The Crypto market has been eerily quiet in the past couple of weeks. As prices continue dwindling down, interest is at all-time low and one would almost wonder is Crypto dead again? To counter the negative sentiment let’s have a look at some of the milestone launches and releases that happened in January alone:

Zilliqa Mainnet Launch — The first public blockchain platform to successfully implement sharding

Huge congrats to the Zilliqa team for this amazing achievement! Having followed this project since its inception mid-2017 the mainnet launch is a massive breakthrough in the research of sharding and tackling scalability issues in blockchain. (To read more on Zilliqa’s approach to sharding)

ETH 2.0 Specs Release

Vitalik chimes in

For the early followers and investors of Ethereum, the long awaited upgrade to PoS and sharding is soon a reality. With the release of the specifications, testnets are already expected to begin in March. ETH 2.0 aims to solve current performance bottlenecks and PoW inefficiency putting Ethereum closer to achieving its vision of becoming the world computer for decentralized applications.

Grin Mainnet Launch

Grin’s mainnet launch marks the first live implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol (alongside BEAM). It introduces an innovative way in which the blockchain size is reduced to address scalability and privacy.

zkERC20 Token Standard Release

Plasma Toolset and Testnet Release

Dai Continues Growing: 2 Million ETH locked in

DaiPay is an open-source payment processor which allows you to receive Maker DAI tokens for payments.

WBTC Live on Ethereum

REN Rebranding and launch of public Darknodes

The Pieces Are Coming Together — Crypto Innovation Is Thriving

To echo the above tweet by Balaji Srinivasan, this article just touches on a few developments in the sea of positive news that came out in recent months. It’s very easy to get caught up in the uncertainty of prices and market cycles, but teams are continuously building to solve key issues at the protocol layer such as scalability, privacy etc. and once these are addressed the technology will be mature for global adoption. Replacing legacy systems won’t happen overnight and we’re only on the cusp of WEB 3.0.

Disclosure: I’m invested in some of these projects and this is not investment advice.