One Year of Nodling

With the growth of DeFi and NFTs, 2021 was a great year for the crypto ecosystem. Uniswap took everyone by surprise when they created their retroactive airdrop at the end of 2020, which then kick-started the DeFi trend. New kinds of protocols are allowing people to tokenize and then leverage their assets, with the DeFi ecosystem ultimately imposing itself as a solid alternative to the traditional centralized finance ecosystem. But just as everybody was thinking 2021 would be the year of DeFi, NFTs suddenly became extremely trendy thanks to the introduction of various easy-to-use platforms and a new wave of adoption by the artist, gaming, and non-crypto native communities. We saw the introduction of specialized applications such as Foundation or Mirror, which provide new ways for content creators to monetize their work.

Polkadot in 2021

The Polkadot ecosystem by itself enjoyed a successful 2021, with the first parachains launched a few months ago, first on Kusama Network, and then on Polkadot. Thanks to supporters contributing their token holdings toward the projects they want to support, the parachain auctions — which are necessary for projects to become parachains — saw a record-breaking volume of millions of DOTs and KSMs. This is a great step toward interoperability between chains, which should lay the ground for a new wave of layer 1 and layer 2 apps taking advantage of various chains. Nodle in 2021

The team at Nodle is incredibly proud of the progress we made over the last year. We have experienced massive, unexpected growth in terms of protocol usage, community, and within our team. Nodle Cash Token 2021 started with our private token sale outside the US, in partnership with TokenSoft Inc. and Republic Crypto, which exceeded our expectations and put us in an excellent position to grow the team and network throughout the year. The support we received from the Nodle community was extremely humbling and encouraging, and we are grateful for all the support from our community.

In November 2021, we initiated a redenomination and removed one decimal from the Nodle Cash token, meaning that every balance is now displayed with one more zero (i.e., all balances were effectively multiplied by 10). This was met with strong support from our community and made the token more accessible and attractive to newcomers and users alike of the Nodle Cash app on mobile. We have established strong relationships with various exchange partners and are in the process of finalizing audits to be ready for listing. The ultimate timing of our listing remains with the third-party exchanges, and we will keep the community updated as things unfold.

Team

We used the past year to grow our team from just a dozen to almost 50 today. We have been fortunate enough to build a team of extremely talented and passionate people who were key to making this year as successful as it was for the Nodle Network. We hired for multiple roles such as community managers, developers, engineers, product managers, business developers, and many more. If you would like to participate in building the future of IoT (Internet of Things) and Blockchain, you should check out our career page, as we are currently hiring for more positions.

Community

Our community team has been hard at work growing our community and ambassador network. We were able to multiply the size of our community threefold, such that we are now reaching 20.7K members on Telegram, 40K followers on Twitter, 5.4K members on Discord, and 15 additional regional communities to add to our international community of over 156 countries — and counting! All this growth would not have been possible without the unconditional support from our team of more than 22 ambassadors, which we are excited to work with every day.

We were able to get closer and better listen to our community thanks to more than a dozen local events including Mainnet 2021, AMAs, online conferences, and sponsored one of the most highly regarded podcasts, Unchained and Unconfirmed, hosted by Laura Shin. Our ambassadors in India organized the first Nodle meetup, and our team flew to various cities to meet a number of you in Berlin, Lisbon, New York City, and Miami.

Engineering and Product

Our engineering team was joined by a team of product experts and grew from a total of 4 people to now 17 team members. We hired multiple talents for our SDK, mobile application, big data infrastructure, front ends, chain, and more. We were able to better organize ourselves, implement new processes to increase quality, improve reliability, and deliver a higher level of performance across all the Nodle infrastructure and stack.

SDK

Our engineering, product, and business development teams worked together to improve the Nodle SDK deployed by application partners. We were able to build a streamlined onboarding experience for our partners, release long-awaited support for iOS, and build an internal beta of the SDK that supports Linux platforms such as routers and Raspberry Pi computers.

These year-long efforts led us to sign deployment agreements with 14 new application partners, including global e-Sports streaming network ESTV, and we hope to multiply that number next year. Each partner embedding the SDK in their applications in place of traditional advertising SDKs brings thousands if not millions of nodes to the Nodle Network, which dramatically improves its performances and coverage.

Network

A tremendous amount of work went into making the network and big data infrastructure of Nodle more reliable. We operated a full architecture change internally in order to reach better stability in terms of network service and rewards stability. We built a series of internal tools to reach better visibility within the network so we can understand and detect issues before they happen. Today, the Nodle network is composed of 5 million daily active smartphones, with 30 million IoT devices moving approximately 100 GB of data across 100+ countries on a daily basis. An average of 24 million Bluetooth packets per hour were sent during the month of November 2021 alone.

We also started building a new set of public dashboards to let users interact with the network, subscribe to data streams for devices they operate, and manage SDKs.

Nodle Cash Application

Nodle Cash application is one of the key interfaces people use to interact with the network today and is thus a crucial part of our stack. Our release of Nodle Cash V3 in November 2021 brought a massive redesign of the application to make it more clear and easier to use. We dramatically improved its stability, improved its integration with the Nodle Chain, and, most importantly, changed the UI paradigm to a more location- and device-centric user experience. The waves of support these changes were met with by our community were extremely encouraging for our team, helping us reach over 400K installations of the application and double our number of Daily Active Users — and further improving the network’s reliability and coverage.

Nodle Chain

Among the many improvements we made to the Nodle Chain itself were partnering with Zondax to develop a Ledger Wallet application to support the Nodle Chain, which is currently under review by Ledger. We also created a Nodle-specific block explorer that provides better visibility within the Nodle Chain itself. In order to better decentralize and secure the network, we kick-started an effort to reach out to third parties such as Blockchain.com, Audit.one, Snowball, and PrestigeIT to become the first community-run Nodle Chain validators. Those nodes would be in charge of processing transactions and blocks on the chain. We already have a list of 30 to 50 candidate nodes and should launch some testing efforts in 2022.

Because security and safety are so critical, we hired Halborn to audit the Nodle Chain and later other components of the network. Halborn has a proven track record when it comes to auditing Substrate-based chains, and also testing the security of IoT devices or networks, which makes them an excellent fit for Nodle.

Recently, we announced our Nodle Crowdloan in order to participate in the second batch of Polkadot parachain auctions. Within the past two weeks, the crowdloan received over 450K DOTs of support (over $14M at the time of this writing) from 1,946 contributors. We partnered with Parallel Finance and BiFrost to both help users retain liquidity for the DOTs they use to support a project and provide different options to help support the Nodle crowdloan. The goal of participating in this crowdloan auction is to enable more security for the Nodle Network by adding the Polkadot network of validators and by enabling better interoperability of our chain and services with other chains and ecosystems.

Website and Public Pages

A few months ago, we introduced a full redesign of the Nodle website to make it more understandable and easier to navigate, and to better reflect the work of our team and company. We also rolled out a dedicated status page to help provide transparency to the various services we provide and are gradually adding new pages and content as we continue these efforts.

Last Words, and Getting Ready for 2022

While 2021 was a great year for Nodle, we anticipate making even more progress, significant improvements, and achieving continued growth in 2022. While we will communicate on our public roadmap in the near future, we are already prepared to bring more decentralization to the network, get even closer to our community, and roll out various improvements to existing tools and products.

2022 will also see the full deployment of Nodle’s first commercial applications running on the network and chain. With various international partners, the first application will be in the domain of the location of assets, which was tested in previous years for industrial and logistic applications.