IoTeX: 2023 Year in Review

As our sixth year in existence comes to a close, we couldn't be happier with how things have gone over the past 12 months OR any more excited about what's to come in 2024. With each year that passes, IoTeX becomes more and more Lindy and increasingly better positioned to thrive throughout future market cycles.

TL;DR IoTeX in 2023:

🪷 W3bstream Launch – Testnet in February, Devnet in June, Mainnet coming in 2024. Groundbreaking middleware for DePIN that serves as a decentralized, off-chain compute layer to connect physical devices and their data with smart contracts on any blockchain.
🗺️ DePINscan Launch – August. A free DePIN explorer with project profiles, real-time network stats, and location maps, boosting investor interest in the sector. 100k unique visitors & 264k pageviews.
💸 DePIN Liquidity Hub Launch – November. In a little less than a month, we've aggregated ~$300k+ of liquidity and facilitated $285k+ of daily trading volume for 8 DePIN tokens.
🌏 R3AL WORLD – First and largest DePIN focused IRL event. 5000+ attendees, 6 Cities, 70 Speakers, 50+ partners and 800k+ social impressions.
⛓️ IoTeX Layer 1 Blockchain – 103 delegates, 3.6B $IOTX staked, 111M+ transactions, & 100% uptime in 2023.
🗳️ 5 IoTeX Improvement Protocols passed – Account Abstraction, NFT Staking Buckets, IoTeX Domain Name Service, and more.
📰 Ethereum Foundation Grant and Collaboration with ARM

2023 will forever be remembered as the year that DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) took the world of crypto by storm, gaining widespread public recognition and providing some of the most interesting, valuable applications of blockchain technology and cryptography to date. IoTeX was perfectly positioned to capitalize on the sector's momentum, given that we have been building infrastructure for use cases at the intersection of the real world and blockchains since 2018 and announced our "DePIN-first" focus in May of this year.

And we did more than just ride the DePIN wave: while maintaining our momentum with respect to our Layer 1 blockchain, ecosystem, and community, we shipped several new products, leveraged our existing infrastructure and tooling in creative ways, launched an accelerator, and attended/hosted 20+ conferences around the world, all for the benefit of DePIN builders. We'll break it all down for you below!

Shipped products

W3bstream Devnet

Our biggest product release was W3bstream. W3bstream is middleware that serves as a decentralized, off-chain compute layer to connect physical devices and their data with smart contracts on any blockchain. We released our Testnet in February, our Devnet in June, and our Mainnet will go live in 2024. Here's a brief visual that explores W3bstream's role connecting smart devices with smart contracts:

There are currently a few projects using the W3bstream infrastructure to leverage verifiable off-chain computation, across multiple verticals. While projects like M3tering Protocol and Western Engineering are focused on bringing web3 to the smart energy sector by creating peer-to-peer smart grids and using W3bstream to provide energy production and consumption data accounting on-chain, projects like Drop Wireless focus on revolutionizing the advertisement sector by creating a decentralized marketplace for ad space, orchestrated once again by W3bstream.

W3bstream is chain-agnostic, meaning it can support (and settle to) a wide variety of today's largest public blockchains including Ethereum, IoTeX, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. We've announced all of these integrations over the past year. The W3bstream Devnet release came with its own user interfacing tool to manage projects, devices and on-chain events. We call it the W3bstream Studio, here's what it looks like:

DePINscan

In August, we launched DePINscan, a public good powered by W3bstream. It's a sector-wide explorer for the DePIN space that looks somewhat like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, but better, allowing DePIN projects to quickly and easily create their own profile pages, share real-time, network-level statistics like the number and location of their nodes around the world, and generate increased investor and retail interest in what they are building.

DePINscan has quickly become one of the go-to-sources for DePIN data, amassing 100k+ unique visitors and 263k+ pageviews since its launch in August of this year. 21 DePIN projects (representing ~$5.5B of market cap and ~440k devices in 156 countries) are directly integrated with the platform (including Helium, Filecoin, Akash, and Streamr), with many more to come.

DePIN Liquidity Hub

In November, we launched the DePIN Liquidity Hub. Token liquidity is highly important to any crypto project, especially DePINs, as they utilize their token heavily as an incentive mechanism to grow their network. Unfortunately, the rest of crypto has roughly 4x the % of DEX to CEX volumes than DePIN does. After seeing this opportunity, we decided to jump in and combine ioTube (our multi-chain bridge), ioPay (our DePIN wallet), and mimo (our decentralized exchange) to increase liquidity for DePIN tokens. We work with projects to bridge their tokens from any other chain to IoTeX L1, create a two-sided liquidity pool using their token and $IOTX on mimo, and then run liquidity mining and co-marketing campaigns to incentivize investor and retail liquidity provision to those pools to increase token liquidity. Project liquidity pool pages look like this:

In a little less than a month, we've aggregated ~$300k+ of liquidity and facilitated $285k+ of daily trading volume (per day, data from 1/3/2024) for the tokens of our 8 DePIN Liquidity Hub launch partners (WiFi Map, Geodnet, Dimo, Streamr, Wicrypt, XNET, Drop Wireless, and Drife). These numbers represent a weighted average of ~11% of these projects' DEX liquidity and ~3% of their DEX trading volumes (excluding newly added projects Streamr and Drife as liquidity data isn't publicly available yet).

R3AL WORLD

IoTeX attended or hosted over 20 conferences and events in 2023 to make a huge IRL impact on the DePIN space.

We hosted the first and largest DePIN focused in-person event: R3AL WORLD. R3AL WORLD is a collaborative event joining together the innovators of tomorrow, who bring Web3 to reality and impact the real world. Starting at ETHDenver in March, R3AL WORLD was the first ever showcase of DePIN projects that were defining the early category, including DIMO, EnviroBLOQ, and GEODNET. A huge success, we took R3AL WORLD on tour around the world: ETHCC, Consensus, Token2049, ETHTokyo, and Hong Kong Web3 Festival.

All in all, our R3AL WORLD events garnered 5000+ attendees, 6 Cities, 70 Speakers, 50+ partners and 500k+ social impressions. Who knows where R3AL WORLD will reach in 2024?

In another first, IoTeX hosted the First IEEE DePIN workshop, the first ever academic, technical program dedicated to design challenges, methodologies, implementations, use cases, and tokenomics related to building DePIN networks.

The IoTeX Layer 1 Blockchain and Ecosystem

Layer 1 Blockchain

IoTeX made incredible strides this year and grew our network activity across all fronts. The IoTeX blockchain is now secured by 103 delegates staking ~3.6B $IOTX (~38% of circ. supply). We onboarded 9 new DePIN Delegates – Mycelium Networks, DePIN Connect, Nabox, Crust, Western Engineering, DoraHacks, Port3, Dmail, and Hotspotty – who share our passion for the DePIN mission. These delegates have already secured over 196M votes collectively. The IoTeX chain processed 111M+ transactions, 27M+ blocks, and 740 verified smart contracts.

Most importantly, throughout this rapid growth in network activity, the IoTeX blockchain maintained 100% uptime in 2023 and has never experienced an outage since its Mainnet launch in 2019. This incredible feat is due to our deep commitment to constant improvement of the blockchain.

The IoTeX ecosystem boasted 120,000+ active wallets in 2023 and the L1 has ~23k devices actively running on it. In 2023, over 1,692 commits were made to IoTeX's Github from the core team and community contributors. Our long history of Mainnet upgrades was extended this year with the launch of Mainnet v1.10, v1.11, v1.12 that added massive new features and security/stability/performance enhancements, including transaction pool overhaul, liquidity staking by staking buckets as NFTs, account abstraction, enforcing ChainID for transaction security, node status monitoring by p2p, API/network improvements, and support for the latest EVM versions.

IIPs (IoTeX Improvement Proposals) Passed in 2023

IIPs are suggested changes to the IoTeX protocol that describe new features or some other notable change in our processes or ecosystem. They are intended to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new features, collecting community input on related topics, and documenting the design decisions that have been implemented.

IIP-13 Representing staking buckets as NFTs: This IIP proposed to natively support the representation of staking buckets as Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) on the IoTeX blockchain, which opens opportunities for applications such as Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSD) and potentially increases the staking ratio, therefore enhancing the security and decentralization of the IoTeX blockchain.
IIP-14 (Account abstraction): This IIP aimed to abstract as many of the account properties as possible, including authentication, authorization, replay protection, gas payment, and batching, allowing users to use smart contract wallets containing arbitrary verification logic instead of EOAs (externally owned accounts) as their primary account.
IIP-15 Sharing gas fees with dapps: This IIP proposed sharing part of gas-fees from smart contract transactions with the DApp developers that created those smart contracts, incentivizing development and project launches on the IoTeX L1.
IIP-21: Bringing IOTX from Ethereum to IoTeX: This proposal outlined a plan to bridge the IOTX token from IoTeX L1 to Ethereum and implement CIOTX (Crosschain IOTX) token on Ethereum, with the aim of improving its utilization and demand in DeFi protocols on Ethereum and exchanges.
IIP-22 Delegate Endorsement: This proposal introduced Delegate Endorsement, enabling individual stakeholders within the IoTeX Network to become Delegates without owning a substantial amount of tokens (i.e., the current minimum self-stake requirement of 1.2M IOTX). IIP-22 aims to promote inclusivity and decentralization, expanding participation opportunities and fostering a more fair and accessible IoTeX ecosystem.

Media mentions and thought leadership

Beyond shipping products and improving our Layer 1 blockchain, this year IoTeX focused on building the broader DePIN ethos through thought leadership and notable collaborations with the Ethereum Foundation and ARM.

Ethereum Foundation and ARM Partnerships

IoTeX was pleased to receive a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to build the first zero-knowledge based account abstraction wallet. Two senior researchers from the IoTeX team are working on using ZK proofs to allow for wallet access with a user-chosen password, broadening crypto wallets' appeal and pushing us one step closer to mainstream adoption. The deliverables are being integrated into the web version of IoPay wallet.

IoTeX also announced a research collaboration with ARM to explore privacy-preserving collaborative data processing based on ARM's confidential computing framework Veracruz. The research results demonstrate the feasibility of processing smart device data without jeopardizing users' privacy and establish a solid foundation to ensure the security of privacy of emerging DePIN applications.

Highlights of our 50+ blogposts in 2023:

Towards 2024

The bear market of 2022 (and most of 2023) reset the expectations of market participants and brought a shift in focus back towards the creation of tangible, real-world value, today. This is one of the key reasons why we believe the DePIN sector has gotten so much attention and why we're incredibly excited for 2024. The future is bright, over the past year: crypto's total market cap has roughly doubled, DePIN's market cap has roughly 10x-ed and the sector has added hundreds of new projects in verticals as diverse as wireless, compute, storage, mobility, artificial intelligence, and energy.

Both IoTeX and the DePIN sector generally have a ton of momentum going into 2024 and we're extremely excited for what the future holds. We will continue to build and ship products with the needs of DePIN builders in mind, maintain and improve our Layer 1 blockchain and ecosystem infrastructure and tooling, and broadcast and shape the DePIN narrative through events, blogposts, and noteworthy collaboration with both Web2 and Web3 companies. 2023 has been a great year, 2024 will be even better!