IBC 2023 Recap 💥 Highlights: - 107 connected chains - 124 Github contributors to main IBC repos - 1,742 PRs merged - Dozens of features, apps, tools - DevX and usability improvements - Expansion to new ecosystems Thanks to the builders and community for advancing IBC. 🧵 1/

As of December, 30d @MapOfZones volume shows 5.3M IBC transactions and $2.5B volume. @osmosiszone is this month's largest IBC user. Notable new entrants like @dYdX @noble_xyz @CelestiaOrg joined the interchain this year, driving volume to new heights. 2/

Total IBC-connected chains went from 53 in 2022 → 107 in 2023. The majority use ibc-go by the IBC team at @interchain_io . Ibc-rs by @informalinc and ibc-solidity by @datachain_en also made strides in adoption this year. 3/

In 2023, ibc-go delivered serious improvements to DevX. The client refactor made it easier to use ibc-go with non-Tendermint clients, while the Wasm Client made it possible to easily add new clients to a chain and to write clients in any Wasm-compatible language. 4/

The callbacks middleware gives IBC-enabled chains the ability to execute callbacks throughout the packet lifecycle. The localhost clients allows different apps on a chain to communicate over the IBC interface. Plus, ICS-20 token transfers now support AuthZ. 5/

Ibc-rs focused on usability. They redesigned APIs to support more use cases, including expanding IBC outside of Cosmos, and restructured the codebase for selective module/domain type import to give developers more flexibility. Plus: new ibc-query and ibc-testkit libraries. 6/

Ibc-solidity refactored in 2023, improving EVM gas efficiency. They also boosted ibc-go compatibility. Ibc-apps saw the launch of the user-friendly Interchaintest framework, ICS-721 NFT Transfers, and IBC Hooks, which lets ICS-20 token transfers initiate contract calls. 7/

The top external contributors to ibc-go through to the end of November were @gadikian , @fekunze , @_cat_shark , @expertdicer , and Vuong177. Thank you to these individuals and to all IBC contributors for their invaluable efforts that drive the progress of IBC. 9/

IBC's 2024 themes: expansion to new ecosystems and usability improvements. Key milestones include integrations with rollups, refining dev tooling and testing frameworks, and protocol feature enhancements. Together, we will evolve IBC into the TCP/IP for blockchains. 11/

Check out the full Year in Review on the IBC Protocol blog. Here's to the interchain we're building together. 🤝 /12