Orbs Rising: Token Allocation Update and our Trip to the Japan Blockchain Conference
June was a monumental month for Orbs — for our R&D, BizDev, and Marketing departments!
R&D Surging
While the dev team has been hard at work making sure transactions are running smoothly, our research department has been busy: Tal and the Odeds are working on the V1 architecture. You can check out the Orbs V1 specs on GitHub (over 20 documents, so brace yourself). They are now in the process of getting peer-reviewed. Our superstar Maya finished a month-long research project on a group-signatures mechanism for Helix, our consensus algorithm.
For those who follow our awesome blog, you can see David has been talking a lot about Proof of Stake. This month he shared his thoughts with us on the Introduction to PoS and the future of Consensus and Before EOS and Ethereum: How much has Proof-of-Stake evolved since PPCoin?. His research into the field is the foundation for the architecture of Orbs’ Randomized Proof-of-Stake (rPoS) — additional information coming soon!
Orbs’ interoperability and scalability features have generated a lot of excitement over the course of our trip last week to Japan. We expect this to underpin some new alliances for Orbs in the coming weeks.
Japan Blockchain Conference
We had the great privilege of partnering with the Japan Blockchain Conference in Tokyo, one of the largest industry gatherings in the country to date. Honored by the Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Trade, Economy and Industry, it was clear that Japan is gearing up to becoming a global leader in blockchain. The top industry leaders in Japan attended (SBI, bitARG2, and Evercoin Founder Miko Mastumura who just announced he will be managing a new Digital Assets VC for Gumi) , alongside companies from around the world (Bitcoin.com, CoinTelegraph, and ConsenSys CSO Sam Cassatt among others). During and after the conference, Daniel and I also met up with companies like SoftBank, Huobi, Dentsu, Quoine, and many others leaders in Japan.
Daniel and I both had the chance to take the stage and represent the thriving Orbs ecosystem. Yaniv Altshuler at Endor joined Daniel for the panel, “Navigating the Crypto Investment Landscape.” Jonathan Noam, CCO of Orbs’ sister company Hexa Labs, ran a panel on onboarding consumers that included our partners PayKey, COTI, and Zinc CEO Daniel Trahtemberg.
Daniel also talked about his journey into the industry and the development of Hexa Group with its philosophy of creating strong, concrete ecosystems. He also went into depth about “reverse ICOs” — taking existing ‘killer apps’ with millions of users into the blockchain space — which is the story of our design partners.
I also got the chance to present Orbs in a talk titled, “A New Strategy for Mass Adoption”. The Orbs concept of a hybrid blockchain scaling Ethereum today and harnessing the power of two chains sprung a lot of interest. Shoutout to everyone who came to our booth to learn more about Orbs.
To close out the conference, I sat on a panel on “How Blockchain Will Evolve” with some of the most influential names in blockchain: Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson, IOTA’s Daniel Allen Cohen, and Aaron McDonalds of Centrality. We had different perspectives on solving scalability issues. I presented the general Orbs philosophy which is, being practical, and putting the needs of dApp developers first. Orbs is very much requirement driven with focus on practical blockchain use.
If we want to see blockchain actually go mainstream, we have to keep in mind businesses and end-users that still haven’t used crypto or understand distributed ledgers. Others on the panel discussed the difficulty and different challenges in developing protocols with a lot at stake verses developing “Silicon Valley” apps that can once in a while stop working. This made for an interesting conversation ;)
We also made an appearance at two local events. While I took the hot seat at Pitch Tokyo alongside our partners Zinc and DX.Exchange, Orbs’ new Head of Marketing Strategy, Danny Brown Wolf, presented how Orbs will augment Ethereum at the Ethereum Japan Meetup in Tokyo. At both events we were happy to connect with the local Ethereum evangelists who were excited about how Orbs can scale Ethereum in a timeline that will allow for millions of users to adopt blockchain in 2018.
Hooked on Tokyo
To us, it’s no coincidence Japan will be the first major industrial nation to test a government-backed cryptocurrency (J-coin) by 2020. We at Orbs anticipate the country will be a leader in embedding blockchain and tokenization into mainstream culture. Advanced mobile payments adoption, together with investor and industry interests, give Japan the edge here. Even recent pessimism in the Japanese market over regulation should be seen optimistically: Japan is stabilizing the market for the long haul. The Land of the Rising Sun is likely to be the launchpad for mainstream blockchain adoption.
Asia in general is really spearheading blockchain at this stage. I’m looking forward to returning in July for the Beyond Blocks summit as part of Korean Blockchain Week and working with new exciting partners in the industry.
Token Allocation Update
We originally planned to allocate tokens in June, but due to negative market sentiment, we have decided to hold off for more optimal conditions. Since we have exciting announcements coming up in the next few months, as well as further key R&D developments, our target is to release during Q3, pending positive market conditions that would best support the project. Stay tuned for more updates soon.
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- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ORBS_Network/
- Read the Orbs white papers: https://www.orbs.com/white-papers
