It’s that time of year again when we have the chance to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished over the last 12 months. First and foremost, we are grateful for the Gnosis community and partners who made this another landmark year. We recently published a blog post announcing our 2024 roadmap and why we're focused on making Gnosis the best network for payments by providing the best bridges to traditional payment schemes, the best liquidity for exchanging stablecoins and the best ecosystem to facilitate payments.
Before we jump in, it's worth noting that Gnosis Co-Founder, Martin Koppelmann published a recent Twitter thread summing up the last two years for Gnosis and why Gnosis Chain is buzzing with activity. It's a nice addendum to the yearly recap.
Let’s jump into the 2023 Year in Review!
The year kicked into gear with a fresh new Proof of Stake consensus mechanism after the Bellatrix hard fork in December of 2022. Gnosis is an open peer-to-peer network of nodes operated by anyone in the world who runs the Gnosis client software. Gnosis started out as a proof-of-authority sidechain to Ethereum with its own consensus algorithm in 2017. Gnosis Merged successfully at block 6,306,357 on December 8th, 2022 deprecating legacy differences and aligning with Ethereum's new architecture. The Merge was the first step towards achieving the goal of 1:1 parity with Ethereum.
The number of validators securing Gnosis Chain also soared in 2023 from 109K to over 170K, making it the second most decentralized chain next to Ethereum. A geographically diverse validator set is critical to ensuring that Gnosis Chain is community-run. Only 1 GNO is required to get started and the hardware requirements are minimal.
The most notable event of 2023 was the launch of Gnosis Pay, the world’s first Decentralized Payment Network (DPN).
After the launch of Gnosis Pay, we’ve set out to position Gnosis Chain as the best network for payments. By providing the best bridges to traditional payment schemes, the best liquidity for exchanging stablecoins and the best ecosystem to facilitate payments.
Hashi was launched, an EVM Hash Oracle Aggregator, designed to facilitate a principled approach to cross-chain bridge security. We invested in increasing the security of the Omnibridge by using zk light clients to validate our native bridge. Hashi is integrating more and more bridge solutions in a way that aims for additive security. Look out for big developments from Hashi in 2024.
In addition to assets bridged into Gnosis, plenty of native assets were issued on Gnosis this year. Great progress was made by Monerium and their EURe token as well as BackedFi with securities and RealT's tokenized real estate.
AI and blockchain technology had a breakthrough year, especially on Gnosis Chain where over 50% of all Safe transactions were executed by autonomous agents during the Prediction Agent Hackathon hosted by Valory + Gnosis. AI on Gnosis will continue to find product market fit, making the outlook on 2024 very exciting.
We also took the opportunity to reimagine our tagline for Gnosis. Since 2022, Gnosis has presented itself as 'The Community-Run Chain.' This tagline embodies our commitment to decentralization, credible neutrality and resilience. We've also worked to maintain DAO governance as a foundation of our protocol evolution and development.
Now that we have a community-run chain, we’re turning our attention to adoption and how we can bring the benefits of Gnosis, a public blockchain, to the most people possible.
In the spirit of open-source, composable tooling we made our tagline modular:
Open infrastructure for a decentralised internet
Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation
Open infrastructure powered by solo stakers
Open infrastructure for decentralised payments
Open infrastructure for a decentralized internet is the global tagline for Gnosis. Open infrastructure for permissionless innovation is aimed at addressing developers and the last tagline is for our solo stakers, who secure Gnosis Chain by running nodes around the world. Open infrastructure for decentralised payments is directed towards Gnosis Pay and Gnosis as the best network for payments.
Let's work together to bring open and fair infrastructure to crypto natives and non technical users alike.
We set ambitious goals for 2023. Below are the highlights from a very busy year:
🚀 🦉Key Growth Metrics in 2023
- Total Number of Validators 178,306
- Current Validator Yield 13.72%
- TVL $251.03M
- Total Active Addresses 2,057,424
- Daily Active Users 11,314
🫱🏽🫲🏾 🎉 Key Developments of 2023
- Shapella Upgrade
- ETHCC Gnosis Pay
- karpatkey’s proposal to activate the Spark protocol on Gnosis Chain
- The launch of Hashi
- Aave V3 on Gnosis Chain + karpatkey
- Onboarding additional client teams (Erigon, Nimbus)
🏎️ 🦉🏁 Gnosis Chain Ecosystem Growth in 2023
- Gnosis Pay
- Hashi launch
- MEVBlocker launch
- Gnosis VIP
- sDAI
- AI Projects chose Gnosis Chain
- Autonolas
- Brian
- Nevermind
- Backed Finance - native token issuance on Gnosis Chain
- Uniswap - v3 contracts deployed
- Mu Exchange (DeFi)
- Beefy Finance (DeFi)
- Moralis (API)
- Kinetex (cross-chain trading)
- Aura Finance (DeFi)
- Mithraeum - $94k reward pool
- Fuji (Lending)
- Ubiquity (Lending)
- MetaMax (DEX)
- Hologram (NFT)
- Zonaris (Gnosis Nodes)
- SubQuery (Indexing)
- Nimbus (Portfolio Tracker)
- Umbra (Payments)
- Omnia (Private RPC)
- Stackly (DCA tool by Swapr)
- PowerPool (Smart Contract Automation)
- Atato (Custody)
- Pyth (Oracle)
- Chainsafe Zipline (Oracle)
🧑🏾💻⛓️Events & Hackathons of 2023
This year Gnosis sponsored +21 hackathons with over +400 hackathon submissions!
Hackathon highlights - ETHGlobal hackathons (NYC, Lisbon, Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul)- ETHTaipei- ETHPrague- ETHSeoul- ETHKL- ETHGlobal Istanbul
Conferences highlights - In July, we made a big announcement at ETHCC and of course, DappCon 2023 in September!
DevConnect and the Gnosis Decentralized Scaling Summit, an in-house one day summit with more than 10 sponsors, 20 different presentations, panels and workshops on privacy, zk proofs, AI, consumer, and payments. We also hosted the Hashi roundtable, a workshop about additive cross-chain security.
We've managed to build a vibrant web3 community around Gnosis in Lisbon, hosting more than 10 Gnosis Ethereum meetups! At every meetup we've had great projects within the Ethereum ecosystem (and beyond), presenting their latest innovations. Check out the complete archive of talks.
⚖️ 🦉 GnosisDAO Top GIPs of 2023
GnosisDAO governance is foundational to the development and evolution of everything we build at Gnosis. The governance process serves to guide decisions about the Gnosis ecosystem. It's designed to be transparent, open to new contributors, and decentralized. For a full overview of all GIPs (Gnosis Improvement Proposals) that were voted on, head over to the GnosisDAO Snapshot page. Here are the top four GIPs from 2023!