Launching the OriginTrail v6 — stages explained
Since the launch of its genesis network in January 2019, the OriginTrail project has yielded a crucial advancement for the foundation of Web3 — The Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG). Underpinned by the permissionless OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) the DKG organizes the world’s most important assets, making them discoverable, verifiable and valuable.
Simply put, the OriginTrail DKG is a marriage of two powerful technologies, blockchains and knowledge graphs. Blockchains are used as trust networks that power verifiability and transactability of Web3 assets. The DKG is blockchain agnostic and is leveraging a variety of trust networks for performance whilst preserving decentralization. To organize a universe of assets (be it those that do exist in the physical world, or digital assets like NFTs and fungible tokens), the knowledge graph capabilities enable discoverability of assets, driving their value through interconnectivity based on the law of network effects — known also as Metcalfe’s Law.
This global and autonomous network functions as a trusted long term memory allowing us to retrieve any knowledge from semantic networks and is already in use as a middleware powering data exchanges for some of the largest companies in the world. The next phase of the DKG evolution, initiated through the v6 launch in three stages, will not only bring order of magnitude performance improvements but also new capabilities (like Universal Asset Locators and driving interoperability with its predecessor knowledge graphs, e.g. the Google Knowledge Graph).
This vastly more performant and universally useful version makes OriginTrail uniquely positioned as the “Knowledge Graph of Knowledge Graphs” — elevating this powerful technology as the centerpiece of Web3.
From Web2 to the Semantic Web3: Assets powered by blockchain and knowledge graphs
The largest Web2 organizations (e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix) have managed to generate enormous value by capturing tremendous amounts of data in their respective knowledge graphs. However, all of these KGs are still their own, centrally controlled islands of knowledge. The upcoming DKG v6 brings the capability to generate and grow such value for the entire Web3 ecosystem, as well as enable all of existing Web2 knowledge graphs to interoperate and extend their reach to Web3 assets using OriginTrail.
The DKG v6 is also introducing an important new primitive to Web3 — a Universal Asset Locator (UAL). Similar to how Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) made it easier to reference an object (e.g. a website or document) in Web2, UALs will have the same impact to help organize all types of assets, from physical to digital, in Web3.
The DKG v6 comes with improved discoverability, performance and semantic powers which uniquely position it as the neutral, permissionless middleware for all semantic technology. For example, with v6 you will be able to query both the OriginTrail DKG and the Google Knowledge Graph at the same time with the new DKGv6 API! With the expanding support for semantic technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data Fragments, SHACL and others, OriginTrail DKG clients become capable of performing search queries across both Web2 and Web3, opening up a vast space for network effects to kick in.
Finally, from a performance perspective, the numerous updates to the protocol introduce orders of magnitude higher operational speed with the DKGv6. This delivers a huge increase in scalability and a significantly better developer experience.
Launching the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph v6
The launch of OriginTrail v6 will be performed in 3 stages, sequentially introducing technical layers by switching on one system at a time.
Stage 1 kicks off today with the bootstrapping of the first OriginTrail v6 stage 1 network. The goal of stage 1 is to verify smooth operation of the v6 network and data layer in a public network environment. The new v6 protocol implementation vastly improves network communication (also replacing the kadence p2p library with the libp2p implementation), and the data layer introducing RDF as the core format for full semantic support.
Ready to try out the stage1 DKG v6? Be one of the first to test-run the DKGv6 by setting up a node and trying out its API.
The involvement of the node-running community will facilitate the speed of successful completion of stage 1. Each node will be capable of collecting granular network KPI and telemetry data and publishing it to the DKG itself, further utilized by the core developers to improve the DKG implementation and proceed through the launch stages. For that purpose, there will be a designated reward pool that node runners will be able to collect by submitting relevant network utilization data. All node runners will be motivated to test and utilize their nodes in various creative ways, in order to generate quality DKG utilization data to be able to collect rewards. The collected data will include performance metrics, collected error information from bug occurrences and other. More details on the reward pool distribution among all node runners will be available shortly.
Stage 2 kicks in immediately once stage 1 KPIs are stable. It will introduce the incentivization layer, implemented through smart contracts, opening the doors for token movements, including delegation, staking and improving several existing mechanisms. Reaching system completeness in stage 2 will again be expedited by contributions from the OriginTrail community running the DKG. The nodes will continue to publish relevant network usage data by performing various tests on the DKG after each upgrade.
Finally, stage 3 will start immediately after stage 2 KPIs are stable and will focus on the migration from the current v5 to the OriginTrail v6 hitting the mainnet. This will include backward compatibility tests, a network update exercise and other related activities.
By completing all three launch stages of the OriginTrail v6, we will be checking off the most important piece of the Turing phase of the OriginTrail roadmap. As you can explore here, the Turing phase enables a shift from data to assets and focuses on increasing their value. Named after Alan Turing, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, it introduces support for Web3 Assets and Uniform Asset Locators as part of the version 6 of the Decentralized Knowledge Graph. In the Turing phase we’re also seeing the expansion of the DKG capabilities for NFT Dapp builders, making it easy to discover, protect, connect and evolve any asset.
The launch of all three stages of the v6 will unlock the OriginTrail Metcalfe phase (inspired by our advisor, Dr Bob Metcalfe, known for the “Metcalfe’s Law” and the creation of the first ever computer network), which will power network effects, bringing billions of assets to the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph. The integrations, such as with the Acala Network which brings the OriginTrail capabilities to Acala DeFi assets, and the OriginTrail Parachain with its premier Graph Contracts, boost network effects for all assets in the Decentralized Knowledge Graph.
Following the successful growth in the Metcalfe phase on the back of the new features of OriginTrail v6, we will reach the Berners-Lee phase of the roadmap, inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web and the visionary behind the Semantic Web. The Berners-Lee phase will bring the materialization of Semantic Web3 to life, with over 1 billion linked assets and ubiquitously integrated Decentralized Knowledge Graph.
Get involved & contribute to OriginTrail v6 launch
OriginTrail is an open source, permissionless system where anyone can participate, run nodes, utilize and publish their data to the network and make it discoverable and verifiable in Web3. You can directly contribute to the v6 launch by:
- Running DKG v6 nodes and have them automatically provide network utilization metrics to the OriginTrail developers (more TBA)
- Post your findings, suggestions and issues to the project Github
- Contribute with code directly on the DKG repo
- Join the ongoing discussion on the dedicated v6 Discord channel
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