Looking back and forward by the Polkaswap Community Collective

Dear Community

We wish you a happy new year and look forward to sharing great moments and achievements with you in 2022.

Before looking forward, we look back at 2021 and share a few words about the past year.

First of all, thank you for your involvement with the Polkaswap, SORA and Polkadot/Kusama communities. Blockchain projects thrive with great communities, and we are proud to be part of the Dotsama space where intelligent individuals build strong projects, a space where open discussion with the community, and on-chain governance decide the path forward. We are part of an ecosystem where respectful debate is encouraged and divergent opinions are welcome, with the common goal of constantly improving the innovative projects we support and invest in. We enjoy the creative memes, the banter and the critical comments. We even see the positive in all the WEN questions, because they all imply you are not doubting the subject of the question will be reality some day and are eager to see that happen. We often remind ourselves that every innovative project we support is totally groundbreaking, and is contributing to a better future for us as individuals and as a group.

2021 was a very exciting year, with many milestones achieved by the core contributors, all before even obtaining a parachain slot on Kusama or Polkadot (!). Just to name a few: The SORA L1 network was successfully launched and exceeded 3,100,000 transactions, on +3.2 million blocks. It was one of the first layer-one networks in the Polkadot/Kusama space to go live. Polkaswap had its launch in April of last year as the first live Substrate build DEX, with the best functioning Ethereum bridge out there: HASHI More than 180 token pairs are tradeable on the DEX of the interoperable future, with 100% community liquidity in the pools. 2.5 million PSWAP were burned for eternity. The percentage of burned PSWAP that gets reminted decreases every day. Moonpay integration provides the first fiat on-ramp to a DEX without having to pass through a centralized entity. Fearless Wallet is widely seen as the premium application for Kusama and Polkadot crowdloan contributions and has the easiest UX for KSM and DOT staking. Starting this week, you can also find your Kusama parachain reward tokens on the app! A deal with JPGames has been sealed to use XOR as the currency in their upcoming Pegasus World Kit metaverse, in line with SORA’s vision of Many Worlds, One Economy. Ceres, a project built to bring more transparency and security to the Dotsama and SORA ecosystem, launched the first dApp on the SORA network after Polkaswap. UMI Digital, a decentralized art and DeFi project, is working on launching their dApp on the SORA network as well, after a successful launch on Ethereum in November. NOIR, the first real-world product available for purchase with XOR has launched its very own token NOIR in a collectors package with NFT and a bottle of Sparkling Rose wine, exclusively available on Polkaswap. With XSTUSD, SORA launched the first Synthetic Asset, an algorithmic stablecoin backed by XOR and pegged to the USD. More XST will follow once self-developed SORAcles are launched.

We can go on for a while with this list, and if you are interested in reliving the achievements in the ecosystem, please check out the SPF Year in review, as well as every publication from the ecosystem https://sora-xor.medium.com/ https://polkaswap.medium.com/ https://medium.com/fearlesswallet https://medium.com/@polkaswapcommunitycollective, https://tokenceres.medium.com/ https://umi-digital.medium.com/.

Achievements aside, we want to take the opportunity to say a few words about the lessons learned and points of improvement. Although we strive towards full transparency and community involvement, we recognize that the communication with and towards the community has not always been ideal. There should have been more pro-active communication around delays of deliverables like VAL airdrop unvesting, visibility of PSWAP LP rewards on Polkaswap, projections on Kusama Parachain auction participation and other topics that concern your investments. Excuses or explanations do not set this straight. We can only apologize.

This brings us to looking forward to the upcoming 12 months.

First of all, we have to and will do better on communication in 2022 about matters that affect you as a community member. We are also community members at PoCoCo, same as you, and we understand your feelings and point of view. We have the same interests at stake. Working closer with the core contributors, we strive to update you more frequently, in a fully transparent way with more illustrative information. Although exact timelines and roadmaps are not available,, we can definitely be more transparent about ongoing developments and obstacles. We value your trust, interest, time, and investment, so don’t doubt that these promises will be delivered!

We have also listened to the community call for marketing. Efforts are being made and we hope these will be well received. Please remember that XOR, PSWAP and VAL were fairly launched. This means that there was no pre-sale round for VCs. All funds and efforts for marketing come from the core team and community members like us. We work on a sustainable growth model and are not inclined to engage with temporary pump-and-dump shillers. If you want marketing, we invite you to drive the initiative as much as we do. We weclome you all to help with the promotion and to share your ideas and suggestions (not airdrops, please) at [email protected]

Even though our main focus remains on education, community growth and the product developments, we are not blind about token prices.

We would like to reiterate that, contrary to popular belief, there has been no PSWAP token dump by the team. The tokens being sold come from non-team holders and community members. We are working on making the SORA ecosystem tokens more attractive, and we cannot disclose more than the following at this stage: We are talking to other exchanges for listings and we are always open to listen to good token allocation and utility proposals.

In 2022: SORA wins a Kusama parachain slot, SORA will have fully functional bridges to Kusama and multiple other networks, Polkaswap mobile will be live and the DEX will be integrated in Fearless Wallet and potentially in other wallets, more XST will be launched with self developed oracles, XSTUSD will play a significantly increased role in the DeFi space, Interoperability will go 2 gears higher, XOR will be the currency in JP Games’ metaverse etc.

We are working, with the means we have, on setting up the structure for a more positive and sustainable price action in the coming months and years. In any case, we believe price will follow value so the main focus remains on value creation rather than prioritizing temporary price influence. And rest assured, A LOT of value is coming :-)

This month we will see the launch of the crowdloan to collect the funds to secure a Kusama parachain. Although initially aimed to launch at the end of December, we now look forward to getting started later this month. The team will come back well rested after a very much needed holiday and ready for more developments in the coming months!

Let's make 2022 an exciting year, together.

Belong to the interoperable future

All the best PoCoCo