Everscale has had a very busy year in 2021, with world records, big reforms, major partnerships, conferences, and awards. In this article, we'll dive back into all the major events of the past year and try to predict what's in store for blockchain in 2022.
Reforms
It is worth starting with the name reform, which caused a storm of discussion and debate in the community.
In September 2021, Alexander Filatov made a proposal to rebrand Free TON. The main reason for the rebranding was that the "TON" in the name was slowing down the ecosystem growth, as the past history of the court case between Telegram and the SEC was scaring away potential investors and partners.
Dozens of blockchain names were submitted for consideration: "Sekond," "Nucleus," "Surf," "Protos," "DIOS," "Everscale"... Every day there were polls in the chats, new ideas were put forward, and the debate did not stop for a minute!
On November 9, the initial members of the network came to a consensus and unanimously voted to change the name. FreeTON blockchain became Everscale.
Another sensational proposal was made on October 11 by Vladislav Ponomarev from DeFi Alliance. This proposal included a lot of reform points, among them: burning 3 billion tokens from Referral Giver, creation of a Foundation, holding an investment round for funds and many other things.
The "Giver Reform" about burning 60% of the entire emission attracted the strongest attention from the community. The need to burn was due to the fact that Everscale's giver system with unallocated tokens was a risk to the long-term market capitalization of the project.
The tokens were publicly burned on November 8. The transaction gathered the 12 necessary signatures and the tokens were sent to a smart contract from which they cannot be returned.
On September 2, a proposal reflecting the thoughts of TON Labs co-founder Alexander Filatov regarding the strengthening of the Everscale governance was put on the forum. The essence of the proposal is to appoint 8 new initial members to replace those whose work was not effective, and give them the reins. The proposal was accepted, and already on October 8 the procedure of changing the key-holders of all the givers took place. New members of the community joined the management.
In this block, we should mention the document which defines the future path of Everscale's development - the Whitepaper, written by Mitja Goroshevsky. The document describes the ideas of radical decentralization, the stages of community development, as well as the principles and solutions on which Everscale is based.
Transaction Throughput Record
On September 2, the Rust Cup validator race ended, the aim of which was to test a new node written in the Rust programming language. TonLabs started developing it back in 2017, in parallel with the development of a C++ node by the Telegram team. Rust nodes are much more versatile and allow the network to run at full scaling capacity.
It was important to see the new node's ability to withstand multiple times higher loads. The Rust Cup resulted in over 55,000 transactions per second record. This was done on a Ton Labs test network, in a data center, with 128 validators. A test was then conducted on an open network, with validators from different countries, with data centers on different continents, no TonLabs servers involved. This network configuration has reached 45,000 transactions (smart contract executions) per second.
Such an achievement is historically unique for the blockchain space. According to the developers, this record is far from being the limit and can be beaten indefinitely by simply adding more validators to the network.
Everscale's transition to the Rust node was completed on December 28. In 2022, various new aspects of this design will be gradually integrated into the mainnet. There are also plans to reduce current fees by up to 100 times.
The goal is to make the transaction processing faster than a web page refresh, in less than 1 second.
Partnerships
The year 2021 for Everscale has been rich in major partnerships, which are still ongoing.
On November 3, TON Labs and FIDE, the international sports organization that unites national chess federations, entered into a partnership to create the NFT marketplace ChessNFT.com as a new holistic NFT chess ecosystem. As part of the partnership, FIDE released a unique NFT collection on Everscale. The release of the collection was timed to coincide with a chess tournament held in Dubai on November 26.
Another partner of TON Labs was the largest Russian truck manufacturer KAMAZ. The aim of the partnership is to combat counterfeiting by recording each manufactured part in the blockchain.
Among the interesting events was the launch of the NFT-platform on Everscale from the cultural space "The Third Place" in St. Petersburg. On December 22, the platform launched the sale of 1125 fragments of Renoir's "Double Portrait of Jeanne Bodeau" at a price of 0.5 ETH per token.
The NFT marketplace mostexpensive.io was launched on the Everscale blockchain in October. Russian tennis player Daniil Medvedev joined the project almost immediately, his tennis ball and racket in the form of NFT were sold for 16,000 and 90000 EVER, respectively.
A partnership with Itez, made in August, allowed Surf users to buy tokens directly from within the app. This will ensure the fast and easy onboarding of the new users.
On October 23, Everscale was listed on the gate.io exchange. Gate.io is among the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges. It was one of the most anticipated events for the community!
Conferences
In 2021, Everscale participated in a number of international blockchain conferences where representatives of major projects expressed interest in Everscale.
An example of such a conference is the AIBC summit in Dubai. The summit brought together representatives of various blockchains, who flew to the event from all corners of the world. The conference was held for two days, on May 25 and 26. Everscale's representative (at the time of the Free TON conference) was Alexander Filatov, one of the founders of TON Labs, who acted as a speaker. The notable event for Everscale was winning the "Blockchain Innovation of the Year" nomination.
But we didn't stop there! Everscale was included in the list of participants at African Blockchain Week, which took place from June 28 to July 1. ABCW (African Blockchain Week) is a virtual summit dedicated to financial technology.
One of the highlights of the year for Everscale was WOW Summit in Dubai, held on October 14-15. This summit showed the need for rebranding: representatives of several projects interested in using blockchain technology made it clear that Free TON (Everscale) technology is attractive, but the reputational risks are not. Moreover, it was at this summit that the NFT marketplace mostexpensive.io was launched on the Everscale blockchain. Everscale also held a live NFT auction where two sports cars converted to NFT were auctioned off.
Everscale's block of 2021 conferences concludes AIBC Malta (Nov. 16-18), where community representatives revealed, via performance, the Free TON > Everscale name change.
Projects and products
Many projects have been launched on Everscale in 2021. We will tell you about the most interesting ones.
Broxus team has launched many of the network's key projects: a wallet browser extension, a decentralized exchange, a bridge between Everscale and multiple other blockchains, and a new explorer. It's worth noting that each of these projects receives regular updates and improvements.
Speaking of updates… During the year, the TonLabs team regularly updated its most popular blockchain browser, Surf Wallet. Among the highlights: Free activation of new accounts, Staking, NFT collections that now can be viewed within the wallet app, a Boosted Staking program to attract long-term investors, integration with Itez for direct in-app token purchases and much more!
The Killer Whale Pod Cast was announced by Mitja Goroshevsky last Autumn. It is planned to become the first fully decentralized launchpad for new projects on Everscale. Liquidity pools for projects will be launched on the decentralized flash exchange (FLEX). Participants will be able to vote for projects on the platform, which will receive support in the form of listing and liquidity if approved. On October 30, a live podcast was held with an AirDrop of the Killer Tokens among active podcast participants.
In November, the Everscale Incubator was launched, a project that supports those wishing to launch their projects on the Everscale blockchain. Users can also migrate an existing project to the blockchain.
Plans for the future
The year 2022 began with the introduction of EVER staking on one of the largest staking providers in the crypto space, Moonstake; competition from subscription marketplace Metadues, partnership with a tournament platform Fluker, etc. We expect the launch of the KW.Finance launchpad providing funding for Killer Whale Pod Cast projects, the launch of the FLEX decentralized exchange, the results of the DeFi Alliance partnership with Cardano and Tezos blockchains, the launch of DeBot Monsters. We expect a new consensus protocol, new hackathons, new conferences, new awards, new NFTs, new bridges to other blockchains, many, many things! In other words, Everscale doesn't standstill.
Thanks to the community for their active participation in Everscale development! More to come!
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