OriginTrail Monthly Report #4: April 2018

In our Q1 2018 report we wrote: “The vision we all share can only be attained through a collaborative effort fostering decentralisation at every step. To tackle the challenges mankind is facing due to the growing opacity of supply chains that generate nearly 2/3 of the world GDP, we will continue on delivering the most professionally-built software while bringing businesses together to catalyze the adoption.”

April was an important month for the adoption of the OriginTrail protocol and networking with key stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Protocol Adoption Updates: 🇪🇺 EU-Colored Month

In April, the OriginTrail team interacted with European commissioners, parliament members, and related institutions on four different occasions.

April 14th: COO Žiga Drev discussed the future of smart farming with Phil Hogan, EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Pekka Pesonen Secretary-General representing EU Farmers and Agri-cooperatives, Franc Bogovič Member of the European Parliament, Dejan Židan, MSc, Slovenian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Food, members of the Republic of Slovenia government and many more at the #EU4SmartVillages panel in Bled, Slovenia. OriginTrail was presented as a solution to drive transparency in the international trade of food as well as a tool for empowering European farmers. Read an event report or watch the video.
April 22nd: Žiga Drev and Tomaž Levak participated in a meeting at the European commission in Brussels. More updates coming soon!
April 27th: We were invited to be supply chain expert mentors at the #EUBlockathon2018 in Brussels in June. The EU Blockathon aims to boost the alliance against fake products — and co-create the next level of anti-counterfeiting infrastructure. The Blockathon will assemble top specialists in law, IP rights, anti-counterfeiting, track and trace, ecosystem dynamics, logistics and security. It is organized by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Commission.
April 27th: Maja Voje, CMO, and Nino Pritovšek, Head of Business Development, met EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc and Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia Boris Koprivnikar at the Future Day event in BTC City, Ljubljana (Slovenia). They discussed how blockchain technology can leverage traceability solutions and boost transparency and trust in supply chains.

We also updated the OriginTrail implementation kit and an explainer video on how to install and use an OriginTrail node. This will greatly leverage the adoption of the solution for end users.. All stakeholders (developers, solution providers and enterprise users) can download our code and set up a test node. But, this is only the technical part of protocol implementation. We are currently providing some basic support for adoption of the OriginTrail protocol by helping corporate users structure their use cases and define the scope of their project. We are actively briefing interested parties about the Trace Alliance as one of the major steps towards full protocol adoption.

The Trace Alliance is a collaboration partnership hub connecting businesses, startups, academics, business leaders and technology vendors with supply chain subject matter experts. The collaborative effort of the alliance resolves different organisational challenges in supply chains management. The Trace Alliance was formed to establish common ground for the prompt and effective utilisation of the blockchain up to its full potential.

If you would like to join Trace Alliance, you are welcome to send an introductory email to alliance@origin-trail.com and our team will gladly onboard you.

Protocol Development Updates: All Deadlines Met ✅

All dev milestones were met in line with the plan outlined in the roadmap. We are very glad that the community actively monitors and suggest improvements not only for the development but also how we communicate releases.

Last month, we had two releases:

April 9th: Ranger release — we made substantial progress on several different fronts:

We introduced the foundational code for the token compensation mechanism;
We also provided documentation regarding the GS1-based data structures in the data layer;
We improved the network layer with a major code rewrite and several safety improvements;
We introduced the OriginTrail Improvement proposal repository on Github to properly structure and organize proposals by the community and developers.

April 23rd: The Kosmos release brought three vital improvements to the system:

Full GS1 standards validation: We improved the GS1 import integration experience by adding full GS1 data validation, which helps speed up integrations;
The first implementation of the market bidding mechanism;
Virtualization of blockchain fingerprinting code, allowing for blockchains other than Ethereum to be introduced in future development.

Last but not least, in April, our team grew by two new senior devs, who bring valuable knowledge and skills to our team.

Nebojša Obradović, Senior Software Engineer- TomTom (Global leader in navigation, traffic and map products, GPS Sport Watches and fleet management solutions) alum, Nebojša is a senior software engineer with a mathematics background. Nebojša specializes in designing and implementing multi-platform projects and has experience in complex signal & data processing.
Janko Simonović, Senior Software Engineer — Janko is a software architect and developer. He spearheaded the Reproducible Computational Analyses for Bioinformatics (Rabix) project and worked for companies like Seven Bridges and Frame.

The team is stronger than ever and eager to submit the Zond release on the 7th of May, which will introduce:

The Initial version of the zero-knowledge privacy sub-layer;
Neo4j database compatibility, allowing for further flexibility in the data layer for implementation;
Standardized and documented graph logic.

Right now, we are halfway there on our journey to the release of Testnet in June 2018. We welcome the active participation of our community members in our tech releases process. You can now submit a proposal to OriginTrail’s Github, using this user-friendly interface for the Improvements Proposals repository. You are also welcome to reach out to our dev team on Rocket.Chat.

Events in April: 10 Events in 7 Countries 🗺️

Springtime is always busy, so nearly all team members are engaged in evangelizing the decentralized future of global supply chains at many events. Apart from four EU-related events presented earlier in this report, and two community meet and greets we will discuss in the next section, our team members actively participated — either as speakers, exhibitors or workshop attendees — at the following events:

Home Delivery World — The annual retail logistics conference and exhibition in Atlanta. Tomaž Levak, CEO spoke about how collaboration and decentralization open up exciting new channels for transparency in supply chains and logistics at a seminar on the blockchain. Among international retailers and brands attending the event were big names like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Coca-Cola, Samsung, and Pepsico.
DApp DEV Conference is an Ethereum Conference by developers for developers in Kiev (Ukraine). Our CTO Branimir Rakić participated in the conference. The DApp DEV Conference brings together prominent experts of the decentralized web from around the world in topics including Ethereum blockchain, distributed ledgers, Web 3.0 and ĐApps. Valeria Kholostenko, Head of Development and Global Community at the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition by ConsenSys, featured OriginTrail in her presentation.
H-Farm Demo night in Venice, Italy. As alumni, co-founders COO Žiga Drev and CEO Tomaž Levak, and CTO Branimir Rakić, participated at H-Farm’s demo event. For 13 years, H-farm has been the innovation platform that supports the creation of new business models and the digital transformation and education of young people and Italian companies.
ITKonekt full-stack dev conference in Novi Sad, Serbia. CTO Branimir Rakić presented OriginTrail to the Serbian dev community. As Serbia has a strong development community, we are constantly on the lookout for great new teammates as well as contributors to the OriginTrail ecosystem.
ENTER Conference in Belgrade, Serbia, Our senior software lead Vladimir Lelicanin presented OriginTrail at an event organized with the purpose to inspire young talents to work in technology and empowering women to participate in the sector, which has potential benefits for our junior talent pool.
Supply Chain 4.0 conference (“Day of modern logistics”) in Zagreb, Croatia. Head of Business Development, Nino Pirtovšek, presented how the blockchain is building trust in supply chains. Senior transportation and logistics managers from Southeast Europe were interested to hear about the adoption of our decentralized protocol.

May will be even more exciting. Our team will travel to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Milano and Amsterdam. The biggest event where Tomaž Levak will speak in May will be Seeds&Chips, the leading food innovation summit in Milano, Italy from May 7th — 10th. The event attracts 15,800+ visitors, 224+ exhibitors, 300+ speakers, 500+ B2B meetings and 140+ partners. Among the partners are 3M, Bayer, KPMG, Carrefour, RIO mare, IBM, Unilever and Carlsberg. Tomaž will speak at the From Farm to Fork: Food Safety and Transparency, From Supply Chain to Blockchain panel on Tuesday, May 8.

Social Responsibility: OriginTrail’s C-Level Team Participates in Incubator for Social Change 💜

OriginTrail’s C-level team is proud to participate in the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition by ConsenSys BSIC Decentralized Impact Incubator to solve global challenges in hardware, democracy, agriculture and the refugee crisis using the blockchain. Žiga Drev, Branimir Rakić and Maja Voje are mentors for an agriculture team who are competing in the challenge and Tomaž Levak is a judge at the competition. They each spend two hours a week working with 3 teams assigned to one mentor. In May, we will also host a local meetup for Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition by ConsenSys BSIC Decentralized Impact Incubator in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Top Media Coverage

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Community Updates and Development

April would not be the same without overwhelming support and good vibes from our community. The most important benchmarks and events were:

On April 17th we celebrated reaching 10,000 Twitter followers.
A community demo: Natureta and Tracing Fresh, Locally-Grown Vegetables with the Blockchain:

2 meet and greet events in the US, in San Francisco and New York City. Thank you all for coming, we loved it.
We conducted a community survey among 3% of Trace token holders. See the results in our Q1 report, which we issued in April.
Swag was sent to Tracers who support us, including some of the influencers who are members of the $TRAC gang — Thanks a lot for sharing the pics.

Wanna find out more about what we have been doing lately?

Search for #TraceBarry in the Twitter search bar and find out what he is up to.

🗓️ May 2018 Will Be No Less Exciting for OriginTrail

At the end of every section of this report, we revealed some of our plans for May were revealed. But, is that all? Of course not. Our key event in May will be the launch of the Token Demand Model, a third-party reviewed prediction model to estimate the demand for the TRAC token, based on the level of usability of the protocol and more.

Our next monthly report will be issued until by 7th of June 2018.

Meanwhile:

Follow us on Twitter;
Talk to us on Telegram and Reddit;
Participate in the open-source development of the OriginTrail protocol with our devs on GitHub or Rocket chat.
Hungry for more? Find more gems in the Q1 2018 report.
TLDR? This: