Closing 2023 with a bang: Huge events and major ZetaChain buzz in November-December

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TL;DR November and December were huge months that saw ZetaChain speak at major events worldwide, sign on industry-leading partners like SushiSwap, double down on community engagement and much, much more.

ZetaChain’s mission is to serve as a platform for universal access, simplicity, and utility across any blockchain. We nearly reached the end of the year, but activities showed no signs of slowing. In fact, November and December were both huge months for ZetaChain with a number of marquee partnerships and strong involvement at prominent global, Web3 events. Let’s get into the details!

Partnerships

We announced a major partnership with Sushi, which will see the DEX integrate ZetaChain to enable native BTC. That means Sushi’s Omnichain DEX on ZetaChain will let you swap Bitcoin and any other asset in a single step without wrapping or bridging.

“Sushi’s partnership with ZetaChain represents a significant advancement for DeFi. The capability to swap Bitcoin natively, eliminating the need for wrapping or bridging, is a game-changer for the industry”, said Sushi head chef Jared Gray.

We’re excited to bring capabilities we’ve enabled for Sushi to other Web3 projects, and connect Bitcoin to the broader Web3 ecosystem.

You can read all about the partnership in our announcement here or in the related media coverage that followed.

Other significant partnerships in November and December included:

• We partnered with Socialfi platform Karat DAO to expand support to ZetaChain, which will soon include its Karat.club social network
• Web3 email service Dmail added support for ZetaChain, giving our community a pathway to their own universal identity with ZetaChain
• We also inked a deal that will see leading blockchain infrastructure and services provider Figment support participation in the ZetaChain network by enabling staking and validator services.
• We partnered with Protofire to bring a Gnosis Safe-forked wallet to ZetaChain that can manage native assets on any blockchain
• Pyth Network became the first major oracle partner to commit to ZetaChain, bringing access to more than 350 low-latency price feeds to developers building with our omnichain smart contracts
• We teamed up with StackUp to introduce our first learn-to-earn campaign for developers building Omnichain dApps on ZetaChain
• Our push to add more wallets and easy onboarding gained another major partner as Particle Network introduced support for social logins and account abstraction on ZetaChain
• Coin98, a leading wallet that is particularly popular in Southeast Asia, added support for ZetaChain

Ecosystem

We made an important announcement about the future of Zeta Points, which will no longer be available to earn on ZetaLabs as we prepare to transition into our next phase. Stay tuned for an important update which will be made in the next few weeks.

While ZETA Points are no longer available to earn, all points already earned will remain unchanged and viewable on the ZetaLabs leaderboard page.

• You can find full details in the announcement post here

You’ll recall that we surpassed 150 dapps in October and, in response, we released our first ecosystem map in November.

We are delighted to make this first comprehensive view of the ZetaChain ecosystem public as we continue down the road to mainnet and see increasing interest in deploying on ZetaChain for access to all blockchains, including non-smart contract chains including Bitcoin.

You can expect regular updates on the map and broad health of the ZetaChain ecosystem.

In the ecosystem itself, key highlights from November included:

Eddy Finance giving a sneak peek of next gen liquidity pools — using an Omnichain Smart Contract, Eddy will support native deposits of ETH, BTC, and MATIC in one single pool

Crypto media outlet Four Pillars released an in-depth technical report on the ZetaChain ecosystem and broader cross-chain interoperability landscape.

Events

We were a major presence at ETHGlobal, a leading Web3 native event in the ETHGlobal series.

Istanbul

We began our participation there with Pragma, the precursor to ETHGlobal IST featuring key Web3 founders, where ZetaChain core contributor Brandon Truong took part in a panel on interoperability with the founders of Dfinity and Polyhedra Network.

Earlier, Brandon was part of our “Unlock the Chain” panel series at GrowthCon. The session covered Bitcoin, cross-chain payments, account abstraction and more with representatives from Avalanche, Polygon, Celo and Manta Network.

India

We were also a major part of ETHIndia, ETHGlobal’s event in Bangalore, as part of the broader Indian Blockchain Week:

• Things kicked off at FILBangalore where ZetaChain DevX Contributor Denis Fadeev kicked off a keynote on the state of blockchain interoperability
• We held a technical workshop on developing Omnichain Smart Contracts, capable of natively accessing all blockchains — even Bitcoin network
• At FILBangalore, we shared the stage with Aptos Network and Protocol Labs, and stressed the need for a better interoperability standard for DeFi applications
• Our booths for the official India Blockchain Week conference, Polygon Connect and Build for Web3 event were absolutely rammed

• We wrapped up our efforts with a panel on interoperability with Analog, LayerZero, LiFi, and Router Protocol at StationX’s Above & Beyond event

As sponsors of the accompanying hackathon event, we picked two teams that had used ZetaChain to develop innovative solutions to help bring Bitcoin into the wider Web3 ecosystem

• Omnichain Ordinal Inscriber won the award for Best contract for Bitcoin
• Beneath Protocol won the award for best use of Cross-Chain Messaging

Full details of our India Blockchain Week activities can be found here

Taipei

We took part in Taipei Blockchain Week. Our community contributor Jonathan Covey gave a ZetaChain presentation at The Curve Summit:

Unblocks The Chains and more

In addition to participating in major industry events, we also held a notable meetup of our own.

We held our Unblock The Chains meetup with a focus on ZetaChain the L1 blockchain, and the boundless possibilities opening to connect chains from Ethereum to Bitcoin.

The event saw more than 100 friends from companies including Uniswap, OKX and others.

Earlier in November, we were part of a DeFi and Bitcoin panel at House of Web3 which included representatives from 0xLabs, Wrapped, Sky9 and LENX. We’re excited to sponsor and be a part of more House of Web3 events following the success of the meetup!

Community

We held the first of our AMA panels on X focused on key Web3 topics — starting with Defi.

The “Remembering DeFi Summer: Past, Present, and Future” session featured panelists from SushiSwap, Eddy Finance, Particle Network and ZetaChain. If you missed it live, you can catch the alpha and insights here: https://twitter.com/zetablockchain/status/1737638675822047708

Last month, we doubled down on community outreach with:

• An AMA with Bitget Wallet to discuss the Task2Get campaign for rewards
• Our first AMA on X for the Chinese community
• The launch of our Korean community and its first AMA on X
• Our lead African ambassador held an AMA with Bitget Wallet Nigeria
• Our first AMA on X for the Vietnamese community
• Another notable community event saw our second India event held in the beautiful state of Kerela with more 90 crypto enthusiasts discussing and learning how to solve the problem of interoperability

We announced our marketing bounty application which allows community members to apply to host events both offline and online — you can find full details here

Engaged community members can also win prizes with our Zeta Sound Bites Contest, which runs until 5 January — full details can be found here

To show our commitment to increasing community events, we announced plans for meetups across North America, Europe and Asia in the coming months

We launched an Office Hours AMA, which will serve to advise on tech and also provide the dev community an environment to share insights — you can expect to see these every month

Denis Fadeev, Contributor to DevX at ZetaChain, joined Bitcoin Tech Talk to discuss innovation happening in Bitcoin and how ZetaChain is enabling developers to bring Bitcoin into the Web3 ecosystem.

About ZetaChain

ZetaChain is the world’s first and only decentralized EVM-compatible L1 blockchain with built-in cross-chain interoperability, connecting all blockchains, even non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. With ZetaChain’s complete Omnichain toolkit, developers can build true omnichain dApps from a single point of logic, and users can access all of their assets, data, and liquidity in a single place, securely.

Follow ZetaChain on Twitter @zetablockchain and join the conversation on Discord and Telegram. Reach out to partnerships@zetachain.com if you’re building on top of ZetaChain.

Any projects mentioned are 3rd party, not ZetaChain.