Taikolights: Community Update Q3/Q4 2024

November 4th, 2024

TL;DR

• 🌟 Achieved profitability with 250M+ transactions and a $3.9M daily volume

• 📈 6x TVL growth driven by native DeFi protocols, alongside a thriving gaming ecosystem

• 🏦 Trailblazers Season 1 distributed 12M TAIKO tokens; Season 2 is ongoing

• 💧 Major hackathon with DoraHacks underway

• 🧠 Building Taiko Gwyneth, our synchronously composable booster rollup

Coming up: ZK proofs integration, DAO governance launch, and preconfirmations.

Dear Taikonauts,

As we mark a magical 5 months since Taiko's mainnet launch and TGE, we're thrilled to share our remarkable journey and achievements. From turning profitable as a based rollup to hitting new transaction volume ATHs, our growth has accelerated across every metric. Let’s dive into what we’ve been building and where we’re heading:

🚀 Key Milestones

🎯 Decentralized, Permissionless & Now Profitable
- Breaking the “impossible triangle” in L2: Taiko has achieved profitability ahead of schedule while staying true to our based rollup model. Unlike traditional rollups with centralized sequencers that may monopolize revenue, our block-building process is fully permissionless and open to everyone. Here’s the kicker: it’s profitable, proving that the decentralized model of Based Rollups can create sustainable value. Game-changing? That’s an understatement.

Source: https://www.growthepie.xyz/chains/taiko

📈 Breaking Records: By The Numbers
- 250M+ total transactions in just 5 months

Source: https://taiko.socialscan.io/charts/cumulative-tx

4,6M daily transaction volume (ATH)

50+ TPS, consistently top 3 among all rollups

1.7M+ unique wallets and growing

Source: https://taikoscan.io/chart/address

81 community proposers & 68 community provers powering our based rollup

60% gas cost reduction making proposers more profitable

Source: https://dune.com/taiko_xyz/taikobcr

🌐 Market Development
- Another day, another exchange. Our TAIKO token continues to gain traction with new listings on LBank, HTX, and CoinW adding to our presence on major platforms like Upbit, Bitget, Bybit, Bithumb, Gate, and so on.
  - Track TAIKO token’s movement on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.
🎮 Trailblazers Seasons continue
- Trailblazers is our signature mainnet incentive program where users and dApps compete, build, and grow together on Taiko. Season 1 concluded with the distribution of 12M TAIKO tokens. Here’s a quick look at the stats:
  
  • 10% of the total token supply dedicated to the overall Trailblazers program
  
  • 80% allocated to direct user rewards
  
  • 20% allocated to partner incentives
  
  • Bi-weekly themed campaigns to keep engagement fresh
- Season 2 is now live, offering new opportunities for users and developers to participate in network growth—with many more surprises on the way! Ready to level up? Head to trailblazers.taiko.xyz
🌐 Ecosystem Evolution
- Our ecosystem has expanded beyond 130+ projects, with recent growth focused on two key pillars:

Visit taiko.xyz/ecosystem to explore our full suite of 120+ projects

• DeFi momentum is surging: TVL has multiplied by 6 since Panko (DEX) and TakoTako (L&B) launched on mainnet. Both are native and exclusive to Taiko, driving more than 90% of the TVL growth experienced. More projects are coming soon!

• Gaming continues to play a strong role on Taiko. Games like World of Dypians, 0xAstra, and Brigade Multiverse are leading the charge, while Crack & Stack has already captured 90K unique players with 5.5M gameplays—and this is just the beginning.

• As a general-purpose chain, we invite builders of all kinds. However, the strategic focus in the coming months will be to continue building a robust gaming ecosystem, enhanced by preconfirmations coming in 2025, achieve deep liquidity in Taiko’s DeFi protocols, double down on community-building use cases, such as SocialFi, Consumer apps, NFTs, memes, and entertainment, and maintain a close eye on RWA & Tokenization.

🚀 Building Through Strategic Support
- Grants: Our $30M grants program maintains elite standards with a 16% acceptance rate. Currently supporting 67 grantees, we've implemented a milestone-based tracking system with our in-house grant council providing continuous support.
🛠️ #BUIDLonTaiko: Hackathon with DoraHacks
- Join our multi-track hackathon (until Nov 17) judged by industry leaders, VCs, top blockchain clubs, and Taiko cofounders:
  - 💪 Work Hard: Innovate in DeFi & RWAs
  - 🎮 Play Hard: Create games & social apps
  - 🌱 Do Good: Build for public goods & social impact
- More on: https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/grant-factory/detail
🎉 Community Vibes Check
- Best parties in crypto? That's us! From KBW's hottest night (s/o to Hashed, Presto & Google Cloud) to Token2049's skyline views with Galaxy Digital - we celebrate wins in style. Catch us next at DevCon Bangkok & ETHDEN2025!
- Plus, every Thursday is Game Night on Taiko - home to crypto's largest Discord community (1M+ members!) where we gather to play, compete, and vibe with the latest ecosystem games. No boring DeFi talks, just pure fun! Follow us on X for event updates and drop by our Discord for good vibes only.
🔧 Technical Innovation
- Shoutout to Four Pillars for their comprehensive 40-page research paper on Taiko, covering everything from technology to ecosystem. Available in both English and Korean, this in-depth analysis provides a thorough look at Taiko’s innovation in the L2 space. Read the full article
- BBR: Our tech wizards have introduced Taiko Gwyneth, a synchronously composable based rollup. We call it a “booster rollup” for its capability to compose with and extend the L1, leveraging native sequencing for seamless L1-L2 state access. As we develop Taiko Gwyneth, our research pipeline is filled with explorations into based rollups, preconfirmations, multi-provers, and horizontal scaling solutions—aiming to achieve profitable, timely, and deterministic L2 block building.
- BCR: On Oct 31st, we upgraded to v1.10.0, setting the stage for Ontake, our first BCR protocol fork expected around Nov 15th (block 538,304). This upgrade enhances L2 EIP-1559 by allowing base fees to be L1-tunable with future DAO governance and introducing initial support for transaction preconfirmation. This enables block proposers to build multiple blocks deterministically without waiting for L1 submission, marking a significant advance in L2 scalability.

🛣️ Looking Ahead

As we move forward, we remain committed to our vision of building a truly decentralized, efficient, and community-driven Layer 2 solution. These achievements in just five months since mainnet launch are just the beginning of our journey together.

Here’s what to look forward to:

• ZK Proofs: Maximum Security for Based Rollup

As a based rollup, Taiko is inherently more secure than any centralized rollup. However, because based rollups allow anyone to participate, anyone can also attempt to attack the chain permissionlessly. Currently, we rely on TEE proofs, and now we’ve integrated ZK proofs into the Taiko protocol internally, with plans to launch them on mainnet this month. Over time, we plan to migrate to proving all blocks with ZK. This integration will further strengthen Taiko’s robust security architecture.

• DAO: Power to the Community

With our upcoming DAO design, the Taiko community will hold full decision-making power over the network. The design includes a multi-threshold multi-sig system to manage both standard and emergency situations, with a Security Council responsible for proposal creation. Delegates (anyone can become one) and token holders have the ability to veto proposals during a review period, with proposals automatically implemented if the veto threshold isn’t reached. This model is currently being battle-tested on the Hekla testnet.

• Preconfirmation: Next-Level User Experience

We’ve begun work on transaction preconfirmation in collaboration with industry leaders, aiming to provide users with sub-second confirmation of their transaction’s execution status. This improvement allows block proposers to operate more efficiently, proposing blocks only when needed rather than at fixed intervals, leading to better blob space utilization. This collaborative effort involves wallets, block explorers, restaking protocols, rollup protocols, and potentially even dApps, with Taiko focusing on deterministic off-chain block building and a preconfirmation registry based on Ether restaking.

• More Assets, More Possibilities

Thanks to our ecosystem projects and community support, the Taiko network will soon welcome a diverse range of new assets—from tokens to NFTs and memes—injecting even more vitality into our growing ecosystem.

Together, we are building a Based future, and the road ahead looks incredibly bright! Thank you, Taikonauts, for being part of this incredible journey, and thank you for the continuous support you have shown us.