OriginTrail Quarterly Report — Q2 2020 | Towards a #Google4SupplyChains
The second quarter of 2020 saw the world economy collapse in an unprecedented way due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and the supply chain interruptions that ensued. The management behind the OriginTrail core development team has quickly implemented all measures to secure the safety of its team members and make sure all development and business operations run without impediments. The past quarter has definitely been the most defining time period in OriginTrail’s seven-year history as it challenged the way we traditionally developed products and business. However, it also introduced tremendous opportunities. Global supply chains are complex and no organisation, big or small, will be able to disregard the levels of opacity exacerbated by the “new normal” the post-COVID-19 world is creating.
Trace Labs — Core Developers of OriginTrail have, along with its global partners, made the right development and business decisions to cater to the needs of global businesses seeking to achieve resilience in their supply chains. To bring supply chains to the next level, we continuously seek inspiration in technology components from builders of both centralized and decentralized solutions (from the likes of Google to decentralized projects). Thanks to the uniqueness of our development trajectory, we were able to reconcile legacy (traditional) IT systems with decentralized solutions, all with the aim of delivering value to OriginTrail users through interoperability. A lean approach in planning and executing development targets has made ODN more battle-tested and versatile, and we have witnessed its use constantly proliferating in scope and scale. With this in mind and harnessing feedback from implementations across multiple industries, we released a detailed roadmap for the second half of 2020.
We are proud to present the achievements made in the second quarter of the challenging 2020, decisively putting the OriginTrail Ecosystem on a trajectory to become the #Google4SupplyChains. We hope you enjoy reading the Q2 report 🦄.
Protocol Adoption: Business Development News
Instruments of Trust: British Standards Institution Releases White Paper on Use of OriginTrail Decentralised Network
In early 2019, the business standards company BSI partnered up exclusively with Trace Labs, the core developers of OriginTrail, to deliver blockchain-enabled solutions. With such solutions, the British Standards Institution (BSI) seeks to enhance its global assurance, certification, and supply chain services by ensuring the integrity of digital records. The OriginTrail Decentralised Network (ODN) has thus been made central in delivering paradigm-shifting solutions that are redefining the way trust is being brokered in global supply chains.
After a year-long development effort on both sides, last quarter, the BSI launched a series of blockchain-based solutions catering to both organizations and individuals aiming to build resilience in their supply chains, a need becoming even more apparent in light of the COVID-19 virus outbreak. Solutions described in the recently released BSI white paper — titled “Instruments of Trust: BSI’s Blockchain-Based Solutions” — enable a secure and trusted way of verifying the authenticity of claimed personal credentials as well as company and product certifications.
One of the introduced solutions is the Supplier Compliance Audit Network (SCAN) Trusted Factory Blockchain Program designed for US importers to ensure the authenticity of a factory’s certification and factory credentials. SCAN is an association of importers that was formed to eliminate foreign factory audit fatigue associated with supply chain security importing criteria within the US Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program (CTPAT). SCAN importing members have combined annual sales of USD 1.25 trillion and source from factories around the world. More than 50 percent of these factories are shared by multiple SCAN members, which, prior to SCAN, would have resulted in the facilities having regular audits by independent importers (SCAN has more than 18,000 factories in the database and the program’s popularity has grown internationally, with several hundred audits conducted monthly).
The solution secures permissioned audit data and factory credentials on the ODN, based on the public Ethereum blockchain, and makes them accessible to SCAN members and interested government agencies such as CTPAT for viewing. The implementation pioneers the usage of a W3C Verifiable Credentials data model to ensure interoperability and compatibility with novel frameworks such as the Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework.
SCAN Members
Powered by Origintrail, the announced solutions, including the Proof of standards ownership and Training certificates applications, and the rest yet to be announced, have now entered the commercialisation phase. Important advancements in regulations in the US and EU, as well as an increased oversight over imported products exercised by the governments, are rendering the Instruments of Trust the solution stack of choice for global supply chains.
European Union Supports the Food Safety Market with Trace Labs to Facilitate Blockchain Adoption in Food Certification
The EU-funded Food Safety Market (FSM) project will develop an industrial data platform to give a digital boost to the way food certification takes place in Europe (globally the market is expected to be worth $11.45 billion by 2023). Specifically, it will build on state-of-the-art blockchain technologies to create an open and collaborative virtual environment that facilitates the exchange and connection of data between different food safety actors interested in sharing information that is critical to certification. In a three-year period, the project will conduct extensive piloting with European providers of inspection and certification services. Having partnered with 10 reputable organisations from eight European countries, Trace Labs — core developers of OriginTrail — are playing an integral role in supporting the FSM consortium with their open-source infrastructure and the ODN, designed for trusted and secure data exchange. Read more about the FSM in our announcement.
Moreover, the FSM consortium will be made a part of the Trace Alliance, an EU-based, non-profit association within the OriginTrail ecosystem that functions as an inclusive and collaborative hub, connecting organizations aiming to work together and solve complex supply chain challenges using blockchain technology. This will allow for wider dissemination of the FSM project results and allow other interested organisations to join the initiative, fostering collaboration across Europe.
Read more about the FSM in our announcement and stay tuned for more information.
EMURGO Joins OriginTrail’s Trace Alliance Composed of a Diverse Set of Established Members
The Trace Alliance collaborative hub was established to bring diverse organisations, large & medium enterprises, service providers, and research institutions together in order to advance global supply chain transparency and trust in an inclusive manner, avoiding technology dogmatism. We are immensely proud to have welcomed EMURGO — the Cardano blockchain ecosystem commercial arm — as a member of the Trace Alliance. Their membership furthers Trace Alliance’s capabilities to improve the interoperability framework for a diverse set of enterprise blockchain solutions and positively impacts the core values of the OriginTrail ecosystem, which are neutrality, usability, and inclusivity. Read more in EMURGO’s blog: available here.
Protocol Development: Technology
The technical development during Q2 introduced pivotal improvements, in spite of the quarter being affected by the global pandemic. The Trace Labs team has quickly and successfully adapted to a work-from-home environment with minimum process disruption and has brought a total of seven releases with important updates on the node core, smart contract optimizations, and protocol operations. With these improvements, the usability of OriginTrail technology for businesses increased by an order of magnitude.
Most notably, the 4.1 release has brought a much sought-after feature set for introducing extended privacy to the ODN Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), enabling data permissioning on a dataset level within the publicly replicated, verifiable claims compatible graphs. The ODN DKG now enables novel industry use cases such as the Decentralized Data Marketplace infrastructure (developed through ongoing partnerships), data provenance and portability systems, and decentralized EPCIS repositories.
The team has also published a new roadmap for 2020 outlining the development path according to the user feedback and ongoing active projects, one of which is the Liquidity Provisioning System of nOS (LPS), designed to abstract complexities for businesses utilizing cryptocurrencies. The initial integration utilizes Uniswap liquidity pools, enabling access to TRAC via the nOS LPS, which will be extended to provide liquidity from additional sources in the coming months.
Also, as announced at the v4 launch, the mandatory node stake deposit has increased to 3000 TRAC to further enhance the resilience of the network, and the update successfully completed at the end of Q2.
Financials
Following the pattern established in the 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.
As announced in the last quarterly report, we were also able to increase the size of the future development fund with the tokens from other pools that have all been unlocked. The total size of the treasury including the future development fund, therefore, stands at 34,883.62 ETH on June 30th.
Key ODN Adoption Metrics on Track
Since the introduction of the three key ODN-adoption metrics in February, and the Total Graph Size (TGS) in May, we have been successfully expanding the OriginTrail ecosystem and facilitating ODN adoption, particularly in enterprise contexts.
As a reminder, the purpose of monitoring selected metrics — namely the number of new jobs each month, the total TRAC staked in the network, the total data size, and total graph size (TGS) — 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.
That being said, successful business development and project implementation in Q2 significantly increased ODN activity, reflected in strong, above expectation growth across all four metrics, as highlighted in the graphs below. This is a strong validation that ODN is being developed in the right direction, and is indeed fit-for-purpose in enterprise environments. As we continue with development outlined in the ODN 2020 roadmap, we are confident and excited to see continued ODN adoption and growth of the metrics in Q3, Q4, and well into 2021.
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 scalable 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.
New Jobs on the ODN
New ODN jobs is 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 linked data storage, availability, and verification services.
In the first two months of Q2 2020, the number of new jobs on the ODN hovered at around 390 before reaching an all-time high of 454 new jobs in June. On average, 412 new jobs were added to the ODN mainnet each month. 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 an initial amount of TRAC as a safety measure (currently at 3000 TRAC, updated from the initial amount of 1000). Furthermore, data holders are required to stake the same amount of TRAC as their compensation to serve as collateral, ensuring they maintain the data availability and presentation 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).
higher in Q2 2020 than in the previous quarter. We observed a constant and stable growth, and on June 30 approximately 2% of TRAC tokens were 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.
Total data size continued with significant growth in Q2, shooting past the 100GB milestone and settling at approximately 120GB at the end of June. The amount of data on the ODN mainnet more than doubled in the last three months, indicating great momentum for the ODN.
Total Graph Size (TGS)
Total graph size (TGS) was introduced in May as the fourth key metric and is meant to tie all of the other metrics together. TGS is a measurement that combines the total number of graph vertices (also known as graph cardinality, or the order of the graph) and the total number of graph edges (known in graph theory as graph size) of a decentralized graph. The vertices represent all the different objects that have been added to the graph (such as identifiers and specific information for supply chain events, products, attestations, locations, and certificates) while the edges represent the connections between these objects.
Looking at TGS development since the beginning of 2020, we can see stable growth that picked up further in June, in line with the other key metrics. Our forecast for TGS was 5,000,000 by the end of June, while the actual value sits at slightly over 5,500,000, beating the forecast by approximately 10%.
Marketing & Communications
As elsewhere around the Globe, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Trace Labs’ business development and marketing activities in Q2. All live events planned for this period were canceled and all our communications and marketing activities moved online completely. Operating as a decentralized organisation prior to the pandemic proved to be a great advantage and we happily seized numerous opportunities for online interactions with our various communities during this period.
NonCon2020 and Other Speaking Engagements
OriginTrail co-founder and CTO Branimir Rakic joined NonCon 2020 to speak on the optimization of blockchain use for data scalability. NonCon 2020 was organised as a replacement event for EDCON Vienna, which was canceled due to COVID-19. It focused on the community, development, and security, inviting interests beyond the Ethereum, including all cypherpunk and privacy-focused individuals and communities. You can watch the replay of Branimir’s talk on YouTube.
Branimir also joined the discussion on digital identity and blockchain at Podim, one of the biggest and most influential startup and tech conferences in Europe, particularly the CEE region.
To expand the knowledge on how the blockchain can help improve supply chains, the Trace Labs team joined forces with Emurgo and organised a deep dive webinar. Jurij Škornik, Trace Labs General Manager, and Branimir shared how OriginTrail technology is being adopted by businesses from around the world.
BSI Instruments of Trust Resonated within the Crypto Community and Beyond
BSI’s whitepaper release on three new solutions based on blockchain technology and OriginTrail Decentralised Network resonated within the crypto community and beyond. It was picked up by MarketWatch, Yahoo! Finance, Altcoin Buzz, and others and made $TRAC one of the top 15 crypto by social volume in May.
Recognitions by International Institutions
In Q2, OriginTrail received recognitions from two important institutions. The World Economic Forum included the work done by OneAgrix using OriginTrail to build resilience in the halal-certified product supply chain in their Blockchain Toolkit.
BSI Bund, the German Federal Office for Information Security, published a study on the security of more than 300 blockchain apps. Within the supply chain category, they focused on OriginTrail and Vechain and noted that “It can be assumed that OriginTrail will capture a larger part of the market in the future.”
Monthly Office Hours with Founders
To enhance our communication with the community, we introduced Monthly Office Hours with the founders in Q2. These video chats, anchored by community member Guinnessstache, give the community a new opportunity to engage with the founders directly once per month. The community sets the agenda by contributing questions they would like to see addressed and joins the live discussion with Guinnessstache and the founders through a webinar. For those that miss the live discussions, recordings are available on OriginTrail’s YouTube channel. The Monthly Office Hours are substituting the Monthly Reports as a more inclusive form of communication with the community.
Shoutout to the one and only, Guinnesstache — dad, husband, network administrator, and a Traceblazer!
Shoutout to the Tracers Community
The three core pillars of the OriginTrail ecosystem are neutrality, inclusivity, and usability. Developing an open-source technology, we have always appreciated the community that has been growing around our technology and encouraged community engagement in all forms. In Q2, this community has really been prolific, producing a community-made overview of the OriginTrail ecosystem, mind maps, node setup instructions, community-led Telegram channel, bombastic videos breaking down the latest news and updates, and family celebrations with OriginTrail. What is even more amazing is to see this kind of activity continue and thrive going forward into Q3.
Attention of the Larger Crypto Community
All our Q2 news and updates, as well as the activity of the Tracers community, attracted the attention of the larger crypto community. The founders recorded a lengthy interview with Brad Laurie — Blockchain Brad. Nik Patel prepared a coin report on OriginTrail, CMtopdog recorded a video about OriginTrail, and Famous Amos of Chill Zone International recorded several of them as well and organized different hangouts for the community interested in OriginTrail.
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:
- Q1 2020, March 31: 20
- Q2 2020, June 30: 19
*OriginTrail does not report advisors and contractors as team members.
Trace Labs is constantly looking for team reinforcements! If you are passionate about building a decentralized future, we would love to hear from you! Check out our career page and do not hesitate to get in touch even if the open positions are not exactly your fit. We always enjoy meeting like-minded innovators.
Trace Token
The Trace token (TRAC) is available on Bittrex Global, KuCoin, IDEX, HitBTC, and ETHoutlet. In June, Bittrex Global started supporting additional trading pairs for TRAC, unlocking ETH-TRAC and USDT-TRAC.
In Q2, two new pairs were added for TRAC on Bittrex Global: ETH-TRAC and USDT-TRAC.
Token holders that follow their portfolio through Blockfolio and Delta can stay up to date on major updates directly through the apps’ features.
The work done by the team and the achievements accomplished across the ecosystem have reaffirmed that the OriginTrail project has strong foundations. It is the foundations that have proven to be the winning ingredient in overcoming challenges in the world of the “new normal” that we all must embrace now. Neutrality, inclusivity, and usability remain the core values of the OriginTrail community (both within token holders and business communities) with the bespoke $TRAC token providing a necessary utility to all participants therein. Ten years from now, we will all look back at this period and remembered it as the advent of the largest decentralized repository for connected (linked) data, aka the #Google4SupplyChains.
