That’s a wrap! — 2022 in Review with OAK Network

With 2022 coming to a close, the team here at OAK Network wanted to take a moment to recognize how far we’ve come, what lies ahead, and most importantly thank you — the community— for supporting us along the way.

And what a year it has been! Market volatility not withstanding, we’re extremely proud of our accomplishments looking back on what has been nothing short of an incredible year for OAK Network.

Partnerships and Cross-chain collaboration

We began the year with a flurry of announced partnerships including Bifrost, SubQuery, Mangata, Mayhem Nodes, Gate.io, Blockdaemon, Darwinia, Web3Go, and Imbue, all leading up to our first successful Kusama crowdloan in March for the Turing Network — receiving the most KSM contributed of any crowdloan in our group.

Since then on Turing, we’ve been absolutely thrilled to demonstrate our dedication to a cross-chain future by opening HRMP connections with Acala, Phala, Parallel, Astar, Bifrost, Mangata, and Crust. A special thank you goes out to the Mangata X team, for collaborating with us on their first ever bootstrap and listing the $TUR token.

Thanks to the Mangata team for being our first listing partner!

Yield Boost then launched locally on the Turing Network to allow collators and stakers to auto-compound their rewards. We are excited to bring Yield Boost as a cross-chain features to our partners in the very, very near future.

All this capped off with the success of our OAK Crowdloan, hitting the cap of 150,000 $DOT in under 24 hours! While we know that there is so much more to do, we couldn’t be more grateful for the support of our community and promise to continue in our dedication to delivering value back to all of you as thanks.

OAK Around the Globe

With so much accomplished at “home”, it was a surprisingly busy year for OAK abroad as well. We started strong off the year strong by joining the Berkley Blockchain Xcelerator, while our Research Associate

Christian Dirk travelled to AmsterDOT where he spoke to the community on research methodologies. Hopefully you also caught Chris Li’s presentation at Polkadot Decoded, or were able to swing by our booth at Consensus where we recorded not one, but two podcasts with our partners in attendance (Podcast 1, Podcast 2).

Christian Dirk on stage at amsterDOT!

Never one to miss an opportunity to bring the ecosystem together, we also kicked off our Hotsama series which remains (in our humble opinion) one of the best nights of the year to connect with other builders, investors, and fans of Polkadot and Kusama.

Science of Blockchain 2022 led to Hotsama 2, followed quickly by our booth at Messari Mainnet and finally capping off the year with a fruitful visit to Portugal and Sub0, where we connected with the substrate developer community at large.

Hotsama 2 friends w/ Spot the robot dog!

Online and On-chain

Even at home, OAK tries to be everywhere — participating in a number of online events which were a beautiful mix of engaging and enjoyable.

The OAK Dapp Competition was a huge success, and sparked our hunger for more hackathons!

Christian Dirk and David Wu Finkelstein helped with judging for the Polkadot Hackathon, while Christian Dirk joined Chris Li to support the Polkadot Relayers program. Not to be outdone, our community lead Jorge Artavia Gonzalez both served as a judged and gave a presentation for the Polkadot Latin America Hackathon.

Can you tell Christian Dirk likes to stay busy? He also had a fantastic talk with Web3Foundation Head of Education Bill Laboon on Governance which is absolutely worth checking out here!

We love our community

But of course, none of this is possible without all of you — our community which is now 20,000 members strong! So whether you participated in a giveaway (make sure to follow us on Twitter — y ahora en Español!), joined an AMA, or just hung out in Discord — we’d like to say thank you for the support. And while we appreciate every one of you — we’d like to give a very special thanks to our 19 Ambassadors, representing 6 languages dedicated to spreading the vision of OAK and cross-chain automation across the world. We absolutely could not do it without you.

Onward and Upward

So while we will absolutely miss everything amazing about 2022, it is with unabated excitement that we look forward to 2023! Stay tuned for more amazing collaborations, the launch of the OAK Network on Polkadot, listings near and far, and perhaps most exciting — the first ever cross-chain auto-remote execution use cases as we bring payment and DeFi automation to Kusama and Polkadot.