Highlights:
- OAX Foundation hosted or took part in over 12 events
- Launched OAX platform prototype in June
- OAX token airdrop has been well-received by the community
- Sponsored a 3-part research paper on digital asset regulations by a HKU law professor
- Our development team achieved a milestone of 1,000 TPS
- OAX was featured in reports by the SCMP, Bloomberg, and DIGFIN
It’s been a momentous year for OAX Foundation and for the digital asset industry as a whole. We’ve made huge progress over 2018 and are moving into 2019 with a new sense of excitement.
2018 started with the industry on something of a high — bitcoin was near its peak and optimism for the future abounded. As the year went on, however, things started to get more complicated and a number of themes emerged that dominated discourse: regulation, access, and scalability. OAX Foundation took a leading role in the debate, all the while making sure and steady progress developing the platform.
In particular, we’ve placed a focus on getting out into the community to help people understand the role of the digital asset industry and the importance of decentralization in helping it mature and become mainstream. As part of this campaign, we’ve spoken at over twelve events, ranging from major industry conferences to small group educational sessions.
We’ve been particularly prominent in the debate around regulation, giving lectures and participating in panel discussions about the direction regulators should take. We also sponsored a series of papers from a leading law professor to help bring academic rigor to the discussion. We’re now sought out by people and organizations, from journalists to law societies, to help them understand the dynamics at play in an area which will be critical to the future shape of the industry.
Externally, then, we’ve had a very busy year — and it’s been no less busy internally on the development front. In the summer we launched our platform prototype, bringing to life our project vision for the first time. Since then, we’ve run extensive tests bringing us ever closer to launching a fully functioning version. A key milestone in this journey was the recent announcement that we’d achieved speeds of over 1,000 transactions per second. This marks real progress for the industry as a whole towards solving the scalability challenge that’s currently preventing decentralized exchanges from going mainstream.
Of course, we couldn’t achieve all this without the hard work and commitment of our people. Over the last twelve months, we’ve shaped a team to provide us with the right experience where and when we need it. Our legal, compliance, technology and marketing functions have all seen senior hires who have brought best in class skills to the project. OAX team members such as our General Counsel (Paul Li), Head of Marketing and Communications (Kelvin Wong), Technology Lead (Wayland Chan), and Digital Lead (Robson Chiu), have spoken at events, written articles and generally raised the profile of the Foundation and our work, as well as shaped the progress of the project.
So after a busy 2018, what’s next? An even busier 2019 is on the cards — both for us and for the industry. Our General Manager, Amanda Liu, recently wrote about her vision for the next twelve months, which will see an even greater focus on regulation and compliance as well as market consolidation. As Amanda said in her article, OAX’s clear focus on building a platform that combines strict governance standards with liquidity and speed matches exactly the direction the industry is moving in.
This time next year the picture will be very different again from how it is now, but we’re confident that we will be there playing a central part in it. We look forward to sharing more of our work with you in 2019!
