OriginTrail Quarterly Report — Q3 2018

Q3 was a very vital period in TRAC history, or TRAC-story, if you will. We have been working tirelessly on protocol adoption, launched the Trace Alliance website, and carried out numerous alliance-related activities, including celebrating passing the 50-member milestone. We also launched an open call, which aims to support 10 teams looking to join the mainnet by providing them with $135,000 worth of rewards. We started a new communication channel — a LinkedIn group for Trace Alliance members — and presented OriginTrail to thousands of business professionals at relevant industry events. The technology department perfected the network, with over 800 community members participating in the beta program. Support for additional standards was added to the protocol and the OriginTrail Network Explorer v1 was launched. Let’s dive into more benchmarks and KPIs.

Protocol Adoption: Business Development News

In the third quarter this year, the team was heavily involved in OriginTrail adoption activities. Significant market insight has shined a light on the need to make the technology more understandable to adopters and implementation easier and more effective. Cooperation on B2B events, applications to European and global tenders, and the creation of new partnerships were the driving forces of Q3.

There were three highlights that stood out:

• OriginTrail became an official partner of GS1 Slovenia, which will not only help OriginTrail spread adoption to GS1 members, but also validate the usage of standards in the OriginTrail protocol. Compliance with project implementations, and further technology exploration of OriginTrail’s protocol with existing GS1 technology solutions, will be the next steps in the evolution of the OriginTrail-GS1 partnership. You can read more about it here.
• Further growth of the Trace Alliance is an indication that OriginTrail is gaining ground and attracting interest from all corners of the ecosystem. In September, we reached the 50-members milestone, which means the alliance did not only grow in number, but also in gaining invaluable experience and new perspectives from new members.
• At the end of September, we launched the first OriginTrail Open Call in order to foster innovative solutions for global supply chains. Ten exciting projects — voted on by the OriginTrail community — will get the chance to deploy their solution with help from OriginTrail. We prepared rewards valued at USD 135,000 in TRAC tokens, an on-site workshop with the OriginTrail team and additional perks. Applications are due by November 9th.

More about the open call is available here.

Protocol Development: Technology

Looking back to Q3, the development team released five major testnet updates, the latest being the v1.3.42b release. The team would like to use this opportunity to thank community members running beta OT nodes for reporting tremendously valuable observations and feeding us analytics insights just by simply running a node.

Significant updates to the code base included the command sourcing pattern introduction contributing to node resilience, an optimized bidding mechanism, and several iterations of refactorings and enhancements that increased overall testnet stability.

Last but not least, the first version of the OriginTrail Network Explorer was released, serving as a window into the world of public data on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN).

What the team has in the pipeline for mid Q4 will be the implementation of significantly more cost-efficient bidding (more information will follow from the tech team in the coming weeks), updates for identity management, as well as improved data and network layer implementations.

Financials

As anticipated, the financial influence of the TGE has diminished in Q3, which resulted in all percentages of budget allocation slowly moving towards their intended targets. There has been an increase in development costs as well as focus on security, which will be even more visible once we get closer to the mainnet launch. There have also been slightly bigger business development costs, as these activities are of vital importance for the longevity of the OriginTrail ecosystem.

The organisation remains in a good state financially, with enough funding to sustain the generally hurting crypto market. 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 (at the end of 2020). 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 September 30th was 15,830.

Marketing & Communication

In Q3, the main focus of OriginTrail’s marketing and communication department was to establish new communication channels and formats to support business development efforts. The majority of activities were in the B2B marketing and community sectors.

Here are some highlights:

• In addition to the Trace Alliance website, we also launched a LinkedIn Group and monthly newsletter for Trace Alliance members where we publish exclusive content (AMAs, webinars, presentations, and reading lists).
• We started to host monthly AMAs as part of which community members can ask questions and have them answered by our team members. The first one — with Žiga Drev and Tomaž Levak — was successfully live-streamed on July 30. You can watch the recording here.
• At the beginning of August, the OriginTrail team was thrilled to be featured in Forbes’ article “Why China Will Drive Blockchain And 4 Related Myths” by Mark Tanner. In the article, OriginTrail co-founder Žiga Drev debunked the myth that you can store anything you want on the blockchain cheaply.
• As you know, OriginTrail’s advisors are actively included in the co-creation of value in the ecosystem. We are thankful to our advisors for brilliant pieces of content aimed at the initiation of protocol adoption. Here is exclusive video interview by Andrew Webster, our advisor and Partner at Jardine Lloyd Thompson in the UK. John G. Keogh, OriginTrail’s advisor and chairman of the Trace Alliance, created an insightful LinkedIn article on how the blockchain is vital for provenance traceability and chain of custody analysis in supply chains. The articles were celebrated in the business community.
• Flagship events where OriginTrail was presented by our founders are the GS1 Industry & Standards event in Ireland; the Food’s Future Summit in Hong Kong and the 2050 China Food Tech Summit (other presenters were PwC, Carrefour China and Coca-Cola). The Autumn Roadshow is continuing well into Q4.

Human Resources

OriginTrail has four offices. The headquarters is in Ljubljana, Slovenia (EU), the product team is based in Belgrade, Serbia, and we have market development offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Here are the numbers of full-time employees for Q3:

• Number of team members on June 30: 19
• Number of team members on September 30: 22

*OriginTrail does not report advisors and contractors as team members.

In September, we organized a gathering of the Ljubljana and Belgrade offices in Belgrade. The entire team aligned concerning Q4 goals and benchmarks. Here are some snapshots:

Our talent pool is always open for blockchain technology in supply chains enthusiasts. Apply via our career page if you would like to co-create the decentralized future with us. We always review the talent pool first when we open a new position and have had immense success identifying great candidates.

Trace Token

The Trace token (TRAC) is traded today on three exchanges — KuCoin, IDEX and HitBTC — with KuCoin seeing the highest volume of trading. Volume and price are following the bear market and industry trends. TRAC is still outperforming Ethereum and is up from the TGE price when valued in Ethereum. Circulating supply has slightly been increased. The token holder structure remains similar as in the previous quarter. Token holders that follow their portfolio through the Blockfolio app can follow major updates through the Signals feature.

Towards Q4: Harvest Time

Rome was not built in a day and it took protocols that run today’s internet, such as HTTP, years to become the standards that shape our daily lives. Our primary market is business-to-business (B2B) and there, the decision making, as well as implementation, take time. The 2018 Deloitte Blockchain Survey (Deloitte Slovenia is a member of Trace Alliance) clearly shows that the majority of the market is still in the awareness/education stage, but budgets to adopt blockchain-based technologies are strong. The survey stated that 39% of companies reported that their organization will invest $5 million or more in blockchain technology in the coming year.

According to the adoption innovation curve (Rogers, 2003), right now, we are still in early adoption (2.5% of the market) and what is done today will shape the future of technology development tomorrow. OriginTrail enjoys its strong reputation as a thought leader in interoperability and global standards adoption. In the fall, we spoke at four GS1 events and were featured in their position paper next to Frank Yiannas, VP for Food Safety at Walmart. We are immensely proud of these achievements and of our partners, particularly those like EVRYTHNG, with whom we are building solutions that will help companies use the OriginTrail protocol and the blockchain without the typical integration hassle of new system integration.

Some of the Q4 milestones that we presented in our roadmap are:

• Collaboration with a certification body;
• Start of a major EU-funded project in agriculture (EUR 20 million; over 100 partners);
• Voting on the open call use cases (up to 10 projects will be voted on by token holders).

But, we are committed to delivering much more! What is outlined on the roadmap is just a part of the overall picture. We are operating in a competitive environment where some information is confidential and partners do not want to publicly commit before deals are closed and agreements are made.

Our team has been working hard and smart to position OriginTrail as a go-to solution for companies who understand that we should be building on the existing system, processes, standards, and practices to decrease implementation costs, increase speed and reduce inter-organizational friction. In Q4, the fruits of our ongoing commitment to implement with business needs in mind will start to show and we plan to end the year with a bang.

Thank you for supporting OriginTrail, co-creating the protocol with us and spreading awareness about our cutting-edge solution.

Trace on!

OriginTrail Team

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