Obyte is celebrating its ninth anniversary with new governance, DeFi applications, and a virtual city built on its fully decentralized DAG-based crypto network.
Summary
- Obyte’s DAG-based network now runs full on-chain governance, allowing GBYTE holders to vote on upgrades and select order providers that keep the DAG in sync.
- 2025 milestones include the election of CariPower as the first community order provider and the launch of Obyte City, a virtual network where plots and houses are governed on-chain.
- The roadmap adds Obyte Friends for social rewards as well as new DeFi, social apps and sidechains, expanding Obyte’s ecosystem beyond core payments and token tools.
Obyte, a decentralized cryptocurrency network, celebrated its ninth anniversary on December 25, 2025, marking nine years since its launch as Byteball in 2016, according to the project’s official blog.
Obyte develops a new ecosystem
The platform expanded its ecosystem in 2025 with new community-focused applications and governance structures, the blog says.
Obyte runs on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture and offers several decentralized tools, including ODEX for token swaps, Oswap.io for liquidity provision, and Counterstake Bridge for cross-network asset transfers. The platform also supports trading on centralized exchanges including NonKYC.io and Biconomy.
The network infrastructure includes autonomous agents, smart contracts, attestations, private tokens, and token creation capabilities. Additional features include Prophet for prediction markets, Kivach for open source project donations, and Pythagorean Perpetual Futures for advanced trading.
In late 2024, Obyte implemented a major network upgrade introducing full on-chain governance, allowing GBYTE token holders to participate in network decisions through a dedicated governance site, according to the announcement.
In March 2025, the network selected its first order provider through a decentralized community vote. Order providers operate public nodes that send periodic transactions to maintain DAG synchronization, although they cannot approve, block or censor transfers, the blog explains.
CariPower, a Caribbean-based renewable energy company, has become the first order provider selected via on-chain governance after receiving over 31,000 GBYTE votes. The company announced plans to explore distributed ledger applications for peer-to-peer energy markets and infrastructure.
In June 2025, Obyte launched Obyte City, a virtual environment where users can purchase plots on a digital grid. The system assigns random coordinates to purchased plots, and when two unbuilt plots are adjacent, both owners receive a house and two additional plots by connecting via Discord or Telegram, according to the platform’s description.
The price of plots is expressed in CITY tokens, which are exchangeable on Oswap.io. The city operates via autonomous agents on the Obyte DAG, with limited parameters adjustable via on-chain governance by parcel owners.
The project announced plans to launch Obyte Friends, described as a community engagement platform that will reward users for their daily social interactions and promotion of the network. Other decentralized financial applications, social systems and sidechains are planned for 2026, the blog says.
