Year in Review 2023

As we welcome 2024 and mark our 4-year anniversary, we take a moment to reflect on this year of bear market building and look to the year ahead.

Akord's 2023 highlights 

Rebranding

We started 2023 with a rebrand that went on to win Gold at the European Design Awards! 

Growing the team

The team grew from 6 to 10, setting us up with a stronger foundation for the challenges and opportunities that 2024 brings.

Features

We introduced dozens of new and improved features, including:

• a migration app for our first app to v2.akord.com
• Importing files from Arweave transactions, Google Drive and Dropbox
• 2FA with SMS and authenticator app
• Description and tags for vaults
• Improved file status tracking
• Instant streaming of encrypted video
• Multiple vault owners enabling ownership transfer
• Organisation accounts and white labelling
• Airdrop access to invite others without Akord account

Atomic NFTs

We recently released our Atomic NFT Minting Tool in public Beta. This tool, integrated with Arweave’s Universal Data License and Universal Content Marketplace protocol, offers a complete experience to users looking to mint Atomic NFTs.

Token-gated access

We've introduced token-gated access to vaults, currently in private beta, which leverages Ethereum ERC20 and ERC721 NFTs for gating access to vaults.

Temporary storage

By integrating cloud storage vaults, we're enabling users to seamlessly manage both permanent and temporary data in a unified environment. Now users can still access our end-to-end encryption and key ownership for the temporary storage needs. 

Developer tools

We've added the ability to use an API key to access the Akord API, further opening our platform to innovation and integration. We also create a bunch of 'recipes' to help developers get started with Akord in their own projects. AkordJS has gone through some serious upgrades, from launch to v4.23.6.

Performance upgrades

In many ways 2023 was about improving performance and several big refactor projects resulted in removing over 10,000 lines of code and furthering our core functionality of uploading and downloading at scale – now users can upload over 10s of thousands of files in one go, as well as upload files over 10 GB without necessarily needing a strong internet connection.

This process was not always smooth and did result in an uptick of reported bugs. We thank everyone who stuck with us and helped us iron out the creases! 

Resources and content

We launched a Learn section on our website, serving as a knowledge hub for everything related to Akord, Arweave, and web3. We published 11 articles on the Learn section, as well as 12 articles on our blog.

SaaS3

In 2023, we introduced a 'SaaS3' subscription model, giving subscribers access to discounts on permanent storage, the ability to add terrabytes of cloud storage, access to advanced features, more API bandwidth and prioritised support.

We still maintain a free tier that gives people unlimited access to vaults and the ability to pay as you go with permanent storage top ups.

Arweave events

We were proud to co-sponsor a landmark ecosystem event, Arweave in Lisbon, with Richard speaking at this event as well as at Arweave in Singapore. 

Zealy

We just launched Akord on Zealy, giving new community members an engaging way to learn about Akord and win generous discount codes to get them started.

What’s in store for 2024?

A key theme for us as we go into 2024 will be bringing UX and utility to the Permaweb. We believe user owned data can unlock new ways to create value, and our work will be focused on making this as easy as possible.

Our own Arweave gateway

Thanks to the excellent open source code and support from the ar.io team, we're putting the finishing touches to our own gateway. This will enable us to provide a better UX in a number of areas including Akord Explorer.

Akord Explorer

We've often mentioned Akord Explorer – our own permaweb dApp that will guarantee perpetual access and discoverability to all public data on Akord – and it's now basically ready to go. Expect it to go live very very soon!

Earn U token 

The U token is the unit of account on the Permaweb and one of the three ways to earn U is by storing data on Arweave. We'll be expanding the Akord wallet in early 2024 to enable users to receive U from their uploads and send it out to an Arweave wallet, which they can use to swap for other cryptos on Permaswap.

Expanding token-gated access

As mentioned above, token gated access is in private beta. It also only supports Ethereum ERC20 and 721 tokens for gating. In 2024 we'll be adding Arweave and Solana NFTs, as well as making the feature public. We believe this feature will unlock new use cases for creators on the Permaweb.

Social sign-on & Arconnect

Continuing our focus on improving the onboarding process, we'll be looking to add social sign-on functionality so new users can create accounts using web2 credentials. We'll also be looking to give users the option to use Arconnect with Akord. 

Stay connected

There are some bigger plans underway and we'll be revealing more in 2024!

Join us on this journey – if you haven't already you can jump into the Discord here.