December 2021 Community Update
Welcome to the end of 2021, Merry Holidays to everyone and of course a very Happy New Year ahead!
As always, we sit and reflect on the past year to think of the steps that we’ve done. While there’s been no roadmap listed on our website, the basic direction and areas we explore have always remained consistent to our goals and perspective in this space.
Over the course of last year, we’ve worked very closely with our partners at IJS to build and develop the vision of their decentralized exchange platform, OpenSwap. The last year has seen a massive uptick of active decentralized exchanges, something that has always been very near and dear to us. The work that OpenSwap has in front of them is far from over, and we see the development team working hard to bring new thinking and features that would benefit the industry. We continue to plan and vision what the future of DEXs will look like with IJS and bring additional benefits to our OAX community through platforms such as theirs.
Through our work with IJS and the subsequent evaluation of the marketplace, we believed it a necessity to explore the opportunities that the BSC chain was offering the industry and in the first half of the year, we proceeded to make the jump. The decision seemed a natural progression for the team. While we realize that many of our community members may be on the Binance platform, certain requirements make it difficult for us to add additional trading pairs, not to mention there’s too many options to fulfill everyone’s needs.
By wrapping our token in the BEP-20 standard, we make it easy for community members to transfer tokens from their Binance accounts to this wrapped standard (and vice versa using the Binance bridge), and also allows them to explore a whole world of different trading pair options.
Currently, on OpenSwap we have the OAX-BNB pair, and with their 2-swap hops, our community members can change OAX to any other token listed on their aggregator through the most cost efficient means. So while some users may be looking for USDT pairings and others ETH, whatever the trade combination may be, it can be done in one go on the DEX.
We’ve also taken the opportunity to engage participants on the two platforms to provide the community with more activities and token opportunities. How many have you participated in this year from staking campaigns to trading competitions and social gleam campaigns. What do you hope to see more of in the year to come?
While DeFi has taken center stage for most of 2021, we expect it to continue in more sophisticated and tailored ways as we move into 2022– through what we might know as DeFi 2.0. Taking the budding seeds and excitement of DeFi, and growing it into a mature offering, the team believes that this space has so much potential.
As a result, as part of our investment for the future we increased our support for our long term partners at Solidus Labs to support their work on risk monitoring and management. As regulators begin discussions on how to integrate DeFi into the regulated space, this will become increasingly important. But aside from regulatory requirements, the team believes it is simply good practice to create a safer environment for financial longevity.
So what are we looking forward to in the new year?
The team has been looking closely at the NFT and Metaverse space. While the initial buzz of NFTs may feel speculatory, we believe that this trend will continue to shift into something with increasing utility and become an integral part of the way we live day to day. Whether through additional perks, creating the opportunity for validation and certification, we’re only scratching the surface of possibility.
And with such endless possibilities, understanding the space and taking the time to step back and evaluate the bigger picture through knowledge and research is important. Such as the work done with Professor Syren Johnstone, which was published into a book and available here. By helping to shape the conversations of leaders and influencers in the space, the importance of such work cannot be overlooked.
We continue our conversations with various parties to explore new projects and evaluate grant submissions to help grow the digital asset space with opportunities and development that would be impossible to do as a single team alone. We continue to urge our community to get involved, and take action if they have ideas on what can be done on the blockchain and in the DeFi space. Make sure you check out our grant page on the OAX website, and learn more about how to bring your vision to life.
And we’ll continue as always to explore giving the community more interesting campaigns and benefit opportunities while we expand the work we do in this space.
Congratulations to everyone who joined our last Gleam campaign of the year! Our early Christmas campaign was a success and we hope our winners enjoy a little gift from Santa!
As always, this is a thriving exciting space that has so many opportunities and room for growth; with it the highs of success, anticipation of potential and the lows of risks, technological challenges and uncertainty. There’s plenty of time to discuss new ideas and new trends in the months to come, but in the meantime, from all of us at OAX, we wish you health and happiness during this holiday season.
