There’s no doubt that 2021 was a defining year for AllianceBlock.
It has been an incredible journey since we started in 2018. We are incredibly thankful to everyone who has believed in us since the beginning and has supported us along the way.
Let’s take a look back on the NoMercy year that was, shine a light on some of the moments that brought us all here, and share the foundation of our vision, as well as what lies ahead.
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At A Glance: AllianceBlock in 2021
We've made it to the end of the year on a high note for AllianceBlock — watch a highlight reel of the key moments!
Thank you very much for being part of our 2021 story! Watch here.
What started as a vision to develop a brand new, fully-decentralized and globally-compliant capital market evolved into an even more ambitious and holistic approach that we’re cultivating every day.
Our mission is not for the faint of heart. However, because of our NoMercy mantra and the immensely talented and committed people inside our organization, we got to work and made NoMercy magic happen.
The first challenge we found was that there were no reliable tools for liquidity mining at the time — and this is why we built Liquidity Mining as Service (LMaaS).
We quickly onboarded our first client, Dafi Protocol, and more clients followed soon after, with returning clients extending their campaigns, both liquidity mining and staking on multiple networks.
The TVL (Total Value Locked) of all LMaaS campaigns reached 60M USD in 2021, all within half a year since the product’s launch.
After LMaaS came the development of the DataQuasar for the data aggregation and analytics needs we knew we wanted to address. “It’s a quant’s dream!”
The Data Tunnel closely followed to allow us to monetize our data and the data of others — building towards a true global circular data economy.
Next came the Bridge because we were not happy with centralized solutions that fragmented the industry further instead of helping it connect. Now, our fully-decentralized Bridge is out with seven supported networks (and many more to follow).
We built the DEX to be an essential part of our vision by optimizing impermanent loss and mitigating the risk that we saw on other DEXes. Our DEX with a brand new automated market maker is now on Testnet and is going through its bug bounty phase. We're developing more novel features in parallel, so stay tuned!
Fundrs is an essential product that enables decentralized investment and lending/borrowing in the DeFi space. Last December, we saw the result of a three-year journey with the Testnet release of Fundrs on five major networks.
We also teased our Wallet, encompassing all the above functionalities in a one-stop-shop solution for the DeFi community.
We knew that compliance would play an even more critical role in 2022, especially for integrating more financial institutions. We didn’t want to compromise the decentralization and anonymity so highly valued in DeFi. As a result, we began to develop our Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Transaction (KYT) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) solutions that allow trustless and reusable identity verifications that will unlock a wide array of use cases.
The final piece of our vision is to develop our blockchain. For this, we will carefully select the industry’s best networks and smart contract languages, such as Polkadot’s Substrate. We will work on this over the next couple of years.
AllianceBlock, based in the Netherlands, will hold all of our modules (highlighted in green) which will be completely decentralized and open-source. Devraaj, based in Switzerland, is a Technology and Services Provider that will be a crucial part of AllianceBlock’s Ecosystem. Devraaj will continue to develop its products leveraging and contributing to AllianceBlock's open-source technology.
These modules will gradually become interconnected in the next few months and shape the ecosystem of our vision. Our products will complement each other and factor in the use of $ALBT, thus increasing the utility of our token.
By deploying these modules on our blockchain, we will be able to independently run our ecosystem for universal use by retailers, DeFi projects and financial institutions. They, in turn, will be able to build new financial infrastructure on top of their existing legacy systems, or even entirely from scratch. This approach will help drive innovation in ways we can't even fathom right now!
End of Year AMA with the Co-Founders
Our Co-Founder and CEO Rachid Ajaja and Co-Founder and CTO Matthijs de Vries walked through a massive 2021 for AllianceBlock and shared a preview of what's to come for a #NoMercy 2022.
There was also a little surprise at the end, so be sure to watch it here!
Since August 2020, we have seen an explosion of announcements, media placements and partnerships that drove thousands of new members to our No Mercy community.
Our community grew to 40K followers on Twitter and over 10K on Telegram for a total of 65K+ across selected channels. This growth is phenomenal, considering we were still at around 400 Telegram members in early summer 2020. We've come a long way!
Aligned with our vision to seamlessly bridge DeFi with Tradfi, we have spent a lot of our efforts engaging with the traditional finance community, and we’ve made great strides in the past year!
We saw the incorporation of Devraaj as a Swiss AG technology company this year. With this, we are now present in the Crypto Valley and have opened the doors to our Zug office (currently being transformed into the NoMercy space we all deserve!).
However, the best night of the year, by far, was when we all met for the first time in Zug during the #WenZug event. We’ve made incredible memories, and we had the best private event for our employees, partners and key community members in all of 2021. Here’s a sneak preview of what went down.
Behind every product is a fantastic team. Each team and community member plays a vital part in our growth and achieving our grand vision. Each of us has a unique opportunity to build the company that we all want and play a critical role in nurturing the culture we value.
In 2021, we have grown from a few people to 100 people worldwide. This means that we are releasing and executing much faster too.
We’ve learned a lot in 2021. After such rapid growth, our next step is to focus on the organization, implementing pragmatic processes and bringing to life operational excellence, supported by our leadershipteam, which is now fully in place.
Bringing the silos together
Initially, we set up silo teams to develop products in parallel to move fast, with one infrastructure team to ensure a link between the products.
Now, as we are continuously releasing all the products, we are moving towards interconnecting teams, where people across teams having similar expertise will come together to share insights, updates in technologies and discuss standardization opportunities.
We will always look back at 2021 as a defining year for AllianceBlock as a company. So many things happened that will forever leave a mark and impact our future journey. And you were a part of that.
Here’s to an absolutely YUGE 2022. We’re glad to have you with us.
Best wishes, Rachid, Matthijs and Amber
That’s all from us. Thanks for reading and remember, #NoMercy! 🌊
AllianceBlock seamlessly brings DeFi and TradFi together.
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