Happy Birthday, XDC Network!

Today, June 1, 2022, the XDC Network’s mainnet has been operating for three years strong. XDC Foundation and the XDC community have been so busy with upgrades, integrations, and XDPoS 2.0 that we almost missed this opportunity to smile and celebrate. Let’s pause briefly to acknowledge the hard work that has gone into developing the XDC Network and nurturing the ecosystem, and thank the vibrant community that supports it.

XDC Foundation — stand up and be counted

XinFin Fintech launched the Layer 1, enterprise-ready XDC Network mainnet on June 1, 2019. Led by co-founders, Atul Khekade and Ritesh Kakkad, XinFin’s development team spent the bulk of the first two years focusing on network integrations and further grooming the mainnet for the trade finance and financial enterprise industries.

In order to focus on these technical priorities, a broader team was cultivated to steward the growth of the network in a more robust capacity, and in mid-2021, the XDC Foundation was formed as an organization to serve and support a variety of ecosystem needs. The Foundation would form a team dedicated to introducing and supporting products and services that facilitate the use of XDC Network, as well as to foster awareness and focus on adoption of the network. This team spans the globe geographically with a concentration of members throughout the U.S.

With a broader network user base in mind, the XDC Foundation team got busy creating the following feature-rich network applications:

Trade Finance, Tokenization, NFTs, and Security

While most of the above-mentioned releases were introduced without much fanfare, one significant event at the beginning of our third year instantly positioned the XDC Network as a go-to blockchain for enterprise applications. In September 2021, the world’s first NFT (as a single XRC20 token) backed by trade finance assets and following unique trade finance industry messaging standards, was deployed on the network. The NFT was created by a member of the World Economic Forum: Global Innovators Community, Tradeteq, and the transaction was conducted with invoice financing company, Accelerated Payments, as the asset originator. The transaction demonstrated how trade finance assets could be made available through blockchain-based systems to those interested in this lower-risk investment sector — one that has previously been available only to a handful of investment banks.

Furthermore, with this development and the broader investment market, the trade finance gap could shrink significantly as technology emerges to improve access to affordable trade finance for small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) based in developing and emerging markets.

In addition to the major efforts put forth by the above-mentioned parties and others, including André Casterman, this significant milestone on the XDC Network follows Atul's and Ritesh’s vision for a low-cost, high-speed, and uniquely secure enterprise blockchain. In fact, security is at the forefront of the network’s capabilities and was outlined in the whitepaper, Accountability and Forensics in Blockchains: XDC Consensus Engine DPoS 2.0.

Co-authored by Dr. Fisher Yu, a senior advisor to XDC Foundation, the paper introduces the XDC Network’s upgrade to XDPoS 2.0 and highlights the advanced Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol and the military-grade security and performance empowered by the upgrade. It stresses the low resource consumption and fully backwards-compatible characteristics of the network. Read more about the upcoming release of XDPoS 2.0.

XDC Network’s capabilities in enterprise applications, and specifically trade finance, earned respect in the broader global trade industry. In 2021, TFD Initiative, DNI Initiative, and the International Trade & Forfaiting Association all selected XDC Network as their first blockchain member; it remains the exclusive Layer 1 blockchain member of each as of this publication date.

SWIFT will implement ISO 20022 messaging standards for financial transactions beginning in November 2022. XDC Network is already one of the networks that is positioned to enable compliance with this new standard. It is not just for financial transactions — the standard can be used in other, more innovative ways to communicate data from one entity to another in a highly efficient transaction.

The Community Looks Forward

We often state that community is the heartbeat of the network. At this point in 2021, there was a much smaller team of community members supporting the project in various capacities, including by building on the network and introducing other ecosystem participants like exchanges, wallets, and development partners. The community has since blossomed into a broader yet focused group motivated by the growth and adoption of the XDC Network. The XDC community continues to expand and develop projects centered on NFTs, the metaverse, financial enterprise applications, and DeFi — all on the XDC Network. From its first days, XDC Foundation has operated with an eye towards further decentralization and has fostered a community-first development approach as we shepherd the network to new heights.

Bridges. As a blockchain optimized for interoperability, the XDC Network has the opportunity to be a network of networks. We are happy to report our community and ecosystem teams continue to focus on building interoperability with other blockchains and legacy financial systems. We have long believed that blockchain’s future calls for it, and one of our early bridges was formed with enterprise users in mind. Built through DASL, the Corda bridge offers an interoperable platform for Corda users. We are collaborating with several other projects in the interest of interoperability as we look forward.

We anticipate some the following additional events in the future:

Thanks for sharing these moments with us and joining the XDC Foundation on the journey to come!