2020 Roundup
While 2020 has definitely been a marbled year overall, we look back on a successful year as a company. We grew our team, onboarded new projects, and launched several products. We are grateful for all the positive things that came our way and wish everyone who has been hit hard during 2020 all the best for the next year. With this post, we would like to briefly cover the highlights we as a company was blessed to enjoy during the past 12 months.
Networks
2020 has seen many new networks come to life and we drastically expanded our services to many new networks:
Chainlink
In March, we joined the Chainlink network as a Node operator and have since processed a tremendous amount of querries — DeFi summer has been a crazy ride! We see ourselves as a Web 3.0 infrastructure and service provider, hence supporting a cornerstone of the Web 3.0 tech stack is especially exciting for us.
Solana
Solanas’ Mainnet Beta saw the light of day in March and has since produced over 50 Million blocks with a global validator set of 360 independent validators (and counting). We are proud to have been supporting the network ever since its inception and to see our CEO & co-founder, Wolfgang Albrecht, as a council member of the Solana Foundation. We are also very pleased to see that Solanabeach, a network explorer we built, is so well received by the community. There’s a lot more to come in 2021 — stay tuned!
Polkadot, Kusama, and Edgeware
The long-anticipated launch of Polkadot took place on May 26th and we were there right from the beginning. We waited ever since the ICO and were really excited to see the network live in action. To best support the overall Substrate ecosystem, we are also engaged as a validator and node operator on Kusama as well as Edgeware. To facilitate a seamless staking experience for every DOT holder, we summoned the Staking Wizard on October 21st.
Skale
In June, the Skale network is built around a strong set of validators and set to tackle scaling issues for Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem. We joined in on the first of December after setting up infrastructure and receiving tremendous support from the Skale team. We are proud to be amongst such a top-notch validator set and eager to see how the network will evolve in the coming months.
Eth2 & Lido Staking
The launch of Ethereum 2.0s’ Beacon Chain on December 1st was undoubtedly one of the most exciting events happening in crypto in 2020. To celebrate this historic event, we co-hosted an Eth2 launch event initiated by the Staking Economy team — you can watch the recording here. To facilitate a seamless staking experience for Eth2, regardless of how many ETH one holds and without foregoing the liquidity of ones’ funds, we joined Lido as a DAO member, node operator, and investor. We participated in testnet as well as the distributed key generation ceremony and work closely with the Lido team.
The Graph
We successfully participated as a Indexer in Mission Control, the incentivized testnet of the Graph, and are very excited to now support mainnet, which launched on December 17th. Seeing our Infrastructure Lead, Gary Morris as one of two Indexer representatives on the Graph council fills us with pride. We eagerly look forward to many more subgraphs emerging and existing ones moving over from the hosted service. With Graphlets we want to contribute to the overall Graph ecosystem and support every stakeholder — we’ll continuously improve the tool and add more features throughout 2021!
Company News
Next to supporting top-notch networks as an infrastructure and service provider, we seek to improve and contribute to the overall blockchain industry.
European Blockchain Association
Together with Datarella and other professional, European validators, we founded the Proof-of-Stake Working group (PoS WG) within the European Blockchain Association. The PoS WG is an interdisciplinary forum that aims to support the adoption of Proof of Stake based consensus protocols. This includes comprehensive educational work and lobbying efforts directed towards political decision-makers within the European Union. The working group will also seek to improve the state of the industry as a whole through self-regulation, standards-setting, and the development of best practices within the industry.
Finoa
In August, we signed a partnership with Finoa, a professional custody solution for digital assets. Through Finoa, professional and institutional investors and can enjoy a broad spectrum of digital asset management solutions. We are supporting Finoa with our industry-grade, highly secure staking architecture. A seamless integration of our services in Finoa’s product suite, enables their customers to earn staking rewards on their digital assets and constitutes an all-in-one platform for the management of yield-bearing crypto assets.
Staking Academy
On August 14th, we launched the Staking Academy, a content aggregation platform for everything staking related. The Staking Academy provides new users with an information source to get started & more seasoned stakers can browse through a variety of articles, podcasts & events.
Team
While we are super stoked about all the networks we onboarded and the partnerships we formed, we are most excited about the growth of our team:
Louis Bauer — Business Development
After finishing his bachelor’s in Technology & Management at the TU Munich, Louis joined our team in May. While his main responsibility is Business Development, he has been a force of nature in every aspect of our company. Louis is bursting with ideas, is a true design wizard, and very knowledgeable in traditional finance. Together with Lars, Gary, and Robert, he did an outstanding job of launching Graphlets, pushed the Staking Academy, and conjure up Ui designs for the Staking Wizard in record time.
Lars Frölich — Software Development
Lars is currently pursuing a bachelors’ in informatics at the Technical University of Munich. He joined us as a working student in August, however, because of him, one would have to redefine the term working student. Ever since he joined our ranks, he has been hammering away just like everyone else. He was deeply involved in several products, always gets down to work no matter what time of day it is, works independently, has a curious mind, and sucks up information about complex networks in no time.
Gary Morris — Infrastructure Lead
While not new to the team, Gary deserves a special shoutout — he has been working around the clock for the past year, really dug into the Graph — so much so that he’s now a council member and was readily available when new hardware arrived (we literally had a ton of new hardware waiting for him at one point) or any upgrades needed to be done. In December, we celebrated Garys’ first anniversary and really hope that we get to celebrate many more!
Robert Dörzbach — Marketing & Communications
Just as Gray, Robert is not a new addition to our team and has been with us since 2019. However, 2020 marked the year he joined us full force after finishing his Masters’ at the TU Munich. Robert is a swiss-army knife and involved in every project & product across our suite. He is offering personal customer support pretty much around the clock and readily available for any questions, guides, or tutorials.
Guys, you rock and we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for you. Big thank you for all the countless hours you put in as well as the laughs, ideas, and adventures we shared. We also want to thank each and every one of our delegators, service users, everyone working with our portfolio projects as well as everyone believing in decentralization and Web 3.0 — onwards!
