DBGrow July/August Update
September 8th 2018
Who is DBGrow?
DBGrow was founded in 2017 in the San Francisco Bay Area to build secure, automated, and intelligent tools that allow entities to take control of their data with a minimal barrier to entry. DBGrow approaches its work as a true collaboration in ideation with the greater Factom community, and strives to achieve success in our projects that will bring benefits to the entire Factom ecosystem. DBGrow is dedicated to ensuring a stable, well governed, and strategically marketed Factom protocol that we can continue to build our powerful and secure technologies on into the future.
Overview
DBGrow has had an active couple of months since our last update. We have focused on developing a strong foundation for Factom both in open source libraries and creating a more robust governance and ecosystem. We are excited for the advances we have made over the past 2 months, and are even more excited for what we have coming next. We will be aiming for monthly progress reports going forward to accommodate the quantity of updates we have planned.
DBGrow Technical Development
Factom ObjectDB: The release of our NodeJS based Factom Object Database library provides a way for developers to store structured, permissioned, validatable, and updatable data on Factom. Specifically, the library is compatible with the ubiquitous JSON data format. The library is applicable to building data-only applications on Factom, like DApps, that require code and variable storage. We’re very excited about the progress on this library!
Factom Cache: The alpha release of DBGrow’s NodeJS based Factom Cache library represents an important building block for many applications built on Factom. The library greatly improves the read performance of repeatedly retrieving long chains compared to the Factom API alone. Utilizing the pending entries API, the library also enables developers to build applications that react to new entries on Factom on a 10 second basis using a convenient callback.
Factom Proof of Support Server(+Android App): DBGrow built a solution to help support teams attest to their presence and availability. At regular intervals, support team members commit signed entries to Factom with a unique message proving they are human and present. This data can be used as evidence in claims against SLA violation and similar situations. As DBGrow’s support team grows to accommodate the growing requirements of the Factom protocol, we will move to implement this system.
DBGrow Governance and Ecosystem Development
Governance & Legal Review Grant: DBGrow is currently managing a grant to perform an extensive legal review of the Factom Ecosystem. We are examining Factom Governance structures, processes in the Factom ecosystem, and the interaction, liabilities, power dynamics, and decentralization of parties within Factom. DBGrow and its members are taking no compensation from this grant, performing it only for the benefit of the Factom community and ecosystem.
After many delays surrounding the postponed protocol grant payouts, and time to re-engage and re-define scopes with law firms after these delays, we are finally able to move forward with this review. We finalized selection of the law firms we are engaging, are fully onboarded with one firm, in the final stages of onboarding with our second main firm, and have finished the discovery process (explaining the ins and outs of Factom) with both firms. We have begun working with them on a variety of processes such as ANO removal and the Factom grant system, and have begun research for a full review of Factom decentralization. Soon we will begin examining the potential of a Factom Protocol Foundation.
Factom Protocol Marketing Strategy & Website: DBGrow has begun building Factomprotocol.org, a website that will represents the entire Factom ecosystem. This website will act as a central informational resource for potential clients, developers, and ANOs, and fit into the funnel of an eventual comprehensive Factom marketing strategy. This website will be a powerful community resources as well. We will use it to legitimize certain processes and entities in the Factom Ecosystem; for example we recently created and are hosting the email exchanges@factomprotocol.org for the Factom Exchange Committee which will be used to contact exchanges with a higher degree of legitimacy, and setup accounts such as the newly created u/exchangecommittee account on reddit. We also will eventually integrate greater community and governance functionality into the website. DBGrow has also created a working group for generating content for this website that we hope to be useful throughout all of Factom’s marketing efforts. With the Factom communities support, DBGrow lowered its efficiency to grant an additional approximately 5,000 USD a month at current FCT prices to fund this project.
All material, copy, designs, and control of this website and all associated work under this project will be transferred in full to a Factom Protocol Foundation when established.
As part of this process, DBGrow and Baltoro also released an in-depth document outlining a comprehensive marketing strategy for Factom.
Guide: DBGrow continues to act as a Guide for the Factom Protocol. After completing the second ANO election round, we have transitioned to start reviewing and updating processes within the Factom Ecosystem, and improving our Governance documents.
