Raze Network — 2021 in Rewind

Raze Network
8 min readDec 27, 2021

Hello, Razers,

Why don‘t we take the final week of 2021 to step back, recap, and reflect on the year we had together?

Let’s explore the world, this crypto space, and Raze Network again, reversely. And let’s highlight the key lessons, note the sidelights, and discard the noises once for all.

When you grind every day, it is extremely hard to pause when efficient multitasking is needed constantly. However, we believe it is well worth our time to look back, explain, and make sense of the trajectory the past year has taken.

It allows our brains to stop amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through the intricate experiences, consider multiple possible interpretations, and create meaning. And this meaning eventually becomes learning, which can inform future mindsets and actions. It is believed by the Raze Network team that this “meaning-making” is crucial to the ongoing growth and development of any team or community.

Wild The World

One notable impact of the pandemic is the devastating economic and social disruption.

Tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty, while the number of undernourished people, currently estimated at nearly 690 million, could increase by up to 132 million by the end of the year. And more importantly, middle-class workers are earning a national income share that is 8.5 percentage points lower, which translates to a 16.0 percent reduction. And the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to further accelerate these trends.

On the other hand, the COVID crisis has exacerbated inequalities between the very wealthy and the rest of the population. The rich economies used massive fiscal support to mitigate the sharp rises in poverty, which are bound to be seen elsewhere.

Analysts say some have benefited from the shift online of much of the world’s economy during lockdowns, while others simply gained from rising asset prices as financial markets bet on the speed and shape of the global recovery.

As it continued

The postponed Tokyo Summer Olympics got underway in Japan amidst a precarious time in the pandemic, evoking mixed feelings among the global public. Yet, despite the uncertainty, 62% overall agreed that the Olympics marked an important occasion for the world to come together.

As concern about the climate continued to rise. Even with ambitious action to slow greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels will continue to rise and threaten low-lying islands and coastal populations throughout the world.

The Game is Rigged & Only Transcendental Power Wins

The world is much more intertwined today than any of us can imagine. To solve the issues the world is facing, conventional tools seem obsolete.

We venture to say only the transcendental power avails in the face of increasing tribalism, and it has to be the kind of power that transcends the sovereignty of nations and political ideologies to change the paradigm.

Because in today’s world, the less sovereignty is viewed as a wall or a shield, the better our prospects will be for protecting people and solving our shared problems.

Despite the pandemic, the Tokyo Summer Olympics still managed to show us the power of humanity, openness, and what we can achieve when the right idea guides us. Despite the virus that requires humans to distance from one another, our nature draws us back to communities again. And despite the inertia to follow the old ways, humans came together to create blockchain technology, Bitcoin, and many more permission-less tools as a transcendent, egalitarian force for human flourishing.

Wild The Crypto

As wild as it may be, the believers still reap huge benefits from their visions. In short, 2021 was a breakthrough year for the cryptocurrency market.

First of all, we have witnessed Bitcoin’s journey to new record highs, observed the emergence of a legitimate legal framework in many countries, and seen institutional support from more large companies.

With that, El Salvador became the first country in the world where Bitcoin is considered legal tender, which means that retailers are legally obliged to accept Bitcoin as payment.

Then the interest of ordinary people in cryptocurrency has skyrocketed this year, mainly because of opinion leaders such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.

Speaking of Elon Musk, and thanks to him, the concept of meme coins has become one of the most talked-about investment opportunities in crypto space.

And with multiple centralized exchanges dedicating hundreds of millions to emerging GameFi projects, the combination of game and token economy is bound to become a huge industry.

Firm The Raze Network

It took enormous efforts and time of a team of resourceful people to make Raze Network what it is today. To have a general review of what a year we had, it is only reasonable to list the major news and milestones.

On February 1, 2021, Raze Network was born with a mission to provide end-to-end anonymity for the entire DeFi stack and to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving payment and trading systems while protecting the transparency of your assets and behaviors from surveillance.

From that moment on, crypto space endowed us with unlimited support and resources, with which we swiftly acquired enough momentum to start building the privacy middleware this space needed.

Since partnerships are key to the success of a project, Raze Network, since day one, has been working on building trust and reciprocal relationships with many other crypto projects who need privacy services. This move gave us access to a huge number of potential users in markets all over the world.

April 1st was probably the most important date of the Raze Network. We decided to announce $RAZE Token Launch and The Rationale behind our Strategy. With that announcement, $RAZE token was ready for real-market competition.

On July 15th, we asked our communities to vote on the future of the $RAZE token release, since we felt it was the only legitimate way to make a democratic decision.

On July 22, 2021, the long awaited Raze Network Testnet was finally launched, with a short tutorial video.

With the ongoing development, we continued to hire more talents to solve issues we were facing and improve the overall user experience.

On September 1st, Raze Network shared the full version of its code, with which builders and contributors can review, contribute, and get inspired by Raze’s open-source code.

In November, we announced RAZE Network Official Mainnet Launch. With more than 6 months of research and development, one testnet launch, and a successful bug bounty program, we were ready to launch Raze’s protocol on BSC and then shortly after launch it on ETH.

On November 18th, As promised, the Raze Network Mainnet is now live to the public on Binance Smart Chain: https://bsc.raze.network/

Having completed the Raze Network Mainnet Launch on Binance Smart Chain, the most important milestone so far, we are ready to move on to a bolder vision. This brand new roadmap Raze Network V2.0 — Homestead is going to serve as a completely new technical map for us when navigating the next development stage.

Finally, we would like to thank all of you for your effort in making this project a successful one and bringing it to this position.

Thank you for everything you do to make this project a successful, terrific one to work for. Have a wonderful holiday with your loved ones.

Look forward to working with you in the year to come.

🎄 🔔 🎁

References:

https://hbr.org/2017/03/why-you-should-make-time-for-self-reflection-even-if-you-hate-doing-it

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/2021-12/Year-In-Review-2021.pdf

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/climate-change-and-impacts-accelerate

https://www.indiatimes.com/2021-rewind

https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/21350/2021-crypto-year-in-review

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/21/market-wrap-year-end-review-musk-pumps-bitcoin-and-dogecoin/

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/20/market-wrap-year-end-review-bitcoin-starts-off-in-a-frenzy/

https://www.benjamindada.com/cryptocurrency-year-in-review-several-firsts/

About Raze Network

Raze Network is a cross-chain privacy protocol. It is built as a native privacy layer that can provide end-to-end anonymity for the entire DeFi stack. The Raze Network applies zkSNARKs to the Zether framework to build a second-layer decentralized anonymous module. The objective of Raze Network is to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving payment and trading systems while protecting the transparency of your assets and behaviors from surveillance.

Contact Raze Network

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Raze Network

Raze is a trustless zero-knowledge proof system designed specifically for decentralized finance.