KYVE’s 2022 in Review: Launching an L1, Partnering With Cosmos, Raising $9M, and More
2022 marked a year of growth for KYVE, bringing on major tech developments, partnerships and integrations with top Layer 1 chains, $9 million raised in our final funding round, the growth of our community to over 130k members, and much more!
All of these milestones contributed heavily to our journey toward mainnet and our mission to bring forward valid data as a public good, enabling projects across the space to fetch data in an easy, secure, and trustless way.
Let’s take a look back at 2022’s major milestones…
A Year of Building
Launching KYVE as Its Own L1
At the start of the year, our team faced limitations of scalability and flexibility with our previous EVM-based chain; therefore, we evaluated many different options and came to the conclusion that launching our own L1 with the Cosmos SDK was the best fit. In mid-May, we did just that! This move opened KYVE up to a far more scalable build, making it easier to handle high-frequency transactions, more streamlined block times, and KYVE’s very own block space.
By finding this new flexibility with the Cosmos SDK, we were able to bring on many new features and adapt KYVE to best solve the data infrastructure issues we are targeting.
Innovative Updates
Since launching our own L1 in May, our team has shipped five different protocol updates. Each update presented new chain and protocol features, security improvements, node role adjustments, UI/UX upgrades, and more in order to improve KYVE.
With each update, our team has also learned a lot! Thanks to being on testnet with an active community, we were able to test which features worked best in order to bring forward a healthy, fully decentralized blockchain. A few key features and tooling that stood out from these updates would be the support for Web2 data, validator role specifications, inter-pool security, and more.
A Successful Incentivized Testnet
KYVE’s incentivized testnet, Mission Korellia, was divided into two phases, the first being open to all skill sets, including design, community participation, engineering, and more. The second focusing more on engineering-based tasks.
With over 43,000 active users funding, staking and delegating in pools, and/or participating in KYVE’s governance, we were able to collect a plethora of community learnings and suggestions on how to enhance KYVE. With this, we released a fifth and, shortly after, a sixth protocol update. These updates concentrated on fine-tuning the pain points we found during testing, for example, certain governance features, slashing terms, validator roles, and pool security. We can’t thank our community enough for their enthusiastic participation and support during these phases!
“The incentivized testnet was more than a huge success,” said KYVE CEO Fabian Riewe. “The insights we got into our protocol and the feedback from the community are overwhelming and very valuable. These new learnings make us more confident about the coming mainnet launch and will help us improve the UX for users of KYVE.”
Building Around KYVE
Being that KYVE is a trustless hub for sourcing valid data, the solutions that can be built around it for accessing, importing, and using this data are unlimited. People outside of the KYVE team have already made their own explorers, dashboards, and more with KYVE data; however, our team wanted to take part in making sure integrating with KYVE is the easiest possible for all industries, not just Web3.
Since 2021, we have provided a REST-API for developers to be able to build their own native solution for sourcing KYVE data. From there, we presented our own indexer this past July (WARP beta) to further explore ideas of what can be easily built around KYVE.
To apply to all who work around data, not just developers, KYVE has also brought forward a no-code solution called Data Pipeline, which allows anyone to import KYVE data into their preferred data backend such as BigQuery, MongoDB or SQL databases with just a few clicks.
While looking at solutions around KYVE, our team also explored within, finding solutions to make the user experience in our own network more streamlined. From this, we introduced a developer tool dubbed KYSOR, which enables node runners with automatic upgrades to avoid timeout slashes, more flexibility between pools, and more.
With KYVE’s goal being to help build a secure, scalable, and trustless data infrastructure for all, we’re just getting started exploring new solutions to ease the data use and access experience! And look forward to seeing what others build around us as well.
Partnering and Integrating With Top L1s
This year brought forward many exciting new partnerships for KYVE. Having already partnered with Avalanche, Moonbeam, Near, Aurora, and more in 2021, we wanted to keep this momentum going, continuing to partner and or release integrations with the other top blockchains in the space. Since the start of the year, we are pleased to see that we have brought on eight new partnerships and thirteen total integrations.
To further celebrate the launch of our Layer 1 chain with the Cosmos SDK, KYVE brought on six major integrations during the month of May with partnered projects in the Cosmos ecosystem. This included the Cosmos hub, Injective, Axelar, Evmos, Cronos, and Ummee. Via these integrations, all historical data from these blockchains are archived onto Arweave and validated in a decentralized way for trustless access and use. Find out more about these integrations here.
Later in June, KYVE launched integrations for archiving both the Polkadot and Kusama blockchains, coming full circle with our origin story. Earlier last year, KYVE came about from our co-founders, Fabian Riewe and John Letey, participating in a bounty to bridge Polkadot data to Arweave, a permanent data storage solution. After creating a valid solution, the idea to offer this to all blockchains in a decentralized way came about.
With this in mind, and Polkadot being a partner from the start, it was a great pleasure to launch these integrations and provide their community of developers with easier access to the data they need, as well as the assurance that the data is completely accurate.
Throughout the year, we also launched other partnerships, such as with Stacks, Celo, Sei Network, and Archway. Each archiving their chain data (or even off-chain, Web2 data in Sei’s case) through KYVE. Other use cases also popped up; for example, we launched a Uniswap USDC-ETH pool in order to fetch, store and validate all events on this smart contract for market analyses and platforms built around this user data. All of KYVE’s integrations can be found on the KYVE App.
$9 Million Raised
At the end of June this year, we officially closed our third and final funding round, with a total of $9 million raised. This round was led by key players such as Distributed Global, Wicklow Capital, IOSG Ventures, Anagram (Joseph Eagan & Lily Liu), Cerulean Ventures, Huobi Incubator, and MEXC. All were eager to give KYVE that extra boost of support while we build toward mainnet.
“We are very excited to lead the KYVE round,” said Herve Bizira, Partner at Distributed Global. “We believe KYVE will be an essential building block of the crypto industry by providing an ever-growing library of decentralized, cross-chain, and trusted data feeds that any dApp can leverage. By leveraging KYVE and skipping the time-consuming process of building their own data management infrastructure, companies will be able to build and iterate at a pace never before seen.”
A Global Community of 130k+
The KYVE-ers
From the different partnerships, community events, incentivized testnet, and more, 2022 brought on a lot of new KYVE-ers! Seeing a 368.34% growth on Twitter followers and a 24.20% peak engagement rate (compared to 3.10% in 2021). We also grew 40% on Telegram, 304% on Youtube, 686% on Discord, and 964% on Medium!
Our international communities have also grown immensely. Now, you can find informative content about KYVE in over 15 languages! All thanks to our dedicated community members. A few examples:
- @Dimokus_vrn posted a tutorial in Russian and English on how to run a KYVE chain validator node on Akash.
- @Holder_Media made a video in French about the different issues KYVE solves, how the KYVE protocol works, & more!
- @GSANDLYang wrote a tutorial in Chinese on how to participate in KYVE’s testnet. It includes how to fund a pool, delegate, run a validator node, and more.
Further Knowledge-Spreading
At KYVE, we’re always seeking new ways to share knowledge and information about the data challenges we’re solving, whether that’s through Twitter threads, interviews and podcasts, as well as in person at conferences and events. Let’s look back at how we went about this…
Along with our #fromtheArKYVE threads where we break down Web3 concepts, events, and or technologies, we brought forward a few new thread types this year: the first being #UseCasesbyKYVE, highlighting certain use case ideas to help broaden our community’s vision of all of KYVE’s different capabilities. As well as #KYVEFundamentals where we go into depth on our core fundamentals, bringing up examples within KYVE’s code and docs to further illustrate our goals and vision of the future for data.
Our team also took to YouTube to bring forward new tutorials, explanatory videos, and VLOG content to give a more in-depth overview of KYVE. For those not too familiar with how KYVE works, you can watch our ELI5 video here.
Lastly, the KYVE team attended over 15 different conferences and events this year across the globe. That includes EthCC in Paris, where we hosted two of our own side events. We also took on Lisbon Blockchain Month, attending Web Summit, where we gained many Web3 and Web2 connections for future partnerships, as well as Filecoin’s FIL Lisbon, IOSG’s Old Friends Reunion event, Arweave’s Ecosystem events, as well as side events for Cosmos, BNB, and Algorand.
Some of our team also attended Avalanche Summit, Devcon Bogota, NEARCON, MongoDB’s Frankfurt Conference, and others. Each provided great opportunities for KYVE to expand its network and further build our current connections and partnerships. Seeing such great success from these events, we look forward to continuing these efforts and traveling the world in 2023!
Launching in 2023
It’s no doubt that 2022 was a strong year of growth and development for KYVE, enabling us to build a solid foundation for all that’s to come in 2023: code audit, final updates, mainnet launch with TGE, IT winners’ KYC, new partnerships (even branching into Web2), conferences and hackathons, community calls, and MUCH more.
Again, we can’t thank our community, partners, and investors enough for all of their love and support. We’re very grateful to go through these major accomplishments with you all, and we’re excited to share more about what we have in store for KYVE in 2023!
If you or someone you know is interested in taking part in our journey of building the Web3 data lake, making data a public good for all, KYVE is hiring! Look into our open positions here.
The KYVE team wishes you all Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!
Blog Author: Margaux, KYVE Head of Marketing
