On 9 January 2024, Flare hosted an X Space to celebrate the first anniversary of the Flare Token Distribution Event.

Esteemed partners and builders from Bifrost Wallet, Block Bonez, Covalent, Enosys, Subsquid, SolidiFi, and Sparkles gathered to highlight their successes in 2023, share insights into their journeys with Flare, and offer a glimpse into their future plans. The call concluded with Hugo unveiling Flare’s 2024 roadmap. Let’s dive in.

Replay the X Space here:

https://t.co/Rwahh7Gznj

— Flare ☀️ (@FlareNetworks) January 9, 2024

Partners and builders on Flare

The call included projects spanning the entire crypto sphere, featuring diverse dapps from wallets, NFTs, DeFi, and tooling. The common thread among these projects is a strong belief in the future of interoperability, with decentralized data access emerging as the key to making it a reality.

Marcel, co-founder of Subsquid, is building a Web3 data lake facilitating batch query and aggregation of terabytes of on-chain and off-chain data. Learn more about Flare’s integration with Subsquid.

Ferdi, is co-founder of SolidiFi, a DeFi platform operating on Flare, XRP, and XDC. Their mobile wallet integrates staking and FTSO delegation on Flare.

Nik, is co-founder of Ēnosys, a blockchain-focused software development and research center. They are currently developing a ‘super app’ on Flare offering a wide range of DeFi products. Learn more about Enosys in our ecosystem call in September.

Cannon, co-founder of Sparkles, leads an inclusive NFT marketplace and provides APIs to major projects and wallets on Flare.

John, founder of Block Bonez, introduces dynamic NFTs to Flare, enabling owners to fuse traits and create highly customizable NFTs, with rewards based on rarity.

Harish, Head of Dev Rel from Covalent, highlighted their support for Flare and Songbird through a unified API, connecting Flare to the wider ecosystem.  Learn more about our partnership with Covalent.

Markus, is CEO at Towo Labs & Bifrost Wallet, a multi-chain wallet for DeFi and NFTs on Flare, Ethereum, XRP, and beyond. They were the first wallet to support native FTSO delegation on Songbird, and have just launched support for staking on Flare.

Highlights in 2023 and beyond

The conversation began with a celebration of the achievements by Flare ecosystem partners and builders in 2023. Subsquid, SolidiFi, Enosys, Sparkles, Bifrost Wallet, Block Bonez and Covalent shared their milestones, setting an optimistic tone for 2024.

Marcel (Subsquid):

• Marcel shared the excitement about Subsquid’s addition of Flare support in October 2023. This enables thousands of Subsquid developers to access Flare data with high performance, customization, and flexibility using Subsquid’s SDK for custom indexers.
• Subsquid is also enthusiastic about the potential synergy between the Flare Time Series Oracle and Subsquid’s indexing capabilities.
• Approximately 20% of web3 developers are already using Subsquid.
• In 2024, they are planning to provide grants for developers in the Flare ecosystem.

Ferdi (SolidiFi):

• The Flare network went live in 2023, and SolidiFi promptly added Flare support to its mobile app which went through a thorough security audit by Cure53.
• SolidiFi is working on v3 of the app, which will include different languages, Tangem cards, and additional blockchains.
• SolidiFi is aligning its business model with that of the FAssets.
• SolidiFi is considering relocating its headquarters from the Netherlands to the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) with a compliance-first approach.

Nik (Enosys):

• In 2023, Enosys underwent a huge rebrand. They also had some great partnerships, including Art on Internet, Velocity series, and Sushiswap for the redemption of the SAK3 project.
• The launch of their bridge to Songbird and Flare was a key moment. Growing the liquidity layer for Flare is exciting for 2024.
• The Gateway of Destiny event signifies the second version of their Clover protocol, which now allows them to introduce mystery box events.
• The API Cloud launch is anticipated in late Q2 2024.

Cannon (Sparkles):

• Sparkles had an exciting 2023 with support for Flare and NFTs since day one, trading 20 million FLR and 100 million SGB worth of NFTs, boosting the user base to 60,000 unique wallets.
• Actively engaging with regulators, Sparkles provided advisory support on licensing and NFTs amid industry changes.
• Collaboration with Flare brought strong technical support, while Sparkles’ infrastructure APIs for NFT stats showcased growing interest within the Flare ecosystem.
• In 2024, there will be a greater focus on utilizing Flare’s core protocols, plus updating Sparkles’ white paper.

John (Block Bonez):

• Block Bonez is now the fastest-selling NFT project on the Flare network.
• Block Bonez has a trait store launching this year where people can buy traits. They are planning to have a fusion room where people can fuse the traits to their base layer and then claim rewards based on the rarity of the NFT that they create. And there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes.
• John has a strong belief that it is important for Flare builders to showcase what makes Flare unique, especially in terms of high integrity data and interoperability protocols.

Harish (Covalent):

• One highlight to them (& to us as well) was an interview between their CEO Ganesh Swami and Hugo.
• The primary focus for Covalent’s team was indexing and serving Flare and Songbird data, plus expanding from 30 to over 200 supported chains throughout the year.
• Positioning as the long-term data availability solution, they recently launched the Gold Rush toolkit, simplifying data consumption for developers building wallet interfaces or NFT galleries.

Markus (Bifrost Wallet)

• Bifrost Wallet achieved a significant milestone with a clean security audit by FYEO during the summer, instilling confidence in users.
• The release of claim bots on both Songbird and Flare, along with the integration of the first onramp, marked notable progress for Bifrost Wallet.
• The team worked on various fronts, including new delegation views and preparations for staking and FAssets, emphasizing their commitment to expanding staking opportunities to a broader audience.
• Markus also announced that Flare (FLR) staking is now available in Bifrost Wallet (v0.6.3).

What community means to you

All participants emphasized the pivotal role of community involvement in the success of Web3 projects, with education, user feedback, and collaboration needed to grow a vibrant ecosystem.

“It’s also really nice to have developers come to you and talk about what you’re doing and actually be genuine, enthusiastic and not just farming grants, because there are lots of chains and lots of people can go to any chain, but they come to us because we’re doing something that they literally cannot get elsewhere because the existing data protocols are fairly weak, fairly centralized. To all the new community members, the people that have built dashboards and ecosystem maps and all that kind of stuff, it’s been bloody amazing to watch that roll out and for this whole thing to grow organically to a large extent.” – Hugo from Flare

“Community is basically a fundamental part of your project or of your company. The more adoption your product or protocol gets, the more important the community will be.” – Marcel from Subsquid

“It’s all about encouraging people to get involved. And just from my personal experience within the community, I think over the last year we’ve really seen it diversify. The big things or the big reasons behind that was the change of distribution, where people can buy FLR and they can get a portion of the future FlareDrops. I think it’s done really great things to expand the community in 2023 and diversify it to be more than just a subset of the XRP community.” – John from Block Bonez

“Without the community, we could not have made it this far, obviously, and it’s really them that bring the quality into the app.” – Ferdi from SolidiFi

“The Sparkles team is from the community, as in, we founded Sparkles through the Flare Discord. That’s how we met all the team members.” – Cannon from Sparkles

“Covalent was a product of a hackathon back in 2018, and was bootstrapped by being an active part of many different other communities to start and learn some of the best practices.” – Harish from Covalent

“The team are quite impressed how quickly the community has learned over the last year and are understanding what is happening nowadays on a DEX, what’s arbitrage, what’s impermanent loss, all those quite complicated things around blockchain technology. So, yeah, I would mostly focus on that and give a shout out to Flintstone and Thanasimos and all the moderators and the team out there who are helping educate the community.” – Nik from Enosys

“A lot of people onboarded to Bifrost Wallet since they received the original FLR airdrop. But now, and especially as we get closer to FAssets, we also hope to onboard users from Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and the other chains. So we are very hopeful that that will increase our potential user base.” – Markus from Bifrost Wallet

Exciting trends in 2024:

The discussion focused on upcoming trends in the crypto market, with speakers sharing insights and enthusiasm for:

• Interoperability and removing walled gardens: Breaking down barriers between different blockchains and fostering collaboration.
• Account Abstraction: Easing blockchain interaction for everyday users and creating an omnichain user experience.
• Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization: Anticipation of increased tokenization of real-world assets and financial instruments.
• NFTs with utility and dynamic NFTs: Evolution of NFTs beyond art, exploring utility and dynamic functionalities.
• On-Chain Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Flare as a substrate for machine learning, with potential applications in collaborative AI models.

Recap of Flare 2023 & 2024 Roadmap

Memorable moments in 2023 included the Token Distribution Event, major exchange listings, and the positive impact of Flare Improvement Proposal One (FIP.01), plus governance progress and successful FLR burn negotiations for the community’s benefit.

FLR token highlights included reaching 435,000 wallets, 120,000 frequently active users, and 5 million token holders.

3 billion FLR or 10% of supply are staked, to 82 validators. In total, 76% of the entire FLR supply is wrapped, delegated, or staked, actively participating in the Flare ecosystem.

2024 will witness the launch of all planned protocols, expanding the functionality and utility of the Flare network. The key focus areas are:

• FTSO scaling to handle 1000 price and data series, with potentially one block updates.
• The Flare Data Connector (incorporating the State Connector and Web Connector), which allows smart contracts to access data from external sources to relay out to other chains, enabling us to serve the FTSO prices to other chains. This allows the community and the data providers to potentially earn from other chains.
• The FAssets system is already in private beta on Coston. It will be iterated based on the learnings on Coston and be launched first on Songbird before the mainnet.
• LayerCake opens up Flare to all the value within other smart contract systems. It can do a few other things, like being able to execute really complex transactions where you specify your transaction on one chain and it executes automatically on another chain. We’re very excited about it.

“I just asked our team to have a T-shirt made saying Flare 2024. Ship everything.”

We thank everyone here and everyone who takes part in Flare, for delegating your tokens, for providing data if you’re a data provider, and for all the other roles many of those data providers and other people around the Flare ecosystem will be doing as the technology ships.

Thanks also to everyone who joined the Anniversary Call and shared the incredible 2023 we had. As we look forward to the coming weeks and months, please stay in touch with us on Discord and X for updates.