2022 at Polkadex
From securing a parachain to the launch of Polkadex Orderbook and a shoutout from Gavin Wood, 2022 was the biggest year yet at Polkadex.
We’re only a few weeks into 2023 and work on THEA and the Polkadex parachain-to-mainnet connection has picked up in pace post-Winter break. Polkadex Orderbook’s liquidity has increased. PDEX crowdloan rewards are expected to be claimable in Q1. While there is a lot to look forward to this year, it’s also important to take a look in the rearview mirror and see everything the Polkadex team was able to accomplish in 2022.
The main highlights of 2022
Starting with some of the top news of the year, in early May, Polkadex secured a Polkadot parachain slot with the help of over 2,000 contributors (in 6,000 individual contributions) and nearly 1 million DOT contributed to the Polkadex Crowdloan.
In September, Polkadex, with the help of Zondax, became one of the first Substrate-based networks to receive native Ledger support — an important milestone for the security of all Polkadexers’ funds.
Arguably the most important Polkadex news of 2022 and the most important milestone since Polkadex was founded, Polkadex Orderbook was launched in October!
Another exciting highlight of 2022 was Polkadex attracting the attention of Polkadot founder Gavin Wood.
Last but not least, Polkadex and the launch of Polkadex Orderbook were mentioned in the Polkadot 2022 Roundup as “a big boost” for Polkadot’s DeFi community.
Dive deeper
The highlights above are just the tip of the iceberg of what we accomplished in 2022. We’ve put together the following summary to help you dive even deeper into more of the most important Polkadex events of last year.
The Polkadex network continued to grow throughout all of 2022. As of January of 2023, there are now over 4,800 native PDEX holders. Meanwhile, the total amount of PDEX staked grew from 1 million PDEX at the start of the year to almost 3.7 million PDEX staked (or almost 20% of the total PDEX supply) by the end of December. While the total amount of PDEX staked more than tripled in 2022, the total number of active nominators in the network doubled to around 2,200 nominators. All in all, almost 1 in 5 PDEX are now locked in staking and currently earning a little less than 30% APY. Start the year off right by staking your PDEX now so you don’t miss out on daily rewards in 2023.
Additionally, the validator community grew from 110 active validators at the start of the year to 140 active validators by end of December. Many validators continued to actively participate in community matters and were quick to update their nodes to allow for 2 runtime upgrades throughout the year.
The aforementioned launch of Polkadex Orderbook in October of 2022 was a culmination of almost two years of work and the most important product development milestone for Polkadex so far. However, the Polkadex development team also spent 2022 working on the Polkadex Mobile App (which was released on Kaizen in November), THEA, connecting the Polkadex parachain to the Polkadex mainnet, and more. We even overhauled our website and launched new pages for Polkadex Orderbook, Staking, and more.
In 2022, we not only made our presence felt through online events, including dozens of Twitter Spaces sessions, but we also attended a handful of great in-person events like Polkadot Decoded in Berlin, Web3Conf India in Goa, Sub0 in Lisbon, and many more.
If you didn’t make it to Berlin, you can watch Vivek’s full talk here:
If you didn’t make it to Lisbon, you can watch Gautham’s full talk here:
Polkadex was covered by a wide range of YouTubers throughout the year, with over two dozen videos featuring Polkadex obtaining over 1 thousand views each for total tally of around 270,000 views. And that’s without counting even more videos in the 500 to 1 thousand view range!
On the written coverage side, Polkadex was featured on Hackernoon, Yahoo Finance, CryptoPotato, Blockchain News, Bitcoinist, BeInCrypto, Altcoin Buzz, and more. However, Gautham’s interviews with CoinTelegraph and Decrypt deserve a special mention as they highlight how radical of an alternative to existing centralized or decentralized ways of trading Polkadex is.
In 2022 we partnered with Zondax and Ledger, which resulted in native Ledger device support for the Polkadex network (and native PDEX). We’re excited to continue to work with Zondax and Ledger in 2023 to make non-custodial CEX-like trading as secure as possible for more and more traders.
Thanks to the Polkadex Crowdloan, we were able to partner with fellow Web3 projects like Parallel Finance, Bifrost, Equilibrium, and RMRK, and wallets like Nova, Fearless, Talisman and Subwallet. We also partnered with CEXs like KuCoin, Kraken, Gate.io, AscendEx, and MEXC Global to offer the Polkadex Crowdloan to centralized exchange users. Lastly, we also partnered with explorer and data providers like Subscan, Parachains.info, PolkaProject, Subvisio during the Polkadex Crowdloan campaign. Securing a parachain slot is definitely a collaborative effort!
In 2022 PDEX continued to become available on more centralized exchanges with an AscendEx listing in March, and a highly awaited native PDEX KuCoin listing in April.
In other great news for Polkadexers, some of our wallet partners like Nova Wallet and Subwallet now offer easy-to-use interfaces for PDEX staking.
To round up the rest of 2022, we also announced important strategic partnerships with Subsquid, Acala, Staking Rewards, Crust Network, Cere, Simplex, and more!
New office
2022 was a year of firsts for team Polkadex. One of the most important ones was the opening of our first office in Bangalore! While most of the Polkadex team continues to be spread around the world, having a physical space to gather not only brought us together, but it also helped accelerate the pace at which we were able to hit product deadlines and milestones. We hope to continue to welcome new faces to our Bangalore office in 2023!
Growing together
In July, we launched the Polkadex Open Beta program in order to give the wider Polkadex community a chance to test Polkadex products and updates pre-launch, provide feedback, and earn rewards; all while helping the Polkadex team deliver better versions of the products originally envisioned.
In September we launched the Polkadex Ambassador program, a treasury-funded initiative to foster community-driven growth for Polkadex going forward. Over 3,200 people have applied to participate in the ambassador program so far!
Social roundup
2022 was a year of growth in many senses of the word. Aside from growth within the team, or development on the product side, the Polkadex community grew across a wide number of channels throughout 2022. Check out some of the highlights in the 2022 Polkadex socials roundup:
- The Polkadex Discord server exploded from around 2,000 members in December of 2021 to over 6,200 members by end of December 2022.
- On LinkedIn, we went from a little over 1,100 followers by the end of 2021 to around 2,330 followers by end of 2022. That’s more than double in 2022 alone!
- The number of Medium followers increased by more than 1,000 (or around 30%) to reach 4,621.
- r/polkadex, the official Polkadex subreddit, grew over 25% to reach over 1,750 members.
- Throughout 2022, the number of Polkadexers on Twitter increased by over 4,000 to reach a total total of around 64,200.
- On Telegram, the number of members across all channels (Announcements, English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, India, German and Turkish) grew to around 24,000.
- Over 500 Polkadexers subscribed to our YouTube channel in 2022 to reach over 1,900 YouTube subscribers.
2023 at Polkadex is looking to surpass 2022 with increased interoperability, more trading pairs, and an influx of liquidity to Polkadex Orderbook. Plus, crowdloan rewards are coming! Stay tuned with the official channels below.
Website | Polkadex Orderbook | Token Manager | Twitter | TG Chat | TG Announcements | Medium | Youtube | Reddit | Discord | Linkedin | Spanish community | Turkish community | Indian community | Russian community | Chinese community | German community
