2022: the year in review

It's been a really exciting year for the t3rn community. From our strategic funding round to the many technical developments of the protocol, not to mention the growth in the community, there are a plethora of reasons to celebrate, despite the dire market conditions we’ve been seeing in the broader crypto space. 

So let’s go through the top highlights of 2022!

‍t3rn went live on Rococo

In May, after months of hard work and dedication, we announced the launch of t3rn's Rococo Parachain, t0rn. Rococo serves as a testing ground for parachains functionality, allowing us to experiment and refine our technology before launching on mainnet. This was also the first step in our vision to develop the XBI format. As a community-driven project, we welcomed feedback and contributions from other parachain builders who were tackling similar challenges. With your support, we believe that Rococo and XBI can become valuable resources for the entire Polkadot ecosystem.

‍Building a trustless interoperability protocol

This year has really been focused on building. After the earlier grant received from the Web3 Foundation to deliver a proof of concept of an innovative solution for smart contract interoperability, team t3rn received, and completed, a second grant from the Web3 Foundation. 

This grant has enabled us to focus on the development of the XBI standard, which we believe will be a valuable asset for parachains and the broader blockchain space. XBI focuses on enabling communications between different virtual machines, such as EVM and WASM. This allows us to use XCM operations consistently and efficiently across different parachains and to specify the necessary metadata for these operations. XBI also provides a callback system for receiving notifications and results from remote chains.

We are excited about the progress we have made and the impact that the XBI standard will have in the Polkadot ecosystem.

‍Strategic funding to further develop the protocol

In November, we were thrilled to announce that we raised $6.5 million in a strategic funding round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Blockchange, Lemniscap, D1 Ventures, Huobi Ventures, Figment Capital, Bware Labs, MEXC, Open Process Ventures, NetZero Capital and an array of industry-leading angel investors, many of which are prominent founders.

“Interoperability between layer-1 blockchains and the applications built on top of them will help improve efficiency and liquidity across the ecosystem by reducing fractured liquidity pools and increasing composability across different execution environments,” said Ben Perszyk, Partner at Polychain Capital. “t3rn is building an expressive protocol for generalizable function calls across different chains – an ambitious undertaking that will unlock new behaviors for crypto builders and users.”

The funds received will be used to expand the engineering team and continue the development of our protocol, as well as build out an onboarding program for developers. 

‍Our team expands with new hires and a new office in Berlin

In 2022, our team experienced growth in key areas, as we welcomed professionals in marketing, development, and operations. 

A key aspect of our expansion was to keep the open and healthy culture that is so inherent to the t3rn ecosystem – what we call the “way of lif3”. Consequently, all new hires are in tune with our fundamental beliefs, exercised through 5 principles.

We also launched a new website and opened an office in Berlin (in addition to the one in Lisbon), further expanding our reach and capabilities. These developments have allowed us to better serve our goals and drive innovation in our industry.

‍The t3rn parachain strategy – towards a multichain Polkadot

We recently announced our strategy towards obtaining a Polkadot parachain. The team has taken a measured approach to obtaining a parachain slot, focusing on building a strong product and waiting for the right timing to make a direct bid using DOT held by the t3rn Foundation.

Once the t3rn parachain goes live, the protocol will be launched as an MVP (minimum viable product), a common strategy in software development, with transaction fees initially paid in DOT. In the future, the t3rn token (TRN) will be used as an alternative and favorable way to pay fees. The team plans to onboard the t3rn community with a token distribution once the protocol has been proven to function securely.

‍t3rn on tour: Polkadot Decoded, Substrate Seminar, WebSummit, sub0…

In June, Maciej Baj, our Founder and CTO, presented XBI at Polkadot Decoded. The XBI standard was also the main topic of Maciej’s Substrate Seminar talk, hosted by Parity Technology. The event in August aimed to educate builders in the Polkadot ecosystem about the latest tech developments in the ecosystem.

In November, we had the opportunity to showcase t3rn at the WebSummit in Lisbon, the largest tech conference in Europe. Our team was featured at the Polkadot booth, and we were thrilled to see a steady stream of web3 enthusiasts coming by to learn more about our technology and projects.

Our Chief Strategy Officer, Jacob Kowalewski, participated in a fireside chat where he presented t3rn as the multichain protocol that brings fail-safe, interoperable execution and smart contract composability to the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond. We also hosted a talk with partners from Consensys and ConsenSys, to talk about the latest market trends and interoperability.

And we ended the month of November at sub0, an event for the global Polkadot developer community that took place at the LXFactory in Lisbon.

Maciej Baj presented our vision for the future of interoperability and our work on light clients. The event allowed Polkadot and Substrate developers to connect and learn more about the ecosystem. t3rn also co-hosted the closing party with other parachains and Parity Technology.

‍A thriving community

2022 was also a great year for the t3rn community. We have seen incredible growth, despite the current market conditions, getting to 30k followers on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. (Now, close to 33k!).

Our Telegram and Discord channels also saw fantastic growth, now at 4,700 and 6,400 members, respectively. Communities in Ukrainian, Spanish, Russian, Thai, among others, are thriving. But the most important aspect is the engagement quality – The community team has created a series of monthly events that bring the community together and promote a fair and open dialogue.

Last but not least, t3rn has recently launched a new batch for the Conductors program, which will certainly further develop the community around the world.

‍In conclusion

Overall, it's been a remarkably productive and successful year at t3rn. These developments bring us closer to our mission of giving all blockchains the ability to interconnect seamlessly, securely, and trustlessly.

We are excited to continue building and innovating in the blockchain space and look forward to what the future holds. We will continue to provide updates on our progress and welcome any feedback from the community. Stay tuned on our Twitter, Telegram and Discord!

‍About t3rn:

t3rn is a multichain protocol that brings fail-safe, interoperable execution and smart contract composability to the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond.

t3rn’s ultimate goal is to enable trust-free collaboration between blockchains and to create an ecosystem in which anyone can utilize and deploy an interoperable smart contract, in an ecosystem where developers are fairly rewarded for their contributions.

Welcome to the new generation of multichain composability.

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