Taiko in 2023: A year in review

2023 is in the bucks!
What an amazing year it was for Taiko. From successful fundraising to tech achievements to incredible community growth, Taiko has become a whole different beast compared to what it was just a year ago.
Here’s a short overview of what Taiko achieved in 2023 and what awaits us in 2024. Strap in!🚀

Testnets

We launched four public testnets. We used each iteration as a playground for experimenting with and testing various designs and mechanisms.
For example, Askja was the first testnet to have zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) partially integrated. Grímsvötn showed us what a fully permissionless rollup on testnet with both proposers and provers permissionless would look like. With Eldfell, we experimented with how L3s built on top of Taiko would work. Finally, Jólnir offered many valuable insights into how a PBS-inspired proposing and proving design would behave in real life.
In each testnet, we saw tremendous activity: Thousands of proposers, provers, and node runners making sure the network is alive and well, as well as regular users transacting, creating wallets, and deploying contracts en masse.
Gathering the testnet data and making sense of it has been possible only because every testnet we’ve had was completely permissionless to participate in. We take pride in the fact that anyone from the community or outside of it can join and leave the network whenever they wish to. This is what communities are for, and we’re beyond happy to have such an active and insightful one!

BCR and BBR

With the help of testing out various ideas with our testnets, we developed two major rollup designs that are going to play a key role in the Taiko roadmap.
The first one is the Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) mechanism, which our Cofounder and CEO Daniel Wang described here. Our upcoming A6 testnet will be based on the BCR design, so you’ll be able to experience it first-hand soon.
The Based Booster Rollup (BBR) design is another major milestone that’s been added to the Taiko roadmap. Currently in development, BBR is expected to come after some time once we’re on mainnet. Read more about BBR here.
We’re very bullish on both of the designs and can’t wait to see how they work in the wild!

Community growth

Speaking of community, we’ve seen a huge growth in the number of members and followers across all communication channels. For example, our X (Twitter) follower count increased from around 7,000 in December 2022 to 480,000 now. On Discord, we’re 585,000 strong, compared to just 15,755 last year. And our YouTube channel subscriptions grew to 6,500.
This is not to say that numbers are all that matter. Even more important than numbers is your active participation and willingness to help newcomers on Discord and our community forum. Your curiosity and drive to learn during Office Hours, Tea with Taiko, and Community Calls have been nothing short of inspiring to the entire team.

Events

What’s even more great is that we met some of you at conferences and events in various parts of the world. We shook hands and chatted with you at ETHDenver, Zuzalu, ETHGlobal Tokyo, EDCON, ETHPrague, ETHGlobal Waterloo, EthCC, zkWarsaw, ETHWarsaw, Ethcon Korea, ETHSingapore, Token2049, Permissionless, ZK Summit 10, ETHGlobal New York, ETHKL, and Devconnect Istanbul.
In 2024, we’re planning to continue attending Ethereum events all around the world and meet with builders and community members. More hackathons, more presentations, more talks! Follow our public events calendar for the latest news.

Expanded ecosystem

The Taiko ecosystem expanded from virtually a non-existent one to one with almost 80 dapps. You can now try DeFi, smart wallet, tooling, gaming, and other dapps on Taiko to get a better feeling of what Taiko is going to look like once we’re on mainnet.
Check out what dapps you can use today on our ecosystem page.

Grants

Another major achievement in 2023 that we’re especially proud of is launching the Taiko Grants program. In the inaugural program, we received 92 high-quality grant applications and awarded 15 grants. Out of those 15 winners, 9 had already deployed on or contributed to Taiko in some capacity before applying for a grant — that’s what we mean when we say we have an active community!
After the successful inaugural program, we launched Taiko Grants Cycle 2, an extended and improved program with a $30M grant pool size. It’s still ongoing, so if you’re a community builder developing on Taiko, an established partner, or just a curious mind that likes to work on complex problems, head to the Taiko Grants HQ portal!

Education

Another area in which we spent a good amount of resources in 2023 is community education. Here are some of the content we produced to educate our community:

• X (Twitter) spaces. We hosted eight high-quality panels on topics like ZK-VMs, decentralized proving, based sequencing, multi-proofs, intents, and others. We had Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and other distinguished members of the Ethereum community as guests. Find the recordings here.
• Research articles. We produced over 10 research articles on topics like L2 MEV, folding, ZK-VM, FHE, and others. Find them on our blog.
• The ZK-Roller-Coaster biweekly newsletter. We — together with community contributors — wrote 17 editions covering the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK stuff. Find them on our blog.
• Rollup Term of the Week. Every Monday for the last few months, we posted a tweet explaining a rollup term taken from the rollup glossary we started back in February.
• Galxe campaigns. We launched multiple gamified community education campaigns on Galxe. Check them out here and join if you’re interested!
• Taiko Tuesday. A community-led newsletter that’s about to celebrate its first anniversary!

Community education efforts are going to stay an area of focus for Taiko in 2024. Expect more of the same type of content plus more!

Fundraising

In June, we announced that we raised $22M across two rounds led by established funds like Sequoia China and Generative Ventures. Since then, we’ve been ramping up our efforts in building our product and the community to make sure we’re ready to launch on mainnet when the time comes.
We’re thankful to our partners for believing in our vision and supporting us in our journey.

What to expect in 2024

We’re going into 2024 with one overarching goal: Mainnet launch. This means next year, you’ll see more partnerships, more security audits, more educational content, more events, and more community engagement.
It also means more teammates! If you’re interested in joining us, please visit our job board and explore open positions.

Thank you

The truth is that Taiko wouldn’t be where it is now without its community. We want to thank you for your unwavering support in building and spreading the word about Taiko — this means the world to us.