What You Need to Know about IOST in 2022

2021 was a huge year for the cryptocurrency market, with huge strides in growth and adoption of digital assets, NFTs, and blockchain worldwide. It was also an incredible year for Moonstake as we rose to the top rankings of global staking providers, reaching a total staking assets of $1.8 billion thanks to the support of our users and partners worldwide. As we begin the new year 2022, Moonstake as well as our strategic coin partners have many exciting news and programs in store for you as our platforms scale and evolve. To welcome our user community into the exciting new year, we're creating a series of articles in collaboration with our strategic partner on what you need to know about our partner coins in the year 2022, this time with IOST.

As of May 2021, Moonstake has been supporting IOST staking and network resource management via strategic partnership with the IOST development team. Since then, Moonstake hosted several key campaigns that helped bring over 1,000 new users to the IOST ecosystem via free account creation as well as promote awareness and adoption of IOST staking such as quizzes, webinars, and staking tournaments. By the end of December, Moonstake's Servi Node had more than 500 voters with over 70.33 million IOST votes, ranking 11th among all validator nodes.

As for IOST last year, the network surpassed the mark of 600,000 total mainnet accounts in November. Throughout the year, IOST also made great strides in the realm of NFT, as the blockchain worked with a number of notable NFT marketplaces to support and optimize the experience of using IOST NFTs for its users. The network also debuted its first ever "IOST official anthem" and also partnered with several DeFi players to further expand in this sector. In this article, we will be interviewing our partner at IOST about what is in store for the IOST ecosystem and its user community in 2022.

Q1 Which 2021 achievements are you the most proud of?

IOST is well-known for our technical advancement and superiority. That remains our strength in 2021 as we constantly accomplish more mainnet milestones, currently hosting a whooping number of over 632 millions transactions and over 620 thousands mainnet accounts. It's also no surprise that the IOST blockchain network has never had downtime and always offers a smooth transaction experience for our users. The historical data, coupled with IOST's solid technical foundation, has led us to lead the blockchain ranking CCID by China's Ministry of Information.

If we have to pick a key word for IOST in 2021, it would be NFT. The IOST Foundation successfully onboarded potential NFT projects such Revival- an NFT Marketplace for all artists, RIZIN FIGHTING COLLECTION- a sports NFT marketplace for avid Japanese RIZIN fans and TOKENLINK- a gaming NFT Marketplace for CrossLink games items, arts as well as music NFTs. With NFT being one of the biggest buzzwords in the cryptoverse, having well-developed NFT projects will serve us well in the long run.

Blockchain education always plays a crucial role in our long-term plan, and we are proud to continue the tradition to share the power of blockchain technology to more developers and students this year. The highlight of 2021 in particular would be our strategic collaboration with the University of Nicosia- the world leader in blockchain education and research to offer annual endowed studentships to support, inspire and empower female leads, and create a more inclusive blockchain space.

Last but not least, we have to also mention our multiple successful partnerships with quality projects including the Moonstake Wallet to grow IOST's staking ecosystem, Yokozuna Finance as a leading DeFi DApp on IOST, OKCoin Japan for a new listing and new Servi Node, Bitpanda Exchange to expand IOST's European market, and many more. To check out our 2021 in recap, see this article https://medium.com/iost/iost-2021-yearly-recap-9454a6139caa

Q2 What measures are you going to take in 2022 to further increase adoption of IOST?

Our team takes a couple of approach to strengthen adoption of IOST this year:
- Target Market: IOST will work hard our existing strong market such as Japan, Korea and China while further pushing our growth in specific target countries in Asia such as India
- Dapps: A successful ecosystem needs successful dapps. 2021 has brought IOST quality Dapps such as Yokozuna or RIZIN Fighting Collection. The IOST team will be more aggressive in 2022 to onboard more emerging Dapps into the IOST ecosystem.
- Interoperability and Interconnectivity: Rather than focusing the efforts on new and mainstream users, we aim to leverage on the existing large pool of crypto users outside IOST.

Q3 What can users expect from IOST in 2022?

A brief overview of our roadmap in H1 2022 can be found here: https://link.medium.com/rSQ7VnqXZmb

Users can find us sticking to our key foundation such as technical maintenance and development, blockchain education, community engagement and ecosystem growth in the IOST roadmap. To stay atop of competition and relevant in the ever-evolving crypto space, it requires us to constantly come up with new and killer moves. We have a secret weapon in development, and will be much more aggressive in growing our ecosystem and community in 2022.

Moonstake is proud to be strategic partners of IOST. We will continue to maintain strong support for the ever growing and developing IOST ecosystem and hope to bring even more great value to IOST and crypto users worldwide in 2022 to help accelerate adoption of the IOST and Moonstake ecosystems together.

About Moonstake

As a world-leading staking service provider, Moonstake develops and operates decentralized wallet services for enterprises and end users.

Our full-scale staking business started in August 2020. With the support of users all over the world, our total staking assets has risen to 1.8 billion dollars. In June 2021, we ranked third among 15,000 staking providers globally.

So far, we have expanded our business and ecosystem through about 30 strategic partnerships, including major blockchains such as Emurgo which is a constituent organization of Cardano, TRON, and NEO. In May 2021, we became a wholly owned subsidiary of the listed company "OIO Holdings Limited" on the Singapore Stock Exchange and we are working to further expand Moonstake's business and improve our credibility. https://www.moonstake.io/

About IOST

High fees and slower transaction times on the Ethereum network have left the door open for new solutions to emerge, and IOST is one such project that has been gaining traction since its mainnet launch in 2019.

Backed by major financial and VC firms such as Sequoia, Matrix, and ZhenFund, IOST is a pioneering decentralized, high-throughput, gas-efficient Proof-of-Believability-powered smart contract platform built to tackle the scalability trilemma once and for all. For this, the concluding ranking from China's CCID ranked IOST as the best blockchain platform under Basic Technology, better than Ethereum, EOS, and every other smart-contracting platform evaluated by the agency. This is a testament to the quality and ability to roll out a better, innovative product and reflective of our true desire to be the best in the sphere.

Being one of the public chain leaders in terms of adoption, performance, and utility, IOST remains committed to our mission to unleash the power of blockchain. IOST currently has the ever-expanding 500,000 community members in over 20 countries, over 400 nodes, a top staking economy, symbiotic relationships with corporations dotted worldwide. https://iost.io/