OriginTrail Quarterly Report — Q1 2018
In the first quarter following our token generation event, OriginTrail made significant progress on all fronts. More than 120 companies are evaluating how to use the protocol in their existing business models, the community grew at a 3-digit growth rate, our dev team is among top 10 most active blockchain development teams in the world on GitHub, and the Trace token experienced a healthy and steady growth trend and is currently more than 350% above the token sale price in ETH. The all-time high value of the token was 0,4788 USD and 0,00040139 ETH.
As we are moving towards deploying the testnet in June and the mainnet in Q3, our team is delighted to present you with the first ever OriginTrail quarterly report. The quarterly reports will be published in addition to our monthly reports, which we are releasing by the 7th of every month.
As we already mentioned, this is OriginTrail’s first quarter following our token sale, which was completed on January 17th. We have chosen January 18th as the starting date for some of our benchmark metrics.
Business Development
The application side of the OriginTrail protocol is getting stronger with each development cycle. Since the completion of the token sale, many companies have started using the OriginTrail solution. The applicability of the protocol makes it widely available for different service verticals such as data integrity in supply chains, data ownership, trade finance, and compliance. These services can be applied in different industries. Due to the potential applicability in different industries, our advisory board welcomed a strong new addition, Mr. Andrew Webster, Partner at Jardine Llyod Thompson, who is helping us with business models from the financial services industry.
Scalability hub Trace Alliance members are actively working on the deployment of OriginTrail nodes on a trial basis to explore how the protocol could enhance the value proposition of their own business models. They are also developing tailored applications for third parties. Once we establish the Trace Alliance ecosystem, partners will be announced. We haven’t been holding still, though, as more than 120 interested companies have received implementation instructions and started exploring integration possibilities. These companies are spread over 30 countries. Most of the interest is coming from Europe (43%). A total of 24% of the companies wanting to explore OriginTrail are from Asia and 23% are from North America. Interest is getting stronger in Australia, with 7%, and OriginTrail is also becoming present in Africa.
The OriginTrail solution can be applied in many business configurations and different industries. Since the main focus of the company is scalability and wide adoption of the protocol, 28% out of more than 120 interested companies are IT service providers. These companies will be able to deploy different solutions to their existing customers and other third parties. 12% of interest comes from consulting companies. Also, manufacturing, logistics and production companies account for 21% of overall interest. The food and beverage industry is showing 7% of overall interest.
Currently, there is a strong focus on the development of the Trace Alliance website, which will work as a collaboration hub amongst companies that want to use the protocol in their business models, service providers that want to act as protocol integrators and different private IT initiatives. The multiplication effect and affordability — the open-source protocol is publicly available to everyone — will further scale the adoption of the OriginTrail solution.
Technology Development
Immediately after the token sale was completed, we proceeded with development according to the roadmap we set ourselves for the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN).
We have decided to focus our development efforts in dynamic, bi-weekly release sprints. Each of the releases brings us incrementally closer to the test-net release in early summer. So far, our development has been on track, with a significant effort in providing detailed documentation about the developments and current capabilities of the ODN node. It enables us to present our work to the community, make it available for users working on their own implementations and include their feedback in next iterations.
The Alpha network was deployed successfully in February with our first partner, Chinese online store Yimishiji. By end of February, we also deployed successful data integration with TagItSmart and Montenegrin wine producer Plantaže, showcasing a anti-counterfeiting solution that utilizes smart tags and OriginTrail.
Our latest alpha node code release came out at the end of March, dubbed v0.4 Mechta, and included important updates and documentation about the node incentive system based on the staking of tokens and node reputation.
Financials
Due to the fact that Q1 included January, which was still a TGE process month, certain larger expenses had to be taken into account. We were performing intense PR/communication as well as marketing activities, which relied more on community/WoM after TGE. There were also higher expenses in the legal/financial department in this quarter and security spending, as some TGE smart contract revisions were done in January as well.
The share of business development and development is expected to rise in the following quarters as other one-time expenses effect will dilute and spending in those two fields will increase.
The company is financially in a good state with enough liquidity to weather the suboptimal market conditions going forward as well.
The envisioned financial structure, according to the execution plan of OriginTrail team, was presented at the TGE and can be seen in the values below showing target share (should be met by the end of the 3 year period). Next to the target share, you can find the current share of costs based on the actual funds spent in a particular segment up to the date of the report. The final assets value in ETH on 30th of March was 17,482 (we concluded the TGE with 17,928 ETH of contributions).
Marketing & Communications
Since OriginTrail is developing an open-source protocol for supply chains based on the blockchain, the marketing department’s primary job is to spread awareness, and engage and support three groups of stakeholders, who are the pillars of building a decentralized ecosystem. The stakeholders are:
- Companies (B2B) who would like to implement the protocol (those with a supply chain) or help others implement it (service providers);
- Token holders and future nodes holders;
- Developers eager to participate in protocol development.
The marketing department plays an important role in spreading awareness for OriginTrail by working on media outreach, public relations, and creating thought leadership with a presence at events as well as with content marketing. The majority of marketing activities and budget in Q1 were focused on B2B marketing and the establishment of processes, platforms, and events for onboarding companies to our ecosystem.
Since the end of the token sale, OriginTrail was mentioned in more than 50 media posts, including those from CNBC, Digital Trends, and The Merkle. We were also present in more than 30 influencer’s videos on YouTube. OriginTrail’s founders and team members are increasingly recognized as thought leaders in the field of implementing blockchain to supply chains. In Q1, they presented at six conferences and industry events.
In March, we conducted a survey of Trace token holders. A total of 3% of token holders participated in the survey. We wanted to learn more about their communication preferences. We will not reveal all the data we gathered, however, we would like to present two interesting findings.
The top 5 countries for OriginTrail are The United States (32.9%), the Netherlands 11%, Australia 9.2%, United Kingdom (7.4%) and Canada (4.9%). Our team aims to organize field marketing activities in these countries in the near future. We also asked our community how happy they are to be our community members. The results are really encouraging.
In addition to this, OriginTrail pays great attention to community management. We like to keep our community well-informed by communicating progress with them on a daily basis via Telegram, Twitter, and Reddit.
In addition to those channels, we also established a chat room at Rocket.Chat for the in-depth discussion with the dev and biz dev team, and Discord, which is as a community-led channel. We also started to produce more video content, the most viewed video being the showcase of our dairy use case. In March, we onboarded 5 highly active community members who have been with us for months to become community admins, in addition to team members who are (and will remain) there.
OriginTrail has not advertised on social media post-TGE, nor do we pay for YouTube reviews of PR articles. We like to keep our organic growth and community-led communication development before we launch the mainnet. Meanwhile, we are focused on building new partnerships, spreading project awareness in B2B circles and catering to our community with devotion, passion for technology, and gratitude.
Human Resources (Team & Employees)
OriginTrail has offices in four cities. The company is headquartered in Slovenia (European Union), the product team is located in Serbia and we also have project offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
- Number of team members on 18 January: 15
- Number of team members on 30 March: 16
In February, we started to recruit for 4 new senior hires. By the end of March, we identified the best candidates for those positions. In May, all the candidates will be joining us so the team will surpass 20 members.
* All new hires will join the team full-time no later than at the beginning of May.
We are always looking for new people with skills and ambitions to join us on our mission. See our careers page!
Trace Token
Trace token (TRAC) will be the integral part and glue of the ODN. It will enable operations on the network and will be needed both by companies using the solution and by users providing the nodes. So, there is no surprise that the interest for the token has been growing steadily in Q1 along with publicity for the project — and it has reflected positively in the coin’s value. These are the first metrics we are providing regarding the token information. Once the main net goes live, we could reveal more information about the protocol architecture and token KPIs.
Since the launch of the token, TRAC has been listed on 3 online exchanges: Gatecoin, HitBTC, and KuCoin. Community members also started exchanging the token on some decentralized exchanges, most notably on IDEX where Trace has been one of the most traded tokens for some time.
Closing Thoughts
We live in exciting times, as every step we make resonates both in blockchain communities as well as throughout supply-chain-related sectors. The mission we have embarked on is being successfully followed thanks to the experience, hard work and audacity the team puts in daily delivering the technology. Yet, the tremendous gravity acquired by the decentralised OriginTrail protocol, which inspires us all, stems from you, the community that provides support, guidance and inspiration in critical moments.
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 two thirds of the world GDP, we will continue on delivering the most professionally-built software while bringing businesses together to catalyse the adoption.
To that end, we aim at deploying the Trace Alliance capabilities, which will greatly facilitate the on-boarding process for businesses while enabling them to work together efficiently in delivering new business models underpinned by the OriginTrail Protocol. We continue working with enterprises, governments and smart individuals to enable data exchange on the upcoming test network in June.
We are honoured to have the privilege to be part of this amazing movement we all built. Thank you for your continuous contribution to make this world a better place.
Trace on!
