Hello to the Secret community!
2021 was an outstanding year of growth for Secret: powerful mainnet upgrades; record highs in active users, adoption, market capitalization, and TVL; substantial global community expansion; dozens of new partners and applications.
But more’s about to come. For Q1 2022, we are thrilled to present Shockwave: a vision for Secret’s global growth that will solidify our network as a critical pillar of Web3.
2021: The year Secret Network soared
Our goal has always been building Secret Network into the privacy hub of Web3. And after this year, we’ve come closer than ever.
Being the only blockchain with private smart contracts live on mainnet for over a year, we became the go-to for building privacy-preserving apps. And Q4 saw our biggest upgrade yet: Supernova—integrating IBC and bringing about massive network improvements and optimizations.
We also saw a dramatic increase in users, with over $1 billion in trading volume across Secret DeFi apps. Our online community grew to represent over 25 languages, with over 8,000 Secret Agents registering as the core of our community.
In short: what began as a couple of whitepapers at MIT over six years ago is now a thriving decentralized ecosystem of builders, validators, investors, and passionate privacy advocates.
Shockwave: Our next stage of growth
With privacy being more essential than ever for the global adoption of Web3, we’re taking Secret Network’s expansion to the next level.
Like in space, our 2021 Supernova will drive an expanding Shockwave through the cosmos and trigger the formation of new stars in our ecosystem.
Shockwave is composed of multiple initiatives to drive Secret’s global growth and solidify our network as the Web3 privacy hub. Today’s blog is a high level overview meant to introduce you to this new growth phase and its components—but don’t worry, more announcements and details are coming 🤫
What to expect
There is no way to grow an ecosystem—certainly not one of Secret’s importance and potential impact—by only looking at a single piece of the puzzle. With Shockwave, we aim to attack every angle at once and involve each member of our community.
That said, adoption and community growth will be our biggest focus, with our main goals for Shockwave being:
- 100 new projects building in the Secret ecosystem in H1 2022
- Hundreds of thousands of new users onboarding onto Secret Apps in H1 2022
- Multiple Secret Apps achieving 10,000+ active users
The space moves fast, so we’ll keep adjusting these goals as we move forward.
We’ll also keep tracking other core metrics important to the growth of Secret Network, including: developer onboarding and education, community growth, active addresses, active validators, daily transactions and contract interactions, TVL in Secret DeFi, active collections of Secret NFTs, and more.
To make Shockwave a success, we’re taking the following actions:
#1 Empower developers to build on Secret Network
We’ve already seen dozens of privacy-first applications launched on Secret. But if we want to become the Web3 privacy hub, we need more.
Driving end-user adoption of Secret apps starts with empowering and supporting awesome developers to build on Secret Network. That’s why we want to:
💰 Dramatically expand funding and incubation opportunities for developers
Grants for critical infrastructure and applications have already brought us critical primitives like the Secret NFT standard, infrastructure like the Secret Monero Bridge, and successful projects like Altermail. We’ve also had great teams like Sienna Network and Shade Protocol successfully fundraise for their application ecosystems on Secret Network.
With Shockwave, we look to dramatically expand our successes across these areas and accelerate application growth, through both grants and external investment. We’re also exploring dedicated models for incubating early-stage projects across all our ecosystem verticals. Developers will be able to build on Secret with confidence, knowing they’ll have the strongest possible support for years to come.
Of course, this means we’ll need to work with the very best long-term partners. While we can’t say more just yet, there’s already plenty in the works. So stay tuned for more exciting updates this month 🤫
And if you’re interested in building your own application on Secret Network, don’t hesitate to shoot us a message at [email protected] or [email protected]. We’ll get in touch!
📓 Enhance our developer tooling and support
Next to funding and incubation, we will be overhauling and improving existing developer documentation, onboarding, and tutorials to make developing on Secret as easy and accessible as possible.
This includes collecting all of our docs and tutorials in one place and creating actionable how-to guides that’ll get you started with Secret app dev in no time. We’ll continue supporting independent developers who want to contribute to documentation and dev onboarding!
We’ll also keep supporting projects that make Secret App development simpler than ever, like the implementation of the Griptape.js framework and the Polar development framework (both grant recipients).
You can find tools for Secret Devs on our developer resources page.
🧑💻 Organize more Secret hackathons
Recently we had some very successful cross-chain collaborations with HackAtom (a cross-Cosmos hackathon) and NFTerra (a collaboration between Terra, Secret, and multiple NFT projects in both ecosystems). And they’ve proven to be a great opportunity to educate developers and help them build their own privacy-first decentralized apps.
If this type of opportunity excites you, keep an eye on our blog updates and Twitter page throughout 2022!
🙌🏻 Expand and support the Development committee
We’re seeing more activity than ever in our community-led Development committee, which meets weekly on the Secret Discord (currently Mondays at 12pm US ET) and provides support to builders at every stage of Secret app development.
Fostering this even more is a big focus for us in Q1. We love helping developers help each other—it’s critical to the long-term health of our ecosystem!
If you’re interested in contributing to the Development committee, get in touch on Discord or drop into one of the open meetings!
#2 Empowering and scaling the Secret community
The Secret community has been at the core of the incredible growth and success we’ve seen over the last few years.
That’s why, moving forward, we’re going to invest even more time, energy, and resources in developing both our international community—as well as our dedicated Secret Agent program.
🌎 Growing our international community
Privacy is a human right—anywhere—which is why we’ve always invested heavily in our international community growth.
Our global community exploded during 2021, with over 25 languages now represented across all our communities and channels.
In 2022, we’ll be doubling down on expanding our global communities with more in-person and online events than ever. We’ll also provide educational materials and grants for community members to compose tutorials, lead research, or host local events.
If you’d like to help evangelize Secret and Web3 privacy in your local area, check out this list of active international communities or join the Secret Discord!
🕵️♀️ Expanding our Secret Agent program
Another 2022 priority of ours is the Secret Agents program, which launched in 2021 to help new members of the Secret community become long-term contributors to our ecosystem. Our mission: to help connect you with amazing opportunities you may not have even known existed!
Secret Agents have the opportunity to earn exclusive rewards (including SCRT, swag, special events, and unique Agent NFTs) and gain access to dedicated Discord channels to communicate and collaborate with fellow Agents.
There are now over 8,000 Secret Agents who responded to the call! And many of these have gone on to join existing ecosystem projects full-time, receive development grants, run independent events, operate validators, or even found companies in the Secret ecosystem.
We’re doing our best to make the Secret Agent experience as fun and fulfilling as possible, and have ambitious plans for building a platform that’s going to bring this to the next level—all powered by Secret Network.
Interested in learning more or becoming a new recruit? Visit our Secret Agents landing page and get started!
🌐 Ensuring global availability for SCRT
It’s going to be difficult to meet our ambitious goals for on-chain and community growth if users can’t or don’t know how to interact with Secret Network.
That’s why we want anyone, anywhere, to be able to easily acquire SCRT, use it for Secret Apps, send on-chain transactions, and stake while participating in governance.
SCRT is already available on a number of large global centralized and decentralized exchanges, but we’re not stopping here. We’re also working as an ecosystem to expand on-ramp access globally (including a recent integration by the SecretSwap team).
And with the growth of Secret DeFi and Secret Bridges—including our recent integration of IBC—accessing the Secret ecosystem and our applications will soon be easier than ever.
Learn more about SCRT, how to use it, and how you can get started.
Together, we build the way forward 🚀
Ultimately we want every supporter of Secret to also be an active user of the network, whether as a delegator, a Secret Agent, a DeFi participant, a gamer, or as an NFT creator or collector.
Want to know how you can contribute to Secret Network and advance our mission of promoting privacy for Web3? Join one of our channels or become a Secret Agent—we welcome all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, and we’ve never needed your skills more than now!
Make sure to stay up to date on our developments and announcements on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, or this blog.
Onwards and upwards!
To discuss Secret Network and Secret Apps, visit our community channels:
