Letter to the Community: Celebrating 2 years of Polymesh Mainnet

Polymesh mainnet is officially beginning its third year in operation! 

Polymesh’s genesis block launched two years ago on October 28, 2021. Since then, we’ve made impressive progress on our mission to grow and promote the Polymesh ecosystem.

In the past year alone, there have been many fantastic milestones for the Polymesh community to celebrate. Let’s take a look at a few notable developments! 

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A reliable and robust network with 100% uptime since inception

Since its inception, Polymesh has experienced unwavering stability with 100% uptime and zero security vulnerabilities with 10.4M+ finalized blocks at the time of posting. 

With 100% uptime and zero security vulnerabilities, it’s clear Polymesh is one of the most stable networks in the tokenization industry. 

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Improved user experience through upgrades and interfaces

Currently on version 6.0, Polymesh offers tons of new features that weren’t available in its first year. These include functionality for stablecoins, smart contracts, non-fungible tokens or NFTs, child identities, and much more. 

We’ve also been hard at work in the development of new interfaces and tools to interact with the network. For example, we unveiled the Polymesh Governance Explorer with Polkassembly, a specific block explorer for governance on Polymesh. 

We also released the Polymesh Portal, a simple user interface to help participants best take advantage of Polymesh’s core functionality that also showcases what’s possible with the Polymesh SDK. To improve user experience, we also refreshed the onboarding interface during its release.

Finally, we launched our first developer survey to understand how we can make building or exploring Polymesh easier for novice and experienced developers alike. The survey is still open should you want to participate for your chance to win POLYX! 

These changes were possible through the expansion of our core developer team led by Adam Dossa in collaboration with Nick Cafaro, who joined the Association this year as Head of Product.

Polymesh ecosystem expands to 40+ members

On top of its 4,100+ unique users, the Polymesh ecosystem now has 40+ entities using and promoting the blockchain. 

In the past year, the blockchain has gained important new node operators, permissioned the first client-exclusive customer due diligence provider, and provided the base infrastructure for numerous exciting tokenization projects. Below are a few examples. 

Major companies onboard as node operators 

This year Polymesh expanded into South Korea, kicked off by Korea Digital Asset Custody (KDAC) becoming a node operator as the country geared up to legalize security token offerings (STOs). The tokenization consortium is backed by South Korea’s oldest and largest bank, Shinhan Bank.

Also joining the Polymesh node operator base this year was Binance, world’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, which now offers POLYX staking directly to its millions of users. 

The most recent company to join the network is SORS, a digital assets financial services company which became a node operator last week. 

As a blockchain for regulated assets, the entities writing and gathering transactions into blocks matter greatly. We’re excited to have 17+ licensed financial entities contribute to Polymesh’s security and operations and look forward to welcoming more! Learn more by visiting polymesh.network/node-operators.

The ecosystem gears up to bring tokenization projects to Polymesh

Companies with Polymesh-integrated infrastructure have made exciting progress in the realm of tokenization that bring valuable use-cases and connections to the blockchain. 

Earlier this year, Polymesh’s first Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) recipient DigiShares announced support for Fireblocks, connecting the self-custodial wallet infrastructure’s 1500+ institutional customers to DigiShares directly. Once DigiShares’ EDF project is complete, it will be possible for Fireblocks clients to tokenize assets and funds on Polymesh via DigiShares’ tokenization solution. 

Tokenise Group – the regulated brokerage, stock exchange, and central securities depository using Polymesh – has announced that Tokenise Stock Exchange has been acquired by VERO, a next-generation social media network. The acquisition serves as a catalyst to revolutionize capital markets via retail investing in the creator economy and is expected to bring unique alternative asset ownership opportunities onchain.

More recently, REtokens and Polymath announced a partnership to revolutionize real estate investment using Polymath’s capital marketplace platform, built on the Polymesh blockchain. The partnership leverages the Polymesh blockchain as base infrastructure and will bring a wave of tokenized real estate assets to the network. 

As a final example, TaroFi (another EDF recipient) is in the process of completing its decentralized exchange on Polymesh. The DEX will connect startups with investors and make it possible to execute investments, automate cap tables, and access secondary markets via one platform – built on Polymesh. 

Collaborations expand the blockchain into new ecosystems 

In the past year, the Polymesh Association has made various collaborations of its own that expand the blockchain into new ecosystems. 

This includes the groundbreaking Memorandum of Understanding between the Polymesh Association and Korean digital asset custodian BDACS to launch a next-generation security token project focusing on K-culture. The project will see Polymesh provide the base-layer infrastructure for exciting tokenization projects in Korea’s booming K-culture industry. 

Another landmark example is Polymesh’s integration into the NayaOne ecosystem, which empowers financial institutions to quickly deploy and launch Polymesh nodes within the NayaOne Sandbox environment for experimentation. 

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Network passes over 4,000 unique users

One of the things that makes Polymesh unique is its infrastructure offering control and permissioning on a public Layer 1. 

Other blockchains that brand themselves as blockchains for asset tokenization are usually iterations or modifications of Ethereum. In contrast, Polymesh was constructed from the ground-up to incorporate identity in the base layer and ensure every user passes identity verification when onboarding. 

This identification process provides confidence to institutions that they can fulfill know-your-customer and anti-money laundering obligations, and that the entities they’ll interact with aren’t blacklisted, facing sanctions, or engaging in terrorist financing. 

Because of Polymesh’s public permissioned nature and identity verification protocols, it’s possible to know exactly how many unique users are on the network – over 4,100 to date. 

Don’t be fooled by the inflated numbers of other networks. What’s more important is the ratio between the number of users and the number of assets actually created (32 on Polymesh, plus 56 tickers and counting).

To steal a quote by Graeme Moore in our interview with Blockdata this year, “If you look at the block explorers for other blockchains with supposedly over 100,00 users, they may only have 10 actual assets…” 

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Support for POLYX grows with over 421M Staked

Another huge indicator of support for Polymesh is support for POLYX.

To date, 765M+ of POLY has been bridged to POLYX via the 1:1 POLY:POLYX Upgrade Bridge. That’s a huge amount and over 76% of the existing supply!

That such a large amount has been upgraded in support of Polymesh signifies confidence in the unique utility of POLYX to fuel the Polymesh ecosystem. As a result, the Polymesh Association intends to close the Upgrade Bridge on January 31, 2024. 

More than 421M POLYX is currently locked in staking, which at the time of posting offers 21.6% rewards to stakers. That such a large amount (almost 50% of the entire POLYX supply) has been pledged as collateral to the blockchain network is a major indicator of community support. 

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Get ready for year three! 

Speaking of community support, we couldn’t have done it without YOU, our fantastic followers, readers, subscribers, boosters, users, and community members. 

Every follow, like, and share of @PolymeshNetwork on X (previously Twitter), every server join in Discord, every subscribe or watch of @PolymeshNetwork on Youtube, and every subscribe to our newsletter brings us closer to trillions of dollars of assets onchain.