It’s a huge understatement to say that 2021 has been an eventful year for Occam.fi. It’s easy to forget that we only launched in mid-April, just over 8 months ago, and we haven’t even celebrated our first birthday yet!
Despite that, as the calendar year draws to an end, it’s a great time to recap on our achievements so far this year, and check out what’s ahead for 2022!
The Launch of Occam.fi
Occam.fi launched in March 2021, making our debut through our own launchpad using the $OCC native token. This proof of utility for the OccamRazer launchpad proved that our components were functioning correctly, and after releasing our public audit results, we started holding regular public IDOs.
In these early days of our growth, we wanted to prove that we were here building for the Cardano ecosystem, despite existing before smart contracts were live on the Cardano mainnet. As a result, we launched the Occam.fi Ethereum <> Cardano bi-directional bridge, letting any user swap our $OCC ERC-20 tokens for counterpart $OCC Cardano Native Tokens (CNTs). Throughout the rest of 2021, we introduced functionality which made it possible to generate rewards for our decentralized exchange (DEX) token simply by holding $OCC-CNT.
Occam’s launch was a huge success in many ways, but it also taught us that we needed to scale up our infrastructure to host the huge number of projects looking to build for the Cardano ecosystem. So, that’s what we did!
IDO Recap OccamRazer
Since we launched the first IDO through OccamRazer for our $OCC token on April the 14th, we’ve been on fire bringing you project after project for the Cardano ecosystem.
Now, at the end of 2021, we’ve launched 22 IDOs on OccamRazer, the most projects of any Cardano-based launchpad to date. Any IDO that reaches its softcap is a success, but we’re even more delighted to share that the overwhelming majority of our IDOs have blasted past this mark and hit their hardcap in just a few hours.
Among so many great projects, it’s hard to pick out favourites, but the community chose through total registrations. As we look back on our first year, we can give a huge congratulations to Ardana, the first and only project to date to attract over 2,000 registrations, and to Cornucopias, following closely behind with almost 1,800 registered users! Cornucopias also took top spot for highest number of participants at 770, with GOGOCoin also achieving a huge 747 participants — over half of those who registered for their IDO got to participate.
Our plans for the new year include an increased focus on making our due diligence process transparent for our users. We’ve recently introduced due diligence reports to help our community make informed decisions about IDO participation, and these are going to be produced for every project going forward. We’re also looking for ways to make the IDO process cheaper and more seamless for our users, and we will discuss that in more detail below!
Occelerator
The Occelerator, or ‘Occam Accelerator’, is an incubator program for early-stage projects launching on Cardano. When we launched the Occelerator, our goal was clear — to accelerate the growth of the Cardano DeFi ecosystem through Occam.fi.
To date, we’ve launched 5 Occelerator partners, making up some of our hottest and most successful projects to launch through OccamRazer. We’re proud to say that most of these projects have already gone on to build out successful components, from DeFire’s early MVP for their DEX Router, THEOS’ NFT Odyssey Pools, to Cardwallet’s fully functional wallet for iOS and Android. We’re also looking forward to working closely with the project teams in the future to build out more components for the Cardano ecosystem.
Occelerator will grow in 2022. We’re making more funding available, and we’re looking for more teams to work with. If you’re a developer or early-stage entrepreneur looking to accelerate your development efforts, apply for Occelerator incubation for 2022 now!
Investment by IOHK & EMURGO, and the Cardano Summit
Next, let’s look at news that no one in the Cardano ecosystem could ignore. In July, we became the first launchpad to receive an investment from the cFund, an official venture capital fund for Cardano developed and managed by Cardano founding entity IOHK.
We also announced that EMURGO, another one of three founding Cardano entities, had also placed their trust in our solutions through a strategic investment. This news solidified our position as Cardano ecosystem builders, and gave confidence to our community that we are here building for Cardano.
Since this, we’ve worked closely with IOHK and EMURGO for development advice, and we’ve been keeping the Cardano community informed of our progress regularly through appearances on Cardano360.
But the most important event on our Cardano calendar this year has undoubtedly been our presence at the Cardano Summit 2021, where we had a physical presence in the official Wyoming and London hubs, and also representatives at the community-led events in Oslo, Tbilisi, and Tokyo.
During the event, we took part in discussions about what it means to be a cFund recipient, and what the process of building on Cardano looks like. We also held several livestreams from Westminster, London, where we introduced new partners and took a sneak peak at our work with Swiss digital asset app SwissBorg. You can watch our Summit coverage here, get a recap of the Summit here, and watch us talk about building decentralized ecosystems here!
OccamX, OCX and ADA staking pools
Naturally, we also released details of the OccamX decentralized exchange (DEX) this year, which will be one of our biggest launches to date and a major landmark in our offering for the Cardano ecosystem.
The OccamX DEX will be a purpose-built Cardano DEX, and will first launch it’s MVP on the Milkomeda blockchain developed by dcSpark. Shortly after, we will go live on the Cardano mainnet through our tailor-made Plutus smart contracts, and we will provide a fully fledged trading and liquidity environment for CNTs.
To support our DEX, we created the $OCX token, used to reduce fees for token holders and provide liquidity to trading pairs on the DEX. The distribution phase for OCX is now underway, and anyone staking $OCC, providing liquidity to $OCC on Uniswap, holding $OCC-ADA, or delegating ADA to our Cardano stakepool is eligible for $OCX rewards. Find more information on that here.
Also, don’t forget to follow OccamX on Twitter and check out our roadmap here!
Introduction of OIPs and Stake-Based Voting
One of our biggest challenges this year has been taking our community’s feedback and putting it into action in a transparent and fair manner. This led us to explore stake-based voting mechanisms, and the creation of the Occam Improvement Proposals, or ‘OIPs’. We introduced these features in October, and you can read more about them here.
OIPs can be created by any member of the community, and voted on by anyone else in the Occam Forum. We have a detailed explanation of our OIP process here. Once OIPs reach a quorum of votes, they move to stake-based voting, where those with $OCC stake can vote to pass or reject proposals.
This means that every user and token holder has a say in how Occam evolves, and we want you to participate! Join the Occam Forums to get started here.
Our Partners
Finally, 2021 has been a year of partnerships! This year we’ve signed partnerships with 11 entities, including co-development initiatives and major crypto app listings. Our biggest partnerships have included:
- SwissBorg — We listed $OCC on SwissBorg and will be working with them to offer access to OccamRazer IDOs,
- Everscale — We recently announced that we will work with Everscale for cross-chain interoperability with Cardano,
- Milkomeda — Built by dcSpark, Milkomeda will host the OccamX DEX on their layer-2 solution before we launch fully for Cardano,
- COTI and COTI’s Stablecoin — We will integrate COTI’s payment gateway and stablecoin solution into the OccamX DEX,
- MELD — MELD will provide us access to deep liquidity pools on the OccamX DEX,
- CardWallet — CardWallet will eventually be our go-to web3.0 wallet solution for the Cardano DeFi ecosystem!
Looking ahead to 2022
So, 2022 is just around the corner, and for some of our community, it’s here already! As we move into 2022, our key focus remains on delivering the OccamX DEX, firstly on Milkomeda, and then on the Cardano mainnet.
We will continue to bring you quality IDO projects, implement your feedback through OIPs, and make the Occelerator program more significant than ever before. Remember, the next voting round for OIPs is on the 15th of January, so don’t forget to vote through Snapshot.
We’re also going to be growing the team, and looking for new ways to keep you updated going forward.
Happy New Year Occamnauts!
