The Nervos Recap of 2022 - The Year of Community Growth

As 2022 comes to a close, we are recapping and reflecting on some of the fantastic strides we experienced — together, apart, and across the global community — over the course of the year.

First of all, we’d like to thank the Nervos community on the path of decentralization and uncompromised, a rather not easy but hard way together.

With more than 100,000 communities worldwide, we have shared major updates and developments across the ecosystem and community over social media, events, and content, so let’s take a look back and find what’s NEW with 2022 Recap:

Nervos CKB

Nervos Network had major technical releases in 2022, including successfully launching a Major Protocol Upgrade (or hard fork) to layer 1, and the new mainnet is called “Mirana”. Bridging with the Binance smartchain by Forcebridge and the CKB light client has been deployed to the Pudge testnet. Axon, a sidechain SDK created by the Nervos Network, is near completion.

Address: The number of unique addresses used increased significantly in 2022, more than three times as quickly as in the first two years. At this rate of growth, the figure will soon surpass 1.5 million.

Hashrate: Nervos CKB is a PoW blockchain secured by miners. During the first four months of 2022, the hashrate of CKB remained relatively stable at around 140 PH/s. It decreased in the year’s second half due to the bear market and fell to 60 PH/s recently. But as new CKB mining rigs with improved efficiency are released by mining hardware manufacturers such as Bitmain, the hashrate is expected to grow in the coming months, which is positive for the network’s security and everything built on top. The graph below shows the hashrate growth since the mainnet launch.

Token Burnt: The native token of Nervos, CKByte (also known as CKB), represents limited on-chain state space. This means that the demand for storing data on Nervos could drive demand for the token. Nervos has primary issuance (block rewards halve every 4 years, hard-capped at 33.6 billion) and a fixed 1.344 billion annual secondary issuance. The latter will compensate miners for continuing to store the app state, to ensure the security and longevity of the network. Based on how CKB is used, the secondary issuance is divided among miners, Nervos DAO depositors, and a treasury fund (which will be burned currently). So far, over 68.2% of the secondary issuance, amounting to more than 2.8 billion, has been burnt.

Nervos DAO: By depositing in the Nervos DAO, the CKB holdings will never be diluted by secondary issuance. Below is a graph showing the growth of Nervos DAO deposits and depositors. As of this writing, Nervos DAO has more than 8 billion CKB locked up, with a total of 45.4 thousand depositors.

Cells: The number of live cells on CKB has been growing exponentially in 2022, thanks to the success of various DeFi projects. A Cell is a generalized UTXO and the most basic structure needed to represent a single piece of data on the blockchain. While the data contained in a Bitcoin UTXO could only be Bitcoin balance or static data (as a OP_RETURN tx), the data collected in a cell can take many forms, including CKB tokens, code like Javascript, or even serialized data like JSON strings. There are no restrictions on the type of data included, so developers have complete flexibility in what they choose to work with. The need for live cells grows as more dApps are built on top, and the number of on-chain users rises.

Take .bit as an example. Each .bit account requires approximately 206 CKB to create the cell; by now, there are 262.1k registered .bit accounts, a remarkable rise from the 47.3k at the end of last year. As of this writing, there are 30.61 million live cells, a significant increase from the 13.53 million at the start of this year.

Layer 2 Solutions

The layer 2 network Godwoken has upgraded to v1, spinning off into its independent organization, aiming to be the first modular gaming full-stack blockchain. Godwoken has been upgraded to Version 1.3 in September, Currently at Version 1.7.

Godwoken has gone green with Carbon offsetting, successfully held the first blockchain gaming conference in India with over 300 participants and made a recent partnership announcement with immunefi on the bug bounty program. Stay tuned for Godwoken’s updates and see new games and dapps upcoming.

Community Growth

The Nervos community is still growing steadily despite the weak market. Nervos has 115.8k followers on Twitter, over 12k users on Discord, and over 17k users in the Telegram chat room.

The Nervos website is continuously getting favored by web3-minded visitors and overall had around 150% growth compared to last year.

Ecosystem Developments

While the Nervos network is a protocol to provide security and interoperability, ecosystem partners, including Dapps and technical partners, have been thriving in the Network and helping Nervos to grow its account/cell and community.

In 2022, we have expanded our ecosystem and expected to grow more in the upcoming years.