What a transformative year it's been for Taiko! From our groundbreaking mainnet launch to explosive ecosystem growth and technical innovations, 2024 marked Taiko's emergence as a leading force in Ethereum scaling.

Let's take a look at what we've achieved this year and what the future holds.

Mainnet Launch

The First Based Rollup

Remember May 27, 2024? That's the day we made history by launching the first based rollup on Ethereum mainnet, marking a strong advancement in the rollup-centric roadmap.

In a memorable moment, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed Taiko's genesis block, noting: "I'm excited to see that Taiko is launching as a based rollup. Ethereum benefits from L2s taking a plurality of different approaches, and I appreciate them being among the first to go in this direction.”

This breakthrough represents a technical achievement for Taiko and a fundamental shift in Ethereum's scaling paradigm. As a based rollup, we've demonstrated how to effectively scale Ethereum while preserving its core principles of decentralization and security.

Remarkable Growth and Adoption

Since launch, Taiko has seen extraordinary growth across all metrics:

• 460+ million total transactions in just 7 months.

• An all-time high of 5 million daily transactions and an average of 3.5 million daily transactions, demonstrating the network's robust capacity and growing adoption.

• Peak daily transaction volume hit 5 million.

• Consistent 50+ TPS, regularly ranking in top 3 among all rollups.

• Over 1.9 million unique wallets.

• Significant TVL growth from $1.24M in June to over $407M!

• Permissionless block building has shown significant success. Reaching 92 unique proposers in total.

Thriving Community

Our community has experienced unprecedented growth throughout 2024:

• Our Discord community surpassed 1 million members, making it one of crypto's largest communities.

• Our social media presence expanded dramatically with Twitter/X following growing to over 920,000 followers.

Media and Industry Leadership

2024 was the year everyone wanted to talk about Taiko:

• Featured in leading crypto media with The Block's exclusive coverage of our permissionless rollout, alongside coverage from CoinDesk, TechCrunch, and Cointelegraph about our mainnet launch and technical innovations.

• Featured on Bankless discussing based rollups.

• Key research coverage by Four Pillars, including a comprehensive 40-page technical analysis and a focused study on preconfirmations.

• Hosted eight panel discussions with industry leaders including Vitalik Buterin and Justin Drake.

• Featured in research round-ups by Delphi Digital covering The Year Ahead for Infra: 2025, Based Rollups and the Blob market.

• Published regular educational content through:

  • "The Rollup Coaster" newsletter.

  • Research articles on multi-proofs, based preconfirmations, binary fields and based rollup economics.

Technical Achievement

ZK Proof Integration

We successfully integrated ZK proofs into the protocol while maintaining SGX proof support, strengthening our security architecture and building a multi-proof standard. This hybrid approach combines the speed of SGX proofs with the mathematical guarantees of ZK proofs.

BCR Optimization

In October, Ontake - our first hardfork (the v1.10.0 upgrade) - enhanced L2 EIP-1559 implementation by making base fees L1-tunable and introduced initial support for transaction preconfirmation. This upgrade significantly improved block proposer efficiency and network scalability.

Gwyneth Development

We made substantial progress on Taiko Gwyneth, our synchronously composable booster rollup designed to extend L1 capabilities through native sequencing and seamless L1-L2 cross-chain state access. This new rollup design will fully take advantage of being a based rollup, and work towards the end goal of a scalable L1.

Community and Ecosystem

Trailblazers Programme

Our signature mainnet incentive program was a massive success:

• Season 1 saw the first distribution of 12M TAIKO tokens both to users and applications.

• Season 2 continued with equal enthusiasm with 6M TAIKO tokens engaging hundreds of thousands of participants boosting our TVL to over $400 million.

• Season 3 launched with enhanced rewards and mechanics.

Ecosystem Expansion

The Taiko ecosystem grew to over 130 projects, with particular strength in:

• Native DeFi protocols driving TVL growth and affirming Taiko as the Layer 2 supporting true decentralized financial tools.

• Gaming applications driving transaction volume to reach 5 million transactions a day.

• Infrastructure tools and developer resources, supporting builders at the foundational level.

Events and Education

We maintained a strong presence at major industry events including:

• ETH Denver

• ETH Seoul

• Southeast Asia Blockchain Week

• EthCC

• Korea Blockchain Week

• Token2049 Dubai and Singapore

• DevCon Bangkok

• Multiple successful hackathons, including our major collaboration with DoraHacks with a total prize pool of $100,000 and the opportunity for participants to build a business through grants and business support.

Token Launch and Distribution

The TAIKO token launch in June 2024 marked another crucial milestone:

• 5% initial airdrop to early community members.

• Successful public sale with 9x oversubscription.

• Listings on major exchanges including: Upbit, Bybit, Bitget, Gate.io, Bithumb and 50 others.

• 10% allocation to the Trailblazers program over the coming years.

Strategic Funding

2024 brought significant financial milestones for Taiko:

• In March we secured $15M Series A funding led by Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, and Token Bay Capital; attracted investments from Wintermute Ventures, Presto Labs, Flow Traders, OKX Ventures, and others.

• This totalled $37M funding across three rounds.

Grants

Our $32M grants program has been a cornerstone of ecosystem development this year. We:

• Maintained rigorous standards with a 19% acceptance rate.

• Successfully supported 67 grantees across various categories.

• Implemented a milestone-based tracking system.

• Established an in-house grant council for continuous support.

• Fostered innovation in DeFi, gaming, infrastructure, and public goods.

What’s Next?

As we move into 2025, several key initiatives are underway to take Taiko’s growth even further:

Preconfirmations

Taiko has longer block times due to its based rollup nature. Based preconfirmations are our top priority to deliver sub-second user experiences on Taiko. We're working closely with our partners to develop this feature, aiming to implement the first preconfirmation protocol in early 2025.

ZK Proofs

Currently, 3 out of every 100 blocks proposed by Taiko Labs requires ZK proofs. In 2025, ZK requirements will apply to all proposers, with a target of 3% ZK coverage. Our goal is to gradually transition to a complete ZK-Rollup by the end of 2025.

DAO

Decentralization has been Taiko's backbone from day one. We're excited to invite our community to participate in Taiko's decision-making process. With the DAO and Security Council design expected to be finalised soon, we look forward to launching these governance structures this year.

Gwyneth

While Taiko pioneered based rollups and opened many opportunities, we believe in pushing boundaries further. This vision led us to build Gwyneth, a new based booster rollup initiative. Through the upcoming Gwyneth devnet/testnet in 2025, we aim to address the fragmentation and interoperability challenges in the rollup-centric roadmap.

Thank You to Our Community

None of these achievements would have been possible without our incredible community of developers, users, and supporters. Your enthusiasm, feedback, and participation have been instrumental in making Taiko what it is today.

Taiko has consistently led innovation, from creating a Type-1 ZK-EVM against all odds to building a based rollup before the concept even had a name. Whatever the future holds, be sure, Taiko will light the way.

As amazing as 2024 was, we have a feeling 2025 is going to be even more incredible. Together, we're not just scaling Ethereum - we're building a more scalable, accessible, and decentralized future for Ethereum.

Here's to an even more remarkable 2025! 🥁✨

Join us 💗

Explore open positions on our job board.

Follow us 🥁

Get the latest from Taiko:

• Website: https://taiko.xyz.

• Discord: https://discord.gg/taikoxyz.

• GitHub: https://github.com/taikoxyz.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/taikoxyz.

• Community forum: https://community.taiko.xyz.

• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@taikoxyz.

• Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/taikoxyz.

Contribute 🤓

Contribute to Taiko on GitHub and earn a GitPOAP! You will also be featured as a contributor on our README. Get started with the contributing manual.