February at Polkadex

The Polkadex Crowdloan continues; Orderbook beta in full swing; mobile app beta released… This was February at Polkadex

Things at Polkadex have not slowed down in February. With the Polkadex Crowdloan in full swing, February has been a good month for hitting important milestones, like the beta tester launch of Polkadex Orderbook and the Polkadex mobile app. Here’s a comprehensive list of everything that happened at Polkadex during the shortest month of the year!

The Polkadex network keeps on growing! February was no exception, with Polkadex expanding to 140 active validators (17% growth over February alone) and reaching almost 1,400 nominators (7% growth). The total amount of PDEX staked on the Polkadex network has increased over 8% since the end of January and stands at over 1.51 million PDEX! Also important to note is the fact that the amount of PDEX migrated over from Ethereum continues to grow and is now over 1.12 million. In fact, not counting KuCoin’s ERC-20 PDEX, there are only around 700,000 PDEX remaining on Ethereum.

Currently the PDEX rewards are at 44.8%, however we still have only about 8.4 % of the tokens staked. Since inflation rewards peak only at 50% of ideal stake (only after which it starts going down), there is still more room for more validators to receive similar rewards without having to worry about the rewards going lower. In case you have not done so already, here are guides to migrate your PDEX and start staking. For anybody looking to transfer their native tokens, we made this short but helpful tutorial to help you unlock your PDEX once 28 days have passed after your latest migration.

February was a month of development milestones. At the beginning of the month, we celebrated the private beta launch of the Polkadex Orderbook web app. A few weeks later, the Polkadex mobile app was also released to the private beta testers. Working together with beta testers, our devs have already been able to use valuable feedback to make improvements to the products. They even released a revamped Orderbook web app iteration with a brand new user interface! But that’s not all. As our devs continue to work through the feedback from our stellar group of beta testers, they’ve also dedicated time to work on some of the broad-spectrum Polkadex challenges. This work has paid off as the interoperability layer of Polkadex is now in the internal testing phase and will be launched onto the public testnet shortly as an update to PolkaIDO. Another completed milestone may be the most important one yet: the connection of the Orderbook’s trusted execution environment (TEE) and the blockchain (Polkadex testnet). This version of Polkadex Orderbook connected to the Polkadex testnet will soon be released to beta testers as well!

After the amount of coverage in January thanks to the launch of the Polkadex Crowdloan, February was going to have a tough time surpassing the previous month. However, with The Street quoting Gautham’s comments about the coming of a new generation of decentralized exchanges, and Coinspeaker’s mention of Polkadex in “What is Polkadot and why is it called Ethereum killer?” article, we were off to a good start. Cap it all off with features on Blockonomi and ZyCrypto, and that’s a pretty good month of media coverage.

Video time! Both KIR Finance and Minus Wells published sweeping, detailed interviews with Vivek in early February. Last but not least, according to Cryptowise’s recent Polkadot projects video, Polkadex is “aiming to be one of the fastest, if not THE fastest exchange in all of crypto”

On the live events side of things, Vivek was hosted by the Bifrost team for an exciting Twitter Spaces AMA in which he spoke a little bit about the growth phase set to take place post-launch.

After a huge month of partnership announcements in January, February kept things rolling with some more partnerships, Crowdloan-related and not.

As mentioned in our last update, most of the partnerships announced so far in 2022 have had the purpose of supporting the Polkadex Crowdloan. In February, more exchange partners, specifically Gate.io and MEXC Global, joined KuCoin in supporting the Polkadex Crowdloan. This means users of KuCoin, Gate.io, and MEXC Global can now contribute to the Polkadex Crowdloan without leaving their accounts. Gate.io and MEXC Global contributors even received a 10% extra PDEX bonus for a limited time in February!

We also announced a partnership with SubWallet, a new easy-to-use Web3 extension wallet which now supports the Polkadex network and even lets you track your Polkadex Crowdloan contributions. Lastly and most recently, Subsocial’s Sub.ID, a tool which lets you see track your account across Substrate networks, added support for the Polkadex network.

February had some fun highlights for the Polkadex community! For example, we released a short how-to video for Crowdloan participants, and even launched a caption contest to celebrate the Polkadex Orderbook beta. Loving the creativity in the captions! We also loved seeing fellow Polkadex community member Dimitri Olock’s new unofficial (but super cool) Polkadex hoodie. We might need to start making official Polkadex swag!

If 2022 is to be the year of Polkadex, then it has to be a year of monthly growth for the Polkadex community. After January and February, it would seem like the Polkadex community is headed in the right direction.

Here’s how the Polkadex community has grown in February:

• The Polkadex Crowdloan has almost reached 130k DOT contributed. That’s almost 2.5 million USD in support of Polkadex’s parachain! Better yet: it’s all from the Polkadex community!
• In February, the Polkadex official subreddit grew 1.2% while the YouTube channel grew by 1.4% as they both surpassed the 1.5k member and subscriber marks, respectively.
• There was a 5.2% increase in the amount of Polkadex followers on Linkedin and an 1.6% increase in the Polkadex Medium follower count, which is nearing 4k followers.
• The Polkadex Twitter page has now reached 61.3k followers.
• The Polkadex local Telegram communities (Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Turkish) grew by 20% and now total over 6,000 members. That includes the recently launched German Telegram channel!
• The Polkadex Discord server continues to become the ‘main square’ for Polkadex town. Since February 1st, the member count has increased 10% and is now around 2,400.

The Polkadex community also grew in a different way in February with the incorporation Faisal Ahmed to the Polkadex team. Faisal is a talented Rust engineer ready to take on one of the most important aspects of Polkadex: the interoperability layer.

Here are the next big milestones in the year of Polkadex:

⚫️ Orderbook beta improvements

⚫️ Interoperability layer released to public beta testers alongside PolkaIDO

⚫️ Orderbook and mobile app public testnet release

⚫️ More PDEX exchange listings and native hardware wallet support

Between continuing our quest to win a parachain slot and making strides towards launching Polkadex products, the rest of the year is set to be filled with even more exciting news. Follow the channels below so you don’t miss out on any updates from the Polkadex team!

Website| Twitter | TG Chat | TG Announcements | Medium | Youtube | Reddit | Discord | Linkedin | Spanish community | Turkish community | Indian community | Russian community | Chinese community |

💙💙💙
💛💛💛

Fellow Polkadot project Subsocial has set up a way to donate funds to support Ukraine and its citizens in the face of the Russian invasion. They are now accepting donations in PDEX. Donations currently go to a Subsocial-controlled wallet while a less trust-bound solution is on its way. For more information check the tweets below or visit the donations page.