To start out this review of 2022 on a personal note, I’m going to share my current mood: I’m currently powering through a major case of writer’s block. I even considered asking ChatGPT to write this article for me!

But how could ChatGPT possibly achieve that? The tool claims to have the data cutoff somewhere during 2020, if I remember correctly. So unless I specified what it should write about, item by item (which kinda defeats the purpose), it could possibly only know about how Josef laid the very foundation by writing the OG PWN smart contracts during HackMoney 2020.

It would not know anything about the rest of the journey up until this point. So here I am, a real human being reflecting on all the PWN-related things that made me (and others) super happy in 2022.

Before we dive in, a quick disclaimer: This article is by no means supposed to represent a full summary of everything that the PWN team has achieved this year. If the full scope of things is what your heart desires, then I suggest checking out the many in-depth articles that we’ve published on the PWN blog this year. With that being said, I’m going to give you a highlight reel written from my own perspective.

PWN’s public liftoff

Without a doubt, a key moment for PWN took place in June, when the PWN platform was launched to the public on the ETH mainnet. Even though the PWN protocol was officially first deployed in November 2021, the platform had been temporarily operating in a closed-alpha mode. The switch was flipped in June, and since then, it has been possible for anyone and everyone to take all their DeFi tokens and squeeze a lot of sweet liquidity out of them without having to worry about getting liquidated in the process. The Polygon deployment followed shortly after the mainnet launch.

Since the launch, PWN has seen more than 1,400 loan requests and over $500,000 in loan volume.

Here are some highlights of the unique deals that PWN has seen during the second half of this year:

• Among the so-called blue-chips, we’ve seen some super exciting loans backed by BAYC and Noun NFTs.

• In the realm of ultra rare 1-of-1 NFTs, we’ve seen a loan backed by a Beeple.

• If you want even more exotic stuff, have a look at a Nation3 DAO token backed loan from the area of DAO bonds.

• Last (but not least!), I want to point out some of the smaller loans that happened mostly in the region of GameFi assets, where a plethora of (not only) sub $1,000 loans have been backed by NFTs from some great collections like Cometh and Aavegotchi.

I hope this demonstrates the versatility of the PWN protocol as well as PWN’s holy grail: Radical openness. You can access liquidity by using anything as collateral without having to worry about forced liquidations. Alternatively, you can provide the liquidity and generate double digit APY on your own terms.

PWN was represented across the globe

It wasn’t only the aforementioned launch that was tied to a major DeFi conference: Throughout 2022, the PWN team made sure to let the world know about what we’re building. And since we’re building primarily for cryptonatives, what better place to meet with our community than at crypto/DeFi events!

I’ve already mentioned our ETHPrague attendance in a number of articles this year, but this highlight reel wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t bring up the team’s phenomenal booth and PWN swag once more. If there was a booth and swag competition happening, PWN would win, hands down! I even participated in the great Slush in November, and despite having some of the biggest companies (Microsoft, Amazon, and so on) in attendance, PWN would by far dominate that event as well.

We also represented PWN during Devcon 6 in Bogotá as well as many of our own meetups that we’ve organized around the world, but mainly in Prague’s famous Institute of Cryptoanarchy and Bordel in Parallel Polis. If something works well in this industry, it’s conferences and meetups.

PWN built useful stuff

PWN’s lending and borrowing functionality is always going to be the cornerstone of the platform. However, the PWN team is always seeking to expand the core functionality with supporting features so that the value proposition of PWN (both the protocol and the platform) continues to grow ever larger.

For this purpose, we often talk to PWN users as well as other cryptonatives in the industry (if you haven’t already, check out our 2022 Cryptonatives series, which includes interviews with Jarrad Hope, Luis Cuende, Mario Havel, and so many other wonderful people). This constant stream of feedback has yielded many exciting ideas – some of which we’ve already implemented, while others are lined up for 2023 and beyond.

One of the tools we’ve built allows anybody to bundle a large amount of tokens (NFTs and/or ERC-20) together and mint them as a single ERC-1155 NFT: PWN’s Token Bundler. I’d like to use this feature as an opportunity to demonstrate our mindset whenever we set out to build anything, which aims to give back to the DeFi community. PWN has uniquely built the Token Bundler feature as an open-source project that benefits all users across DeFi (even if they never want to get into lending and borrowing). Even then, you can use Token Bundler, mint your bundle, and use it literally anywhere in DeFi.

Another tool that has been introduced in 2022 is PWN Safe. Even though this smart contract wallet is still currently being built, we’ve already been able to demonstrate its capabilities. PWN Safe enables all the important functionality that existing lending protocols don’t support, such as keeping all the asset’s functionality available even when it’s locked as collateral in a loan (e.g. gaming with a GameFi asset while also using it as collateral), or claiming airdrops and other rewards – no matter how complex – while the asset is locked in a loan.

The magic of PWN Safe is that it’s not just a feature – it’s an entirely new primitive, which enables many never-seen-before use cases and unlocks possibilities that even we might not be aware of at the moment. I can’t wait to demonstrate the full capabilities of PWN safe and to see the exciting use cases the DeFi community comes up with when it gets released in early 2023.

PWN’s 2023 outlook

It’s time to give a sneak peek into the new year! PWN keenly awaits 2023 as a year during which we take things into the next level. Although we’ve been playing a little bit of catch-up in regards to product offering during the last couple quarters of this year, we’ve now caught up and are ready to unleash the beast that the PWN protocol can become.

Right off the bat, we have a complete protocol upgrade scheduled for Q1 2023, which enables many demanded loan types as well as some loan types that the industry has never seen before. This upgrade also takes us one step closer to the holy grail of DeFi mortgages, which is an area we recommend keeping an eye on in 2023, since we will be making a few major releases in that direction throughout the year.

Our mindset of community-driven development means that PWN will eventually embrace a full DAO model. The goal is to make this happen sooner rather than later. So if you ask “wen dao” or “wen token”, I’m very confident in responding with “soon™” and knowing that it actually means soon.

I could keep going with PWN’s plans for next year, since there’s literally tons of stuff scheduled not just for 2023, but specifically for Q1 and Q2 2023. Instead, I’m going to wrap this up by wishing you the best start of 2023, and I’m hoping that together (as both a community and a society), we will finally be able to break free from the crazy period that started around mid-2019. PWN hopes that 2023 will kickstart a completely new era – a blank canvas – that we’ll be able to paint anew.

Have a wonderful rest of the year, everyone, and I’ll see you in 2023!

Steve