December at Polkadex
Tags: Web3, Polkadot, Cryptocurrency, Defi, Polkadex

2021 has undoubtedly been a year of growth for Polkadex. The last month of the year was no exception. The beginning of December was the busiest time yet for Polkadex developers. Throughout the whole month, the spotlight shone on Polkadex in a big way, including an awesome video feature by Hashoshi. We also teased our parachain strategy reveal and other important releases coming in January. In order to prepare for what’s coming, the Polkadex team took some time off to relax and enjoy the calm before the storm. Read on to dive into the highlights from the last month of the year and get a sneak peek at what’s coming in 2022!

The Polkadex network hit a bunch of milestones this December. The network expanded to 110 active validators (10% growth over last month) spread around the world. It also surpassed the 1,000 nominator milestone and now has over 1,100 active nominators (~16% monthly growth). The total amount of PDEX migrated from ERC-20 PDEX to native PDEX on the Polkadex network inched up closer to 1 million PDEX during December. One of the craziest milestones yet: the amount of PDEX staked has now surpassed 1,050,000 PDEX, including more than a 15% increase in the month of December alone. As we’ve mentioned before, more PDEX staked means the annual percentage yield (APY) for staking is dropping. But don’t worry, the APY projection is currently at a very high 57.5%, which means there’s still time for early-birds to take advantage of extra-high rates! If you haven’t done so already, migrate your PDEX and start staking. As a small side note, for anybody looking to transfer their native tokens, we made this short but helpful tutorial to help you unlock your PDEX once 28 days have passed after your latest migration.

The Polkadex developers have never been as busy as they were in December. With audit deadlines in December and early January, it was crunch time for development on Polkadex Orderbook and the Polkadex Mobile app. On the Orderbook side, the team was busy making design improvements and integrating several features (open orders, order history, trade history, graphs, market trades, and more) to the Orderbook web application frontend. Other areas of focus included working on the connection between the Orderbook and the blockchain and integrating the fetch balance feature into the Orderbook mobile app.

In non-Orderbook development, the team applied some UI fixes and load management improvements to PolkaIDO and worked on the Polkapool design conversion. Last but not least, the Polkadex devs worked together with the Subscan team to finalize and release the Polkadex Subscan explorer integration!

After all their hard work in December and throughout 2021, a lot of the team members took some time off to recharge their batteries and prepare for a packed start to 2022.

The month of December started with the team’s appearance at Blockchance Hamburg, which included a great talk by Polkadex Executive Director and Co-Founder Vivek Prasannan. That was followed by coverage from KryptosChain, who mentioned the importance of the start of the Polkadex Orderbook audit in his latest Polkadot report. KIR Finance also finally started staking his PDEX and made a video with a deep-dive into his favorite parts of the Polkadex project and an amazingly detailed staking walk-through guide. Speaking of going into details, that’s exactly what Hashoshi did with his breakdown of the knitty-gritty bits that make Polkadex Orderbook a gamechanger for the end user. Lastly on the video front, Vivek sat down with the a Million or the Moon guys for a deep Polkadex conversation with good Web3 vibrations. Stay tuned for some more great interviews planned for the new year!

In other media, our friends at MarketSquare featured Polkadex in their 2021 DeFi wrap-up article, while Crypto Economy published an exhaustive introduction to Polkadex great for newcomers and day-one fans alike.

On the partnership front, the biggest news of the month was the official launch of the Subscan explorer for the Polkadex network. This partnership is has already made it much easier to view and verify the Polkadex network’s on-chain data, look into specific transactions, and analyze account histories. As the network grows and more products are released onto it, Subscan will become an even more essential tool for Polkadex users.

The Polkadot space is heating up with the end of the first batch of parachain auctions in December. We congratulated the winners on this huge milestone and expressed our desire to join them in the near future!

How near? We’re aiming to participate in the second batch of auctions (which has already started)! Our parachain strategy will be revealed in January (a.k.a. in the next few weeks), so we had to make it a teaser for it.

In other partner-related news, Vivek had an IRL meet-up with Jamie Burke from Polkadex-investor and mentors, Outlier Ventures. Collab opportunity in 2022? Can’t wait to hear what they cooked up in London.

A sign of the Polkadex team establishing themselves as leaders in the space, Polkadex COO and Co-Founder Deepansh Singh was a guest speaker at Sting and Advanced Blockchain AG’s Blockchain Pre-Accelerator sponsored by Nasdaq.

Last but not least, Blockscope, one of the original Polkadex network validators, wrote up this short piece to describe their experience validating Polkadex and list some of the network’s achievements to date. What an awesome community of validators!

What would this year have been without the Polkadex community? We could not do any of this without the community and we’re ever so thankful for your support. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on for this whole year. We’ve always strived to provide transparent and timely updates while addressing the community’s questions and concerns. This December we enjoyed connecting with you all in a Twitter Spaces with Vivek. We loved seeing your creativity in all the memes from November’s meme competition and struggled to finally pick the winners this month!

As we said before, your support means everything to us and the ever-growing Polkadex community as a whole. Here’s how your support has helped the community grow in December:

The Polkadex Twitter page officially hit 60,000 followers!

The Polkadex official subreddit grew 4.4% to reach almost 1,400 members, while the YouTube channel grew by 4.5% as it actually reached 1,400 subscribers.

There was a 20% increase in the amount of Polkadex followers on Linkedin and a 2.5% increase in the Polkadex Medium follower count.

The recently-launched Polkadex local Telegram communities (Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Turkish) grew by 30% and now total over 4,500 members.

The Polkadex Discord server continues to become the ‘main square’ for Polkadex town. In December, the member count steadily remained at around 2,000.

What’s your favorite Polkadex community channel? What other channels do you usually discuss your favorite DeFi and Web3 projects in? If you think Polkadex’s presence is missing from any of the platforms you usually engage with other DeFi and Web3 enthusiasts on, let us team know!

The year of Polkadex is coming. 2022 is just a few days away. Here’s what’s coming in January:

⚫️ PolkaIDO public testnet release

⚫️ Parachain strategy revealed

⚫️ Orderbook beta testing release

⚫️ More PDEX exchange listings and native hardware wallet support

2022 is going to be huge. Follow the channels below so you don’t miss out on any updates from the Polkadex team!

Website| Twitter | TG Chat | TG Announcements | Medium | Youtube | Reddit | Discord | Linkedin | Spanish community | Turkish community | Indian community | Russian community | Chinese community |