2018 has definitely been a wild ride here at BANKEX. Multiple international awards and nominations, successful tokenization cases, and, above all else, product launches. In these 12 months, the company has managed to claim its well-earned place in the global arena as well as expand existing projects with new partnerships. So, without further ado, here are the 15 things we are most proud of achieving this year.

1. International Awards & Hackathon Wins

The BANKEX Foundation team is widely known as Hackathon heroes. We set the bar high for ourselves with not one, but two prizes at the ETH Denver Hackathon in February. Later in the year, BANKEX successfully presented the ‘Calculating statistical functions using zk-SNARKs’ project at the ETHBerlin Hackathon and won sponsor prizes at ETHSanFrancisco and ETHSingapore.

On top of everything else, BANKEX Head of Risks and Analytics Maria Mikhaylenko received the Decade of Women Digital Frontier Woman Award at London’s Fintech Week.

2. BANKEX Web3swift Open Source Library

BANKEX is home to the best IT engineers and developers in the industry. No wonder BANKEX web3swift library leads GitHub’s Swift depository list. As of the time of this writing, the open source library has gathered over 400 stars, beating its closest contender by more than 200 points.

3. MediaToken Tokenized Instagram and YouTube Accounts

BANKEX’s MediaToken brings social media platforms to the blockchain to provide rising bloggers with better fundraising opportunities and increased ad revenue. Thanks to MediaToken, a Spanish travel agency, TurismoSpain, made history as the first Instagram account to issue its own tokens, which are available for trading on an exchange. A few months later, TechHives, a YouTube tech channel, joined the tokenized social club by releasing THV dividend-bearing tokens.

4. BANKEX Plasma

This summer, BANKEX Plasma reached speeds of 22k transactions per second and immediately received positive feedback from Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin. In September, the BANKEX team presented its first use case — buying coffee with crypto from a vending machine.

BANKEX Plasma Prime is on The Plasma World Map, right next to Vitalik’s spec!

5. Recognition by the Global Community

We are proud to say that the BANKEX team became a part of the United Nations Blockchain For Impact Global Summit in New York this year. Moreover, our CEO Igor Khmel appeared on NASDAQ’s Trade Talks. Blockchain has a great potential to improve traditional industries, and the big players clearly see it coming.

6. Developed a New Token Standard: ERC-888

In order to push tokenization forward, BANKEX developed a new standard of security tokens — ERC-888. With total revenue written to a smart contract, shareholders can automatically receive dividends. What’s even better is that it takes 15 times less gas for smart contracts to create ERC-888 than it usually takes to issue tokens of any other standard.

7. Entertainment Tokenization: MovieCoin

This year, MovieCoin made headlines in Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, and Bloomberg. Powered by BANKEX’s Proof-of-Asset Protocol and software development kit, MovieCoin leverages blockchain technology to transform film financing with a traceable payment system, better financing opportunities, and an open investment environment.

8. The First BANKEX Proof-of-Skill Hackathon

Inspired by the world’s top competitions for blockchain developers, BANKEX Foundation organized its first Proof-of-Skill hackathon this May. The panel of judges included Vlad Martynov, Head of the Ethereum Competence Center, and Sergey Prelutsky, co-founder of MixBytes Blockchain Labs. The BANKEX team reviewed over 160 applications and invited 18 teams of top-class engineers to take up the challenge.

9. BANKEX’s WaterToken for Sustainable Development

Moved by the idea of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, BANKEX created a blockchain-based traceable donation technology called WaterToken and integrated it with a public water system in Narok, Kenya. First, locals undergo a KYC procedure and receive NFC cards needed to get access to the water system. Then, all donated tokens are split equally between the cardholders.

10. BANKEX Pay

BANKEX Pay is a secure mobile Ethereum wallet that is available for both Android and iOS devices. With this app, you can manage transactions, generate receipts, and store ERC-20 and ERC-223 tokens right from your smartphone. This functionality is combined with best-in-class design and BANKEX’s renowned security technology.

11. BANKEX Custody Service

When you need to protect your digital assets from malicious attacks, broken hardware, and the human factor, a simple crypto wallet is not enough. BANKEX Custody Service offers a cold storage solution to safeguard your cryptocurrencies and tokens, with restorable passwords, 2 layers of proactive human authorization, and 24/7 multi-channel support. Safety is guaranteed, since all client records are kept in a 256-bit-encrypted database, with cloud backups on three continents.

12. BANKEX Digital Deal

You can’t keep your crypto locked up forever, can you? Sometimes you need to conduct some business, preferably avoiding fraud in the process. This is when Digital Deal comes in handy. Its Escrow-based prepayment allows you to test your counterparty and transfer the funds only when all agreed-upon conditions are met.

Digital Deal recently been won Best Blockchain Product of 2018 in the Proddys rankings!

13. BANKEX Blockchain Fundamentals Course

Even though Bitcoin celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2018, there still aren’t a lot of quality learning resources available online that cover blockchain history and principles of operation. BANKEX Foundation decided to change that. Our team of industry researchers developed an online Blockchain Fundamentals course that is available for free on YouTube.

14. BANKEX Token Exchange

Our latest product, BANKEX Token Exchange is another top-notch solution to the security issues that come with hot wallets. The trading platform is integrated with BANKEX Custody cold wallets to provide safe storage for your tokens, whether you decide to trade them or hold on the exchange. What’s more, you can set separate passwords for signing in, trading, and changing security settings.

15. Partnership with Amazon

You heard it here first! BANKEX wraps up the year by establishing a strategic ISV partnership with Amazon Web Services. What it means is that we are now Amazon’s official SaaS B2C blockchain solutions provider. So stay tuned to see Custody Service, as well as other innovative BANKEX tech, appear on the AWS Partner Solutions Finder page!

What comes next? We’ll continue working on our cutting-edge technologies and tokenization solutions. It will definitely be a year full of big partnerships, and we can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Until then, thank you for joining us on this amazing journey.

See you in 2019!