Welcome to the Darwinia Retrospective! Thank you to all the developers, researchers, contributors, node operators, community members, and more who have helped sustain the growth of Darwinia Network in 2021.
Darwinia 2021 Stats Snapshot
Opening Quotes by Darwinia Co-founders
2021 was a fruitful year. Darwinia has made great progress and has gained more insights and experience in bridge technical research. We look forward to seeing new milestones in the new year.
Alex Chien
With the maturity of the bridge message network, DVM, and infrastructure, in the next year, we will see more and more excellent community applications, looking forward to the explosion of the Darwinia ecosystem.
Denny Wang
Darwinia, a Web3.0 Metaverse builder in 2021
Darwinia Network is the cross-chain bridge hub of the Web 3.0 Metaverse. The application areas of Darwinia Network include DeFi, cross-chain NFT trading, GameFi, etc. Darwinia team also developed the Metaverse game Evolution Land.
The future of Web3 is all about interoperability and Darwinia has been contributing to the compatibility and interoperability of the Metaverse since 2018!
Designed from scratch to be a token router and bridge-hub of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Darwinia is also one of the friends of Polkadot and was mentioned in the light paper.
Darwinia 2021 Milestones
Darwinia and Polkadot
Selected to join Polkadot Decoded 2021
After several rounds of community votes and dry runs, Darwinia was the only project selected to present a cross-chain bridge tag speech at this year’s Polkadot Decoded 2021.
Darwinia is running for the Polkadot and Kusama parachain auctions
To empower more ecosystem projects with cross-chain bridge infrastructure support, Darwinia is bidding for Polkadot and Kusama parachain slots so that ecosystem projects won’t have to reinvent the wheel and build their own bridges to every chain, but instead focus on building their customized applications.
Development of Momentum
- Darwinia Mainnet has been live for a year
- Solo chain and Polkadot/Kusama Parachains
○ Darwinia and Crab are bidding parachains from Polkadot and Kusama
○ Two testnets Pangolin and Pangoro, one canary network Crab
○ Around 25 on-chain runtime upgrades in 2021
- Darwinia Substrate-to-Substrate bridge
○ Darwinia <> Crab bridge are already online
○ Document and SDK will be opened to other Substrate chains that want to bridge with Darwinia
- The layered design of bridge network: truth layer, message layer, and application layer
○ Each Bridge Instance consists of four components (Source::Truth, Source: Message, Target: Message, Target: Truth)
○ There are two implementations of the message layer, one is a message pallet for the Substrate to substrate chains, and another one is message solidity for EVM to EVM chains
○ Currently truth layer components, including completed and in-progress:
- Grandpa finality pallet for substrate standalone chains, with two implementations:[Substrate_Pallet, EVM_Solidity]
- Legacy eth1 POW-optimize light client pallet(Used by Ethereum bridge v1)
- BSC finality pallet
- Parachain Grandpa finality pallet for parachain (via relay chain), with two implementations: [Substrate_Pallet, EVM_Solidity]. Working in progress, expected to complete in 2022 Q1
- Eth2 consensus finality for Eth2 execution layer(via Eth2 consensus layer) expected to complete in 2022 Q2
○ Complete the verification of the truth layer of the BSC light client, and support the verification of the storage proof, and support the verification of the BSC storage proof in the DVM（Darwinia Virtual Machine)
- Bridge relayer economic system
○ Relayer fee market design, engineering, and integration
○ Running smoothly in Darwinia <> Crab Bridge
- Bridge relayer client: Bridger
○ Frame and extensible support of bridge tasks
○ Replace scan services with indexing solutions such as The Graph and Subquery
- Darwinia Virtual Machine
○ More integrations with Subscan and other explorers(such as https://crab.subview.xyz/)
○ EVM infrastructure compatible support and integrations. (such as Metamask, Remix, etc)
○ DVM debug and trace solution and support
○ Interoperation solution between Substrate runtime pallet and DVM smart contract, using precompile contracts
○ Smart contracts specify solutions for ecosystem explorers
- Security enhancements and principals
○ Introduce message filter for target chain in the message protocol
○ The application layer should be aware of the security assumptions of the bridge layer and should introduce redundant security designs according to its own requirements
○ Redundant designs like a guard system should be implemented in the application layer instead of the bridge network
○ Decentralize, open-source, peer review, and code audit
○ Safety exploration and solutions
Growing and breaking new ground with our ecosystem partners
Glad to support above star projects to expand their asset multi-chain circulation with Darwinia Ethereum cross-chain bridge and help integrate more quality non-parachain assets into their DeFi applications with Darwinia Substrate-to-Substrate bridge.
Cross-chain token application: Wormhole
- Wormhole V2.0 released: New UX Design and extensible bridge apps support.
- Finalize Wormhole mapping token metadata standards for ERC20 and ERC721.
- Wormhole-backed important changes used blockchain indexers The Graph and Subquery to replace wormhole-backend services which make the backend services totally decentralized and open-source, anyone with wormhole UI and these indexers can deploy an interface to interact with Wormhole.
- Added fee market to the Substrate-to-Substrate bridge.
- Wormhole support cross transfer RING between Darwinia and Crab network.
- Wormhole governance uses DAO to manage proposals.
○ Wormhole DAO command-line interface.
○ Use wormhole guard to enhancement security.
Flagship Metaverse application: Evolution Land
Overview
Evolution Land 2021 Stats Snapshot
Evolution Land has been listed top in various rankings including Top 5 NFT games, Top NFT Game with the highest volume, etc.
6 new pillar features and gameplays
- Two new continents Dawning and Eden launched on Heco and Polygon, BSC continent coming in 2022. 200+ NFT lands have been sold in the presale of the Eden continent for 330,000 USDC.
- Evolution Land new DeFi Farm launch
- Evolution Land new GameFi — Furnace
To empower their apostle ability, players could forge equipment with resources and materials in the upcoming Equipment and Profession System.
- Evolution Land DAO
Evolution Land Metaverse
Evolution Land has built partnerships with star games guilds including YGG, BGG, ZGG, DFG, etc.
Star projects and influencers announced to join the Evolution Land Metaverse.
Evolution Land cooperations
Evolution Land community growth
We have seen explosive growth of the Evolution Land community.
Evolution Land Roadmap 2022
The global voice of Darwinia DAO community
DAO takes shape
16 democracy proposals on Crab
44 council motions on Darwinia
Active social activity
We have seen explosive Darwinia ecosystem community expansion on Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and Discord.
New Metaverse Experience Officer Program
Darwinia upgraded the previous Ambassador program into Metaverse Experience Officer program in 2021.
MEOs generated 100+ new articles every month which were translated into Russian, Indonesian, Hindi, Korean, and other languages and posted on social media.
MEOs also generated 50+ videos per month, averagely over 5 minutes, and ranging wide contents including Darwinia intro, Darwinia Crowdloan, Evolution Land, game tutorials, etc.
Featured events and campaigns
- Evolution Land Metaverse new continent launch
On 2nd, September, Evolution Land had a grand new Polygon continent launch release and the event was mentioned by Bloomberg. The event flow was over 40,000+ involvement on Twitch.
- How to build the Web3.0 Metaverse Event
On 23rd, November, Darwinia had a Metaverse topic panel event with our friends in Metaverse including Decentraland, My DeFi Pet, Anons NFT, Torum.
- Darwinia community daily Q&A
The community Q&A lasted for 11 weeks, including discussions on the development of the Metaverse, Darwinia’s progress, how to play the Evolution Land, etc. More than 3,000 community members have participated.
- Darwinia Metaverse Meme Contest
We had Darwinia Metaverse Meme Contest with over 120+ work created
Looking forward 2022
2018–2022, 2022 would be the fifth year since Darwinia has been building on Substrate with Polkadot.
In 2022, we will continue to grow with the mission of building the Web3.0 Metaverse.
About Darwinia Network
Darwinia Network is a decentralized cross-chain bridge network building on Substrate, which is the “cross-chain bridge hub” of the Web 3.0 Metaverse. It provides a safe and general bridging solution, connects to Polkadot, Ethereum, TRON, and other heterogeneous chains by cross-chain transfer of assets and remote chain calls.
Darwinia Network has gained high reputation and recognition along the way to build the decentralized cross-chain bridge protocol. In 2020, Darwinia was written in Polkadot light-paper as one of the friends of Polkadot and Substrate. And Darwinia was selected to join Substrate Builder Program and Web3.0 Bootcamp, and for the outstanding work in Substrate Builder Program, Darwinia Network was officially awarded the Level 2 badge by Parity. The products and tools developed by Darwinia have been rewarded three W3F Grants.
Darwinia has been contributing to the compatibility and interoperability of the Metaverse.
The application areas of Darwinia Network include DeFi, cross-chain NFT trading, games, etc. Darwinia also develops the Metaverse game Evolution Land.
