O3 Labs 2021 Annual Report
It has been a very eventful year for O3 Labs. Our first product, O3 Wallet, was the product that got us started in the crypto community in 2017 and it was updated extensively based upon the release of our cross-chain trading protocol, O3 Swap. O3 Wallet was correspondingly enhanced to allow cross-chain transactions to be initiated directly from users’ soft wallets on their mobile devices. This was and still stands to be an overlooked innovation in a saturated industry where DApps tend to favor access from laptops and desktops without mobile integration. O3 Swap was suddenly at the fingertips of our over 150,000 O3 Wallet users.
To complement our nascent protocol and raise money for further development, O3 Labs launched $O3, our native ERC-20 token with contracts on other EVM compatible chains to support its function as a switch token on other networks within our O3 Swap protocol. O3 Swap’s $O3 had a hugely successful IDO launch and public launch on exchanges as investors opened their minds to the idea of a cross-chain trading protocol like O3 Swap. More success followed at the beginning of our launch as we achieved daily volumes that frequently surpassed $200M on our brand new protocol!
June ushered in the beginning of several prominent liquidity mining events on the O3 swap platform on three different networks including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Huobi Eco Chain. Our Ice Age Mining and our Icing Sugar Mining events were launched in an effort to supply our liquidity pools and draw users to O3 Swap’s new, innovative cross-chain swap solution with high APY incentives for staking. The mining event did just that as thousands of users scrambled to stake their O3, O3 LP and other project tokens native on each chain to earn O3 rewards. At the time O3 Swap’s total TVL surpassed $500M. July saw a repeat of this model as O3 Swap launched on Polygon’s Matic blockchain and total TVL surpassed $700M quite quickly. O3 Labs also began a bug bounty program that July to reward programmers who could find flaws in the O3 Swap smart contracts or code repositories on GitHub.
This string of successes would be unceremoniously interrupted in August though due to the hack of the O3’s bridging partner, an exploit that momentarily resulted in the loss of O3 Swap’s liquidity pools. Of course this was a difficult time for the O3 Labs team that was devastated at the idea of losing our reputation as a secure protocol, but after negotiations with the hacker, all of the money was returned to the pools within a few weeks time. This event was a big setback that halted what had been good momentum for the protocol during its infancy; however, they patched the flaws in their security swiftly once the funds were returned and awarded the white hat hacker a bug bounty sum. O3 Labs awarded him a bug bounty as well and pressed on with new conviction to ensure the security and functionality of the decentralized protocol for all its users, new and old.
Of course the hacking event inspired our series of 10,000 hacker punk NFTs which were released in September and will be used for mining our governance token, DAO3 when the O3 DAO is developed. O3 Labs’ DAO plans to give the users all the tools they need to determine the direction of O3 swap whether that be voting on pools, staking opportunities, partnerships or even the fee structure when swapping in the O3 bridge.
October was noted for the launch of the O3 Dashboard which readily provided O3 Swap data like TVL, liquidity pool data, and the current price of $O3 token. O3 Swap’s and O3 Wallet’s full integration with Arbitrum took place as well as Ice Age Mining Events and Icing Sugar Mining Events took place on that network too as is customary when O3 Swap integrates with a new chain. Meanwhile, in November we went big and added five chains to our cross-chain protocol including OEC, Fantom, xDai, Avalanche, and Optimism before initiating Icing Sugar Mining and Ice Age Mining events on both OEC and Avalanche simultaneously. December concluded 2021 with the release of our O3 Bridge testnet and the announcement regarding the details of our DAO which is currently in development.
Lastly, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our growing communities on Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Discord and of course Telegram where the total number of our community members now surpasses 170 thousand strong. O3 Swap is still under a year old, yet has grown so much. Despite ups and downs in the market and the stress induced from the August exploit, O3 Labs couldn’t be happier with the progress we’ve made! We invite you, the reader, to try a swap for yourself at o3swap.com! You know you want to! Please follow us on Twitter @O3_Labs for the latest up to date information about O3 Labs and our array of blockchain products!
O3 Labs Team
o3.network
