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Hedera 2022 Community Update
Michella Cerone
Jan 24, 2023
by Michella Cerone
Community Development

As we head into a promising 2023 with lots of momentum, the future is bright for the builders and enthusiasts of Hedera.

2022 was an eventful year for Hbarbarians, and it’s time to mark the New Year as a checkpoint to look back on achievements made by the Hedera team, as well as the application developers and retail community, and gain perspective on how far we’ve come this past year.

This article showcases an overview of the tremendous growth in retail usage, developer adoption, ecosystem support, and product milestones in 2022 on the open-source, public Hedera network.

Community

We have an incredible and innovative community to celebrate! 2022 was a year of community growth and abundance. The community has partaken in a tremendous number of Twitter spaces, in-person meetups, hackathons, workshops, and events. Developer community contributions to the open-source ecosystem and codebase via Hedera Improvement Proposals (HIPs) rose significantly and the amount of projects launched by the developer community has been jaw-dropping. Let’s take a closer look at the various facets of community growth in more detail, and start by highlighting community social channels:

Twitter +47% going from 177,881 to 261,228 followers

YouTube +24% from 28,600 to 35,400 subscribers

LinkedIn +66% from 18,893 to 31,294 followers

Major community-focused initiatives included:

Twitter Spaces have been a new endeavor for Hedera in 2022, enabling discussion around various topics, such as NFTs, DeFi, and web3. Spaces have showcased projects in the Hedera ecosystem and will continue to run throughout 2023.

We’re excited to release a full revamp of the Hedera Discord. The improved Discord will now cater to the broader Hedera community of retail users and associated ecosystems; it will continue to support and foster a wide range of channels specific to developer support, feedback, and notification of developer-focused announcements. Hedera welcomes everyone to join the new Discord and make connections with the team and other community members. Click this link to join!

Network Updates

The first major network update of 2022 was the announcement that the Hedera Governing Council would purchase the IP to the Hashgraph consensus algorithm with a commitment to open-sourcing the codebase under Apache 2.0 license. This decision was made with the goal of incentivizing community participation. The Hedera roadmap was also made public in 2022. You can find the open-sourced codebase here. In addition, the Hedera Governing Council has elected four new directors:

  1. Tasker Generes, Vice President of Vision and Innovation, ServiceNow - term ending December 31, 2023

  2. Monique Morrow, Sr. Distinguished Architect of Emerging Technologies, Syniverse Technologies - term ending December 31, 2023

  3. Shyam Nagarajan, Executive Partner, Web3.0 and Sustainability, IBM Consulting - term ending December 31, 2023

  4. Ian Putter, Head Blockchain Center of Excellence, Standard Bank Group - term ending December 31, 2023


Now let’s dive into some more technical network updates:

Staking:

In 2022, native staking went live on Hedera, and staking phases I, II, and III were achieved. This means that users can now stake their $HBAR to a node of their choice via supporting wallets and exchanges and earn rewards for doing so.

At the end of 2022, 31.3 billion HBAR was staked to the network!

EVM Compatibility:

In 2022, Hedera took a bet on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and started making contributions to the Hyperledger Besu Project. The reason behind striving for EVM equivalence is simple: many existing web3 applications are seamlessly integrated with EVM chains, therefore becoming equivalent with the most popular virtual machine will incentivize existing dapps to integrate and help grow the Hedera ecosystem and community. Also, research shows that the EVM is the default starting point for new web3 developers.

The first feature launched to support EVM compatibility was smart contracts which are native to the Ethereum ecosystem. Hedera now is compatible with solidity-compiled smart contracts and has seen their implementation succeed. Smart contracts onboarded the first DeFi applications to the network which has ramped up significant TVL. (Stader Labs: 90m, Saucer Swap: 30m, and Heliswap: 6m ).

Swirlds Labs has shipped the open-source JSON-RPC relay which allows developers to interact with Hedera using standard Ethereum tooling.

To complement this feature, Hashio was launched, which is a hosted service that provides a JSON-RPC API interface, on top of Hedera’s native API transactions, that offers a familiar Ethereum-like API. Hashio is still in Beta.

In 2022, Hedera began to support a variety of Ethereum-native developer tooling including hardhat, truffle, web3.js, and ether.js development frameworks.

HIPs:

The Hedera Improvement Proposals process ran smoothly throughout 2022. 17 HIPS have been executed, five of which were community driven including the following:

HashScan Explorer:

HashScan quickly became the most popular explorer of the Hedera network, launched in 2022 by Swirlds Labs. This explorer allows users to track accounts, transactions, and tokens as well as mirror nodes, consensus nodes, topics, and contracts. With HashScan, users can also track and calculate an estimate of their staking rewards.

Use Cases:

Hundreds of projects launched on the Hedera network in 2022, leading to increased developer activity and retail transactions. As the list of use cases is very long and we don’t want to exclude anyone, please make sure to check out all the web3 use cases here and all of the enterprise applications here.

Metrics

The Hedera mainnet has seen more activity in the year 2022 than any previous year. Let’s dive into the metrics:

Transactions:

  • We closed off the year with a total of 530M transactions.

  • The average TPS of the networks was 18.98, competitive with some of the leading chains in the industry.


  • The non-fungible token transfers have generally been trending upwards as well as the fungible token transfers:



  • We witnessed the smart contract activity be relatively steady throughout the year with spikes during the release of new applications and protocols:


Accounts

  • 769.7K accounts were created in 2022 - 276.6K of which are active compared to the total 1,600,026 existing accounts.


  • The number of builder accounts on the network increased steadily month over month, with exponential growth in the latter half of the year.


  • The number of commits coming from the community relative to the core team has also been on an uptrend throughout 2022:


Events

The Hedera team attended, was honored at, and sponsored a huge variety of events throughout the year 2022. Below is a list of the highlights:

January:

February:

March

  • March 28-31: NFT LA 2022

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

University Meetups 

In 2022, Hedera hosted a variety of meetups and workshops at Universities including Columbia University, Northeastern University, Northeastern University, Arizona State University, Georgetown University, Tufts University, University of Washington, Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, California State University Long Beach, University of Glasgow, University of Waterloo, ESCE International Business School, University College London, Cal State San Marcos

Awards

In 2022, Hedera and/or its core contributors have received awards:

HBAR Foundation Grants:

The following information has been pulled from a blog published by Elaine Song at the HBAR foundation - 2022: a Year in Review. Make sure to check it out for all the details and updates in 2022 on the foundation’s side.

Since the foundation launched its grant applications, they have received almost 1300 submissions. This is more than 100 applications per month, which is a healthy signal for ecosystem development and developer interest.

40% of applicants self-selected as Metaverse, 29% as Crypto Economy, 7% as Sustainable Impact, and 5% as Fintech and Payments. The remaining 19% applied without selecting a specific fund category. That 69% of applications fell into the crypto economy and metaverse fund categories indicate a hunger for these use cases within the Hedera ecosystem.

Grants Given

This year, the Foundation has given 195 grants. The Metaverse and Crypto Economy funds were the most prolific, accounting for 37% and 28% of grants given, respectively. The size of grants from these funds also varied most - with a higher percentage of grants for projects with smaller scopes coming to market faster.

To date, 89 projects are live on mainnet - 45% of all grantee projects. This is remarkably fast, given that the majority of grants were committed this year. This again speaks to the quality of projects and commitment by those teams to developing and deploying on Hedera.

Conclusion

All in all, 2022 has introduced significant activity and action potential to the Hedera network. As we enter the new year in full force, the teams at Hedera, Swirlds Labs, and the HBAR Foundation are hard at work to promote growth on our beloved network.

Thank you for being a part of the journey, we look forward to more adventures with you by our side!

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