ⓘ Canopy is in Betanet! Learn more ↗
Canopy Community,
Q3 has been a very successful quarter for Canopy and its ecosystem. While we remain largely under the radar, that will begin to change as we approach the new year.
During this time, it’s my belief that Canopy has grown into the best development framework for sovereign applications and L1s. While it remains untested in a public setting, Betanet has proven its reliability, integrity, and scalability. We believe that in the mid-to-long-term it will grow to rival Cosmos as the go-to stack for L1s.
Some highlights from Q3:
Do I believe people should care about these vanity metrics? Hell no. Do I think they speak to the capability of Canopy and the vision of our team? Yes, 100%.
What matters is:
We’re extremely proud of those value propositions. Our long-term bet is that if we can make L1s easy to build, more devs will seek to build sovereign applications.
In Q3, the primary technical efforts have been threefold:
We’ve had a sleepy Betanet, and we like it that way. Very little drama, calculated interventions. We’ve done over half a dozen upgrades without issue on the Canopy chain. In addition to that, we’ve been pushing experimental versions to Canary, our experimental chain hosted on Canopy. Canary has seen one halt in that time, which is expected, but Canopy has been rock solid throughout.
As a lead into our application, and as a deliverable on the journey to make Canopy the easiest-to-use framework, the team developed and released Canopy Templates. Templates allow developers to build in their preferred protobuf-compatible languages, like Python, Typescript, C#, and more. This effort is a major milestone, because it unleashes the power of our VMless architecture, and opens doors to an order of magnitude more developers. Build in your language, but get all the benefits of Canopy Core without knowing Go: a win-win for developers. Templates will play a large role down the line in the application we’re building, because it enables us to deploy L1s with predictability. This means we can deploy L1s like rollups, because the chain is standardized out of the box.
Growth priorities have been in support of these efforts:
Betanet is not a growth mechanism, but we were able to expand our tent to include top-tier validators, such as Pier Two, Lavender Five, Rhino, and about 15 other incredible names. Here’s the announcement if you’d like to see all of them. These top validators will be the backbone of the network once we hit Mainnet.
We’ve received an abundance of applications to participate in Betanet, and we’ve been bottlenecked by technical resourcing. To preserve the essence of Betanet and have it serve its true purpose, we have not invited any other resources to participate — yet. Stay tuned, as we will do our best to include others in the leadup to mainnet as a way to stress test our team, protocol, and processes.
Canopy’s Incubator continues to support teams developing on Canopy. This first cohort is committed to building and launching some of the first applications within our ecosystem. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and we thank them for taking an early bet on Canopy. Our plan is to continue the Incubator on a rolling basis, accepting the highest quality teams that apply and giving them unique access to Canopy leadership and team resources. If you’re interested, apply here.
Without ruining the surprise, we’ve been working on an app that will be the centerpiece of our ecosystem. It will combine key components of applications that users expect, and will enable Canopy developers to have one of the most seamless user experiences in the space. We’re thrilled about the progress of this application and anticipate it will launch in Q1 of ‘26.
As part of this, the Canopy team has expanded significantly, and includes many new developers who are bringing a range of skills to the community. No longer is Canopy the protocol-heavy engineering team that happens to build products — we’re now a two-headed beast that has deep expertise across protocol development, application building, and growth.
As for growth, we’ve been deep in partnership conversations for launching Mainnet, and we’ve got some exciting teams aligning with Canopy to help us make a big splash. We’re dreaming up a Mainnet and announcement cycle that will put Canopy on the map, build a much larger community, and position Canopy as a place to build.
Meanwhile, the marketing team has solidified and is finding its voice and angle within the larger crypto space. This is a work in progress and should mature rapidly as we work with experts to launch Canopy. The key is being true to ourselves and what we’re attempting to accomplish.
Betanet was originally envisioned as a short-term testing period, but we’ve decided to stretch Betanet into Q1 ‘26 to ensure we provide a complete developer and user experience for early adopters. After Betanet concludes, we’ll be releasing Canopy Mainnet, tentatively planned for Q1. Stay tuned for exact timing.
While this is a disappointment for some, I believe it’s bullish for the project as a whole. We didn’t want to release Canopy without the tooling necessary to demonstrate its full capabilities. This timeline will enable users, devs, and stakers to understand and take advantage of the full Canopy experience, from onboarding permissionlessly, to launching in minutes. Stay tuned for specific announcements for Mainnet.
The Canopy Foundation and Canopy Labs share a mutual vision to launch and support software for the creation of sovereign applications. Our goal over the next two quarters will be to deliver on the vision of the Canopy Stack, the launch of the security system, the Canopy Chain, and to release tooling to make it easier for developers to build and grow.
Join us on this journey. We build in Discord and muse on X.
Until next time,
Adam
