users.
3. Two-Month Campaign: The OG Trading launch will span two months, offering exclusive ZKX rewards to incentivize our community to explore the platform.
4. Airdrop Allocation: We will utilize the allocation for trading incentives to bootstrap the mainnet launch campaign and establish steady rewards for distribution to both terminals — OG Trading and Advanced Trading. The airdrop allocation remains designated for a retroactive airdrop.
5. Clans: You have four clans, and your on-chain history determines your eligibility into these clans. Clans benefit those with a history of trading in perpetual swaps, OG traders, Whales, Ethereum OGs, Yakuza members, and early ZKX contributors. Participation in the Airdrop is tied to “Clans, and joining a Clan provides a head start in the retroactive airdrop, exclusive NFTs, and perks, creating a different and exciting ZKX journey.
6. Token Listing: ZKX token listing is in progress, with interest from major exchanges. The team is working diligently on this, and more details will be shared in January.
7. Advanced Trading Terminal: Following the OG Trading launch, a professional-grade ZKX Advanced Trading Terminal with API access catering to advanced traders will be introduced.
In the end, we aim to provide both gamified and professional trading platforms, followed by other products in 2024.
We have exciting things lined up for 2024, so Happy New Year, and see you the next time!
Check out our previous blog for more about OG Trading — The Road to Mainnet Q1 2024.
