A look back at what we got up to in 2022.
Intro
What a year 2022 has been, both for the DeFi, the wider industry and the global economic sector as a whole. Whilst outlier factors make seem to have affected the whole market, we’ve been heads down building. Numerous challenges have beguiled the sector this year with everything from centralised exchange meltdowns to whole layer-1 networks cascading, but we haven’t let a few market setbacks slow us down.
Despite these challenges, the team at OpenOcean has continued to deliver on our promise to the wider market to build an all-in-one interoperable crypto hub that works for everyone. In this article we’ll cover everything that happened in 2022, from statistics to users and integrations, all in the name of building bigger and better for 2023! Let’s jump in!
Key stats
Let’s take a look at some of the key statistics from our DEX Aggregator and how the platform has performed in 2022 given these recent market conditions. Whilst the main trading volume is lower now than at the start of the year, 800m in Q1 down to just under 100m in Q4, we still managed to push 1.7b in cumulative volume for 2022 and have pushed over 4.6b since our inception.
To put this in perspective, the total TVL of the DeFi space decreased from 166.6b on the 1st of Jan to 38.8b in December 2022 which is a drawdown of 76% — Despite the market conditions, OpenOcean has still managed to increase our total active user base from 400k in Jan by almost 81% to over 700k in December.
We’ve also tracked the MAU or ‘monthly active users’ whose wallets have frequented the site on more than one occasion. We found that the number of active wallets returning to the platform after making one-trade are up over 450% when compared to the averages from July onwards.
Whilst OpenOcean is chain agnostic, we have noticed that volume was higher on more prominent L1’s and successful L2 rollups. Moreover the chain that has had the best average performance volume wise has been Avalanche; due to the very strong Game-Fi communities and gaming tokens which contribute a lot of volume on the platform.
Community Stats
Our tech team hasn’t stopped building throughout 2022, but that doesn’t mean our community stopped thriving either, on the contrary we’ve seen a huge uptick across all of our socials. Our communities are multinational and multicultural, it’s not uncommon to find discussions happening in French, Vietnamese or even Persian — OpenOceans community members touch all corners of the globe!
Telegram
Telegram is a very popular platform for us, quick to disperse information and a necessary tool for our community team. Whilst telegram members have decreased down from January and ultimately moved to discord, what we have seen is an increase in member conversion up 36% since Jan 2022– Member conversion is those who join and interact rather than just join and lurk. These are just the stats for the English communities and don’t include our strong Asian and African communities.
Discord
We love Discord as a platform and a place for organising ideas. Our Discord communities encompass multiple languages and touch all corners of the globe including our many language rooms. Our Discord server has grown exponentially from January where we started the year on just over 13k members and has increased to 28k, a 51% gain in the year. Discord is and continues to be a forward-looking dedicated space for our community and that’s why we chose in-part to launch the initial stages of DAO proposals process on there, but more on that later.
Twitter
Make no mistake, Twitter is how a large majority of our communications are handled. Our Twitter presence and growth in 2022 has been largely attributed to attracting community members from partner projects and chains in which we have deployed. Back at the end of December 2021, our total Twitter followers were 180k. Fast forward to today and we’re currently sitting at just under 296k followers, a huge increase of 63.8%.
Other Socials/Media
Whilst we primarily use the above methods of communication we’ve explored this year with branching out further. In 2022 we ramped up our production of accompanying Medium articles, we joined the CoinMarketCap Community forum and we now publish major updates through PR Newswire who distributes OpenOcean press releases through their platform to major publications including the likes of CoinTelegraph and Yahoo Finance.
Building out the platform: Partners and Chains
In our quest to make OpenOcean the best it can be, we needed to offer our users access to the best pools of liquidity but also facilitate trades between un-linked pools on other DEXes as well. That’s why we haven’t stopped this year when it comes to our huge network of partners of what we like to call ‘The OpenOcean Family’.
Since the start of the year we’ve continued expansion of our supported chains and now aggregate DEXes on over 18+ chains in total with some of the new 2022 crowd favourites like Optimism, Aurora, Harmony, Cronos, Moonriver, Arbitrum and Aptos. We started the year with only 95 integrated DEXes and only a handful of supported chains; we’ve since grown that to over 231 DEXes– an increase of 141%. Some of our most recent popular DEX integrations include Hashflow, Ankr, Rocketpool, WOO Finance and TraderJoe v2.
OpenOcean API + SDK V1, V2 and V3 and Widget
At the heart of OpenOcean is our unique routing algorithm, it underpins all of our trading throughout the platform. We also use our algorithm to power the immensely popular API+SDK. Since our inception we’ve provided a very easy-to-use API and SDK for developers and other platforms to use. It can be integrated in under a minute and is fully-customisable.
We’re now lucky enough to be on our third version of our API and SDK release which have been welcomed and regarded highly by the community.
In addition to the API and SDK we’ve made further modifications to our iframes widget, making sure that as many platforms and protocols as possible have access to our liquidity. Our widget rollout has been quite popular with it already being implemented by Aboard futures exchange and rolling out to more soon.
API and dApp integrations
Whilst we have been focused on getting OpenOcean into the hands of as many platforms as we can, one part we haven’t ignored is the listing of the OpenOcean dApp itself. We had made our app available within other ecosystems and were able to successfully integrate and market to the respective platforms communities.
In 2022 some of our partnered API integrations have included Li Finance, Mask Network, Rango Exchange, XY Finance and Chainge. As well as integrating our API directly, we’ve also managed to partner with select platforms to launch a cloistered version of the OpenOcean app. These dApp integrations are crucial for the supporting platforms in opening them up to a whole ocean of liquidity.
Some of our most prominent dApp integrations include the likes of Gnosis Safe, which offers its users a safe and effective way of performing multi-sig transactions. In the second half of 2022 we proceeded to integrate the OpenOcean dApp directly with Ankr, BENQI and Vesta Finance platforms.
Open source bot
In October we were please to announce our partnership and integration with the open-source trading platform Hummingbot. OpenOcean is the first Dex Aggregator to partner with the interopable bot project. With Hummingbot, our users can very simply and easily connect to OpenOcean and a multitude of other CEXes/DEXes together to run their own automated trading strategies including grid trading, market making, arbitrage and more.
Wallet Integrations
Throughout the year we’ve been adamant in seeking out wallet partners who share the same vision for the industry as we do. We had already joined forces with ONTOWallet and Fantom fwallet who make it possible to access all the required liquidity from the comfort of the wallet; and in 2022 we welcomed the very popular multi-chain wallet XDefi to the OpenOcean family so that we can provide more low cost swaps for even more people and all from within the app itself.
New/Updated Functions and Features
With 2022 slowing significantly towards the latter part of the year, we decided to take the opportunity to allocate more resources to make sure the whole OpenOcean platform was as good as it can be. This included re-working the order process and improving the user experience of the platform.
Cross-chain swaps
We released our novel cross-chain bridge and swap all-in-one solution at the end of 2022. Not only had our community been requesting this feature, we felt there was no other offering in the market quite like an all-together solution which could not only bridge tokens but also perform the swap as part of the ‘1-click solution’. To facilitate our bridging part of the build we partnered with industry leaders in the space MultiChain and CELR so we could access both of their bridging technologies; once combined with OpenOceans market-beating swap rates the platform was released into the market with much aplomb.
Gassless Limit Orders
We’re big believers in giving our community a flexible approach to trading and that’s why we listened to our community and rolled out full support for limit order functionality on OpenOcean. Initially we rolled out support for the BNB chain back at the start of January but we have since expanded that not only due to community demand but also due to market demand; it turns out our limit orders were very popular for low-time-frame traders or ‘dip’ traders. Our limit orders utilise a combination of AMM and RFQ (request for quote) purchasing guidelines and feature a gas-free interface so you can make/cancel as many as you want without incurring fees. We’ve proud to have launched limit orders now on eleven different chains.
Including: Avalanche, BNB chain, Fantom, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, OKC chain, Cronos and Moonriver
Referral
To reward those hard working community members of ours we launched the referral scheme back in 2021. Even though conditions have not been great in the markets we have continued to support our generous referral scheme which earns you gas back in $OOE for any referred friends or users. The rates have been adjusted slightly so we can continue to keep our program alive and working through the bear market.
TradingView
One of the features we were most excited about introducing was our TradingView charts and indicators powered by DexScreener. This was a huge upgrade for us, whereas before we only had line charts available– with TradingViews integration we were able to provide a trading environment similar to a CEX but with the familiarity of the OpenOcean user experience.
DAO
The DAO was launched to let the most important people have a say in how we run the platform. Those are our community members. There are several benefits for DAO stakers, first and foremost they get to participate in active-governance as well as get a reduction on any trading gas fees and they earn bonus OOE for doing it. At present we have just over 14 million OOE staked in the DAO. The very first proposal to partner with Aboard passed through all voting stages is currently being implemented as you read this, it should go live in the new year.
FIAT onramp
Whilst we didn’t find this news fit into any of the other categories, one thing we knew at the start of the year was that we should introduce a FIAT on-ramp to make it even easier for our partners and community members to get easy-access to crypto. So thanks to our close partners at Banxa, we’re thankfully very happy to be able to offer this service under the OpenOcean umbrella.
Conclusion
2022 has been a challenging year, but nothing that we all cannot overcome together. DeFi will be certainly continue to be tested, but we believe that with everything we’ve done to make interoperable DeFi available for the masses we’re setting OpenOcean up to be in the prime spot for the start of 2023 and beyond, join us on this epic journey together.
Get involved below!
- Website: https://openocean.finance
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenOceanGlobal
- Discord: https://discord.gg/C7PHQaKdNX
- Telegram: https://t.me/OOFinance
