OriginTrail Quarterly Report — Q1 2020
The first quarter of 2020 was marked with many challenges, but the OriginTrail ecosystem once again proved its resilience. Since the Freedom-Gemini Network launch in Q4 2019, the development team has released ten updates for the OriginTrail node client and entered the new quarter by checking off a milestone with the v4.1 release. We are still actively involved in many European projects where we are putting to use a range of OriginTrail capabilities. Each month, an update on our ongoing activities can be found in the monthly reports, whereas the quarterly report is a wrap up of key achievements.
Protocol Adoption: Business Development News
Q1 was full of exciting development for Trace Labs, the core development company of the OriginTrail protocol. As COVID-19 developed into a pandemic in February, Trace Labs introduced necessary changes to our work process early on, ensuring the continued execution of projects and the building of organizational resilience.
In the Q4 report, it was announced that Trace Labs is part of four currently active European consortia: SmartAgriHubs, DEMETER, LEDGER, and Blockchers. The SmartAgriHubs and DEMETER projects are still active whereas LEDGER and Blockchers have been completed. In Q1, we joined two new projects, BlockIS and PARSEC, both of which are supported by the European Union.
Food Data Market (FDM)
After extensive development, the Food Data Market (FDM) was introduced to the public. Food Data Market is an open-source software infrastructure, utilizing the OriginTrail protocol for trusted data exchange with the goal of contributing to sustainable supply chains.
The magic of FDM is that this infrastructure can be applied to data exchange in any industry, not just food supply chains. More information can be found in the blog post and the repository on GitHub. FDM is currently in the pilot stage, and we are exploring new possibilities for the project to further develop our technology stack and bring it closer to its users. Co-founder and CTO Branimir recorded a demo for all interested in how it works.
Laboratory Data Market
The start of the new year brought Trace Labs another project powered by OriginTrail. Trace Labs is part of the Blockchain Innovation Spaces program, known as BlockIS.
Supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Trace Labs is developing a Laboratory Data Marketplace (LDM) for trusted food provenance based on isotopic reference tests of food products. Currently, the project is in the Experiment Stage, after the successful completion of the Innovative Stage.
PARSEC
March saw the launch of another project based on the data marketplace prototype. It was presented at the PARSEC kick-off boot camp. Trace Labs will use the OriginTrail protocol to develop and launch a verifiable sustainability scheme for food supply chains based on satellite Earth observation data. Key partners in the PARSEC accelerator are the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC), BioSense, the European Union Earth Observation Programme (Copernicus), Asociación Valenciana del Sector de la Energía (AVAESEN), and others.
Oracle OpenWorld Middle East
In January, Žiga Drev and Branimir Rakić, both co-founders of OriginTrail and Trace Labs, attended the Oracle OpenWorld Middle East 2020 IT conference in Dubai. At the event, Trace Labs presented common solutions with its new partner AppsPro, a leading Oracle solution provider. Side by side, they are bringing the OriginTrail protocol’s capabilities closer to Oracle users in the Middle East.
More generally, OriginTrail has gained a lot of interest in the Oracle ecosystem of software builders. We continue to build and validate Network Operating System capabilities to support the needs of network of partners with the 4.1 node client release. This is the most important step we have taken since becoming Oracle’s partner for blockchain technology.
Protocol Development: Technology
The development team successfully completed all tasks set at the start of the new quarter. The most important release in Q4 2019 was the Freedom-Gemini Network. Since then, the development team has regularly published releases, first on the testnet, and then on the mainnet to continuously improve the OriginTrail node client. Each update was released on a bi-weekly basis. Therefore, the Trace Labs core development team drastically improved the Freedom-Gemini Network during Q1.
From the first (v4.0.1) to the most recent (v4.0.10) release, many improvements were made and issues solved. The most important improvements were the enhancements in the litigation procedures and peer-to-peer network visibility, the improved memory handling, the security updates, and the accelerations in the export process. Numerous under-the-hood improvements are available on GitHub and Discord.
First Major Update of Freedom-Gemini: OriginTrail v4.1
This update was released in April, but it is the result of a lot of hard work that happened in the first quarter. Release v4.1 brings an important new feature, the first of its kind in the industry: the ability to hold public and permissioned data in a single decentralized graph on the same node and within the same dataset.
It enables exciting new use cases, like data marketplace, data portability, and automated GDPR compliance.
Financials
Following the pattern established in previous quarters, spending is approaching set targets. The development costs are still increasing and will continue to increase with the focus remaining on executing the roadmap laid out for the following quarter.
The organization remains in a good state financially, with enough funding to sustain further development efforts. The envisioned financial structure, according to the execution plan of the OriginTrail team, was presented at the TGE and can be seen in the values showing target share (at the end of 2020) below. 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 assets’ value on Mar 31th was 4987 ETH.
Key ODN Adoption Metrics
In February, Trace Labs co-founder & managing director, Žiga Drev, outlined three key ODN-related metrics that contribute to the value of the OriginTrail ecosystem and support TRAC token appreciation. We will enrich quarterly reports with these metrics from now on.
We believe that supply chains can become sustainable only by allowing all organizations, big or small, to benefit from trusted data exchange. We have been committed to delivering real value to user communities for nearly a decade. The launch of a new, versatile, and very capable OriginTrail protocol has brought about a paradigm-changing way of allowing companies of all sizes to link, exchange, and add integrity to data. As the core developer of OriginTrail, Trace Labs is also the main adoption agent for the ODN, making sure that the development of the protocol is validated in operational environments, as this is the only right way to make engineering decisions.
The purpose of closely monitoring selected metrics — namely the number of jobs activated each month, the total TRAC staked in the network, and the total data size — is to understand the bottom-line progress of ODN adoption, validate the quality of previous development choices, and plan a future development roadmap through validation in real industry environments. Given the demand and already-approved projects featuring the OriginTrail protocol, we expect a very positive outcome in the next quarter, as well. Currently, our main focus lies in ensuring partners and clients receive the necessary service that will enable greater resilience in the post-pandemic economy, and that we can do so on a larger scale and with higher levels of automation.
New Jobs on the ODN
Monthly active jobs represents the number of new datasets published in a month on the OriginTrail Mainnet for which node holders are getting compensated. Datasets are published by organizations using the network for various purposes. Jobs incentivize node holders in the network to stake TRAC as this qualifies them for compensation in exchange for data storage.
Each month in Q1 2020, the number of new jobs was much higher than ever, with an average of 407 new jobs a month added to the ODN mainnet. Since a lot of jobs have a duration of more than a month, the total number of active jobs on the network is constantly increasing.
Total TRAC Staked
Each node joining the ODN mainnet is required to stake 1000 TRAC as a safety measure (this will change to 3000 TRAC in one of the following releases). Furthermore, data holders are required to stake the same amount of TRAC, which will get compensated as collateral to ensure they maintain the data availability in its original form (e.g. for a job with a 100 TRAC compensation, the node holder is required to stake 100 TRAC, which get locked in the smart contract until the end of job duration).
In Q1 2020, we observed a constant and stable growth in the volume of TRAC tokens staked on the ODN. Currently, 1.5% of TRAC tokens are staked in the network relative to the total supply.
Total Data Size
The total size of data stored on nodes participating in ODN is also an important metric that shows the utilization of the network for business data.
It has gained strong momentum in Q1, with constant growth. At the end of the quarter, there was 10 times more data on the ODN mainnet than at the beginning of the year, which shows the richness of the recently uploaded data sets.
Marketing & Communications
Even though the COVID-19 crisis prevented Trace Labs from attending many events that were planned at the beginning of the year, some still successfully took place online and we were very happy to join.
Community AMA
The community is very important to the OriginTrail ecosystem. That is why, at the start of January, we once again organized our community AMA session. It was hosted by the distinguished OriginTrail community member Guinnessstache. All three founders — Žiga, Tomaž, and Branimir — joined the session and shared more insights about Freedom-Gemini. The AMA is still available online for those with unanswered questions or who may be looking to stay up to date.
GS1 Global Forum 2020
Once again, Trace Labs attended one of the most important annual events in Brussels, the GS1 Global Forum. GS1 standards are at the core of the OriginTrail technological stack, providing compatibility with existing labelling, capturing and data sharing mechanisms, enabling the necessary interoperability needed to connect different IT systems within supply chains. At the GS1 Global Forum 2020, Trace Labs’s Co-Founder & Managing Director Žiga Drev joined a blockchain panel with three other blockchain innovators. He talked about the open-source Food Data Market project, which aims to bring greater visibility in food supply chains through the use of the OriginTrail protocol with the GS1 EPCIS open standard. For more insights, read the blog post.
A Live Interview
In February, OriginTrail co-founders and managing directors, Tomaž Levak and Žiga Drev, responded to an interview invitation from Tom Heavey, owner of the Crypto Gurus YouTube channel. Tom was already acquainted with OriginTrail and the interview turned out to be a really sophisticated overview of the OriginTrail ecosystem, its ongoing project updates, and plans for the future. The highlights can also be found in this blog post.
Human Resources Update
Trace Labs unites OriginTrail’s core developers at three different locations: Hong Kong, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Belgrade, Serbia.
Team members across locations:
- Q4 2019, December 31: 19
- Q1 2020, March 31: 20
*OriginTrail does not report advisors and contractors as team members.
Trace Labs is constantly looking for team reinforcements! If you are passionate about building the decentralized future, we’d love to hear from you! Check out our career page and don’t hesitate to get in touch even if the open positions aren’t exactly your fit. We always enjoy meeting like-minded innovators.
Trace Token
The Trace token (TRAC) is available on Bittrex International, KuCoin, IDEX, HitBTC, and ETHoutlet. The number of token holders with more than 500,000 TRAC has grown in Q1 2020.
Token holders that follow their portfolio through Blockfolio and Delta can stay up to date on major updates directly through the apps’ features.
As mentioned in the previous quarterly report — January 2020 was the month when the last portion of tokens for Founders and Team were unlocked. That makes it a good time to also share an overview of the different pools of tokens and the amounts up to which they have been distributed. In the table below, you can see that there is no more TRAC in “hard” lock, which refers to tokens locked in a smart contract under a defined time-constraint. However, that does not mean that all TRAC has been put into circulation. In the column “soft” lock, you can find funds that have not been distributed and are also currently not planned for distribution in 2020. The intention is to reassign TRAC from the “soft” lock category entirely to the future development fund, effectively increasing the size of the fund by 6.5%. This will ensure that the OriginTrail protocol development can be sustained with respect to future requirements of its user communities.
Despite all the TRAC being distributed, not all transactions from smart contracts had yet been made. These asset movements are planned to take place in early May, which should also correct the TRAC circulation supply information published on different portals (e.g. Coin Market Cap).
We are looking forward to continuing to grow the community. Currently, there are more than 200 active nodes that are contributing to the strong ODN-enabling trusted data exchange in global supply chains.
Each contribution to the development and overall opinion is always more than welcome. In February, our valued community member bottomshorter designed an amazing visual overview of the OriginTrail ecosystem. Later on, he even brought to life an independent OriginTrail community website with a comprehensive overview of all the latest project updates. We are really grateful for such input!
We’re making supply chains work. Together.
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