This post was authored by IoTeX Co-founder, Raullen Chai.

IoTeX started in 2017, the same year I left Uber to pursue my dream of building a fully trusted universe for machines based on blockchain and trusted computing. In 2018, we completed our initial design and began building IoTeX from scratch. This year in 2019, we achieved yet another massive milestone and launched IoTeX Mainnet — our network is now run by 60+ Delegates from around the world and has served >3 million transactions to date!

The evolution of IoTeX coincides with a critical moment in history. Data breaches are dominating media headlines. Our devices and data are increasingly vulnerable to hackers. Corporations continue to treat us as data points instead of human beings. What this means is our mission to build the Internet of Trusted Things is more important than ever. As IoTeX shifts from theoretical to practical in 2020, we can now address the world’s greatest data privacy and trust-related issues with our technology. Whether you’re a developer or end user, there will be many new ways to engage with IoTeX very soon: Mainnet GA, Ucam, Pebble Tracker. Join us!

Nothing can make me more proud of our team and community — it’s humbling to see how far we’ve come these past two years and that part of our vision has now become a reality. 2019 signifies the Genesis of the IoTeX Network, which serves as the launchpad for our work in 2020 and on. Yes, 1% of our journey is now finished!

As we close down this year, let’s look forward to a fruitful 2020 and also take time to reflect on all of our hard work and accomplishments in 2019. Happy holidays from the IoTeX Team!

— Raullen Chai, Co-founder of IoTeX

2019 Recap — The Genesis of the IoTeX Network

An action-packed year — here is a chronological recap of 2019:

January — After completing Roll-DPoS design around Christmas 2018, we announced the IoTeX Delegates Program right after New Years 2019 and opened applications soon after. The protocol parameters, e.g., epoch, block period, gas limit were finalized and k8s deployment got started! We joined China Mobile IoT Alliance as the only blockchain member and partnered with University of Cincinnati on blockchain-based privacy research!

February — An official Bug Bounty was opened to hunt for vulnerabilities on the blockchain and some system contracts, and fortunately no critical bugs were reported. In the meanwhile, we were thrilled to see a large group of people from around the world, including geeks, venture capitalists, crypto believers, PoS providers, DApp builders, and IoT vendors join as pioneers of the IoTeX Delegates Program.

March — The IoTeX Voting portal was opened and voting for Delegates officially kicked off! With our first batch of Delegates, the IoTeX Foundation began hosting weekly Delegate calls and announced the official Mainnet rehearsal! ~50 delegates joined the rehearsal to dry run the genesis ceremony. Joy and tears! Cobo Wallet was the first third party wallet to support staking/voting, followed soon after by Trust Wallet and others. To cap it off, our voting portal was listed as a top DApp on many DApp radars!

April — IoTeX blockchain started successfully on April 22 without any hiccups, and we shared with the world our vision for the Internet of Trusted Things. While busily onboarding more delegate candidates, we designed a Delegate program with The Giving Block for charity. Social responsibility has always means a lot to IoTeX. By the end of the month, a reputable Delegate launched its first product on top of the IoTeX blockchain — the ecosystem started to grow!

May — 2,000,000,000 IOTX tokens were staked which accounted for ~50% of all circulating tokens at the time to secure the IoTeX blockchain. Blockfolio partnership was established and ISCC, one of the largest security & pen-test competitions designed its special challenge using IoTeX blockchain! The ioPay wallet became available for the first time, and we hosted meetups in New York, San Francisco, Bangkok and Seoul to celebrate the Mainnet launch!

June — We introduced Vitality (VITA) as the first IoTeX network token for our beloved community, which has unique economic design to reward the IoTeX community and could be initially used for purchasing new IoT products on Vitamart. The IoTeX Analytics tool was launched shortly after that, which offered developers query-able insights about how the IoTeX blockchain operates.

July — The Consensus Delegates pool expanded from 12 to 36 after passing the first decentralized IoTeX Community vote on-chain, and all private sale tokens were distributed. We joined hands with Chainlink to build hardware-based trusted data oracles with IoTeX trusted computing technology and Chainlink data oracle technology. And our partner Nesten started to build a decentralized mesh network on top of IoTeX!

August — More DApps emerged and Vitamart was officially opened to the public! Delegates of the Month (DOTM) were elected by voters. We participated in meetups and Blockchain Weeks in Germany and Amsterdam to onboard new community to IoTeX. Prototypes of secure hardware connecting to the blockchain were demonstrated in the form of trackers, smart home devices, and more! After months of research and planning, we updated our roadmap and strategy for what we want to achieve next.

September — We presented our innovations in decentralized identity (DID) for IoT to the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the premier consortium consisting of the world’s most influential IoT companies. We were also invited to work with the Trusted IoT Alliance on a Blockchain & IoT reference architecture to leverage blockchain infrastructure to secure and scale IoT ecosystems. We received new strategic investment from HashKey Capital and published vision article to illustrate our quest for the Internet of Trusted Things.

October — To make our vision of Internet of Trusted Things more concrete, we finalized our plans for the first blockchain-powered consumer IoT product, Ucam, which is co-developed with Tenvis, a hardware giant that has sold millions of cameras in North American markets. Ucam received the prestigious CES Innovation Award in the Cybersecurity & Privacy category — a massive honor! We put our heads down and focused on delivering the first-of-its-kind camera to the mass market as soon as possible.

November — Mainnet Beta was launched smoothly! We made several major upgrades to the IoTeX blockchain, such as reducing block time by 50%, upgrading the virtual machine, adding more chain analytics, improving storage size ~40x, improving sync speed ~10x, adding support for cross-chain transfers of assets, and more. We hosted meetups in our hometown of San Francisco during the annual Blockchain Week to showcase our progress!

December — We launched the IoTeX Forum, the one-stop shop to discuss all things IoTeX. In the meantime, we were invited to organize a workshop at the Arm AIoT Dev Summit in Silicon Valley on achieving end-to-end security using Arm-based edge devices and IoTeX blockchain. We launched node smart monitoring and one-line upgrades to further improve the usability and transparency of IoTeX blockchain. At year end, ~2.2 billion IOTX tokens are staked and voted! As we close out the year, we are planning for a big CES on January 7–10.

2019 was an amazing year in which IoTeX really started to take off — I could not be more proud to see the phenomenal progress spanning research, development, product, marketing, community, business development and more. To an even greater 2020!