Year in Review: 2024
2024 was a big year for us. This year marked Revoke's fifth anniversary while it was also the first year that we were able to grow the team past just myself. This year we launched some long-planned features and we've received significant funding from Public Goods Funding initiatives and our community. This has allowed us to continue building Revoke as a fully open source and free public good, and we hope to continue this way in 2025 and beyond.
Rebranding
A big change for us this year was the design of our new brand. We've worked on this with Richard Schumann for some time and launched the new brand halfway into the yeaar in June.
Together with the new brand we also completely overhauled our browser extension to make it more user-friendly and functional.
Batch Revoke Functionality
Batch revoking is something that users have been asking for for a long time. Usually our response to this request has been that it's not possible to batch multiple revocations into a single transaction. And this remains to be the case. However, we have finally added a batch revoke transaction flow that allows users to queue up multiple revocation transactions one after the other.
Risk Indicators
Another important feature that we've added this year is risk indicators. When you're a big crypto user, you might have dozens of token approvals and it is easy to lose track of what is what. That is why we've added risk indicators to token approvals to help you understand which token approvals may be riskier than others.
To offer these risk indicators we've partnered with Webacy, ScamSniffer and we've built our own risk engine. We plan to continue expanding this feature in 2025, with additional partnerships and more risk indicators.
Other New Features & Open Source Contributions
Over the course of the year, we've added a lot of smaller improvements to Revoke.cash besides the big ones mentioned above. Some of these updates are UX improvements to menus and search functionality, improvements to the signatures dashboard and exploit checker, and more. We've also added many new networks to Revoke.cash, bringing the total number of supported networks to over 100.
We wouldn't be able to do all of this without the help of our open source contributors. We've received a lot of help from the community this year, and we're grateful for all the contributions. Some of our most notable contributors this year include Chidozie David, Sabal Poudel, Andrei Kalpovski, Ryan Waldon, bobeu and Nate Beauregard.
Funding as a Public Good
Revoke.cash is a 100% free and open source public good. We believe that we are building essential tools that everyone should have access to, which is why we're working hard to make sure that Revoke.cash remains free to use for everyone. But to do so we need to receive sustainable revenue.
In the past we had experimented with sponsorships, but the incentives around this were hard to manage for a product like ours. That is why this year we doubled down on public goods funding initiatives. The crypto community has shown a growing interest in sustainable funding for public goods, and we are grateful for the support we've managed to receive.
Our biggest revenue this year came from Optimism RetroPGF, who awarded us with close to 150k OP tokens. Other big revenue came from Octant, Gitcoin and ENS.
Unfortunately it looks like we most likely won't be eligible for Optimism's Retro Funding again in 2025 because of changing eligibility criteria. Regardless, we're grateful for the support we've received from Optimism and we hope that we'll be eligible again for future funding initiatives.
To add to the funding that we receive from public goods funding initiatives, we've also integrated user donations into the new batch revoke transaction flow. This allows users to donate to Revoke.cash more easily as part of their usage. Combined with public goods funding, this allows us to receive sustainable revenue.
If you are working on new public goods funding initiatives or you know of any new funding opportunities and want to support Revoke.cash, please let us know!
Growing the Team
With additional funding we were able to start to carefully grow the team past just myself. This year we've added Dries and WiiMee as part-time members to the team. Dries has been working with me on the code, while WiiMee is expanding our social media presence and educational content.
As a bootstrapped public good, we have to be careful with how fast we grow. We want to continue to build Revoke as a free and open source public good, and we need to continue to receive sustainable revenue in order to grow the team. And I believe that we're finding a good balance in slowly growing the team.
Educational Content
With the addition of WiiMee to our team, we've started to create more educational content. WiiMee is producing weekly educational videos for our Twitter account, and we're planning to expand our social media presence to more video-focused platforms as well.
Conferences & Merchandise
As a team we try to have a presence at high profile crypto-focused conferences. We have limited resources, so we have to be selective and keep the number of conferences manageable. This year the big two conferences that we attended were EthCC in Brussels and Devcon in Bangkok.
Both of these events were among the biggest and most anticipated crypto events of the year, especially now that Devcon moved to a biannual cadence. This year at Devcon we also wanted to do something more for the community, so we launched our first ever merchandise that we gave away to our users and supporters at the conference.
Token Approval Exploits
2024 was looking to be a good year without too many large approval-based exploits, although we did see several smaller ones throughout the year. But in the second half of the year, two big exploits changed this. In the end, we saw 10 exploits in 2024 with over $80m of stolen funds, $65m of which was stolen in the second half of the year.
Looking Forward to 2025
In 2025, we're planning to continue to develop Revoke.cash as a free and open source public good. We have support for a few new networks in the pipeline and we're planning to improve and expand the risk indicators that we've released this year.
We're also planning to release some new features that have been on our long term roadmap for a long time, such as approval history and expanding the account dashboard with more information. If there is anything you'd like to see in 2025, please let us know!