Staking for the world’s first multi-chain Decentralized Knowledge Graph
To accelerate the growth of the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph, significant development efforts have been invested in creating the Starfleet blockchain. The Starfleet blockchain is to be utilized in OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph to provide a parallel consensus solution that relies entirely on TRAC and significantly lowers the barrier for publishing data holding jobs on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN), thus allowing for economies of scale (making the technology interesting for mainstream users) and scope (Knowledge Economy Tools). Support for additional blockchains beyond the Starfleet chain (e.g., the upcoming blockchain ecosystems such as Polkadot) will enable integrating the benefits of their respective functionalities in the OriginTrail consensus layer, making the ODN a truly blockchain agnostic solution.
The expected efficiency gains are tremendous. (*Disclaimer: By describing a possible future state, we wish to explain the mechanisms at play and are not making any predictions, promises, or giving financial advice of any sort.) By decoupling from the gas market of the Ethereum blockchain, we expect the OriginTrail’s cost efficiency to increase by more than tenfold, with jobs that have 100 times greater network activity, resulting in a vast increase of the total knowledge (from a Total Graph Size (TGS) of 8 million in 2020 to 96 million in 2021).
To achieve this with an even more accelerated pace and greater resilience, we are announcing to launch the OriginTrail Version 5 on the xDAI blockchain. The xDai blockchain is a stable Ethereum-based blockchain designed for fast and inexpensive stable transactions. Those participating in the upcoming staking process are going to receive exclusive access to a bounty pool of 5,000,000 TRAC tokens to test the OriginTrail v5. Each participant in the staking process, which starts on February 18th, will receive 5% or more of bounty TRAC on top of the staked amount (corresponding to total staked amount) with multi-chain token properties enabled by the xDAI chain bridge to the Ethereum blockchain.
As the registration for the staking process vastly surpassed the initially proposed hard cap of 50,000,000 TRAC tokens (registered interest currently exceeds 80,000,000 TRAC tokens), the Starfleet Task Force of the Trace Alliance Working Group on Decentralization and Tokenomics has unanimously accepted the core team’s proposal to increase the hard cap to 100,000,000 TRAC tokens. Having done so, we are continuously pursuing the principle of inclusiveness and look forward to attracting a wider audience to participate in the staking process for the world’s first multi-chain Decentralized Knowledge Graph.
Starfleet development on track
The development of the OriginTrail community-supported Starfleet blockchain has been moving at a strong pace, achieving major milestones in January 2021. The joint efforts of the OriginTrail Core Developers and the team at Parity Technologies have lead to reaching technology readiness level 4 (TRL4) on the complete ODN to Starfleet integration — the first lab testnet of the multi-chain ODN, operating with both the Starfleet alpha blockchain version and Ethereum Rinkeby, has been successfully integrated.
The Starfleet blockchain is based on the Substrate blockchain framework created by Parity Technologies, developers of Polkadot, with whom OriginTrail core developers have been working through the Substrate Builders program over the past several months. Both teams are focused on ensuring the smooth integration of the ODN and Starfleet blockchain, as well as performing the technical preparations and specifications of the future ODN Polkadot integration (which is one of the expected outcomes of the joint efforts within the Trace Alliance Decentralization and Tokenomics Working Group). Additionally, the first implementation of the Starfleet RPC service has been in development, to support the upcoming Starfleet testnet release.
Expected efficiency gains and effects on growth
The introduction of a multi-chain OriginTrail and Starfleet community-run chain is expected to significantly impact the growth of the entire ecosystem by delivering unprecedented efficiency and unlocking a wider scope of applicability.
Looking back at the year 2020, we witnessed some key milestones when it comes to the adoption of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network by global leaders like the British Standards Institution. However, increased adoption also unearthed some improvements that are required for further growth. In the last year, we have seen roughly 4,600 data holding jobs published on the OriginTrail network. By relying on a single chain in the consensus layer, on average, more than 40% of the costs for publishing the 4,600 jobs was spent on Ethereum fees. It is rather clear that a 40%-60% division of costs does not correspond to the delivered value. Businesses using OriginTrail are doing so to predominantly benefit from the functionalities of the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph and are using the consensus (blockchain) layer in a minimal way. Such steep costs also led to several optimizations when publishing jobs among Data Creator (DC) nodes. To save on costs, DC nodes had to sacrifice real-time publishing for consolidated publishing of their data, effectively lowering the number of total jobs and increasing the Total Graph Size (TGS) per each job, which was above 1,500 TGS/job in 2020.
Turning our heads towards the future, a strong disclaimer should be made; here, we are describing a possible future state to explain the mechanisms at play and not making any predictions or promises or giving financial advice of any sort. What we can do, however, is look back at 2020 and see a clear need for an upgrade. The Starfleet release and related updates (including the AAP utility mechanism) are aiming to bring down the costs of publishing a job on the multi-chain OriginTrail Decentralized Network by at least a factor of 10, to USD 2.5 or less in fiat currency terms. By achieving that, we are making way for the early majority of OriginTrail adopters, as much more use cases are becoming possible with such efficiency. Improved efficiencies are also expected to drive a larger frequency of job publishing, which — together with increased difficulty to add TGS to a growing graph (Branimir spoke about this at the last MOH) — means that the TGS number per job will be lower. Assuming the average TGS number per job will end up between 200 and 1,000, the OriginTrail ecosystem should see an increase of 20 to 100 times in published jobs compared to 2020, to achieve the goal of 100,000,000 TGS.
Graph: The road to 100,000,000 TGS
The multi-chain OriginTrail and the upcoming Knowledge Economy Phase are expected to show several positive effects on tokenomics of TRAC, starting with the fact that Starfleet establishes a way to keep the entire OriginTrail Decentralized Network utilization fully in TRAC (compared to only 60% in 2020). Additionally, we will see a significant amount of entire emission (up to 20% of total supply and potentially more than 25% of circulating supply) locked for the duration until the Starfleet bridge is made functional (up to six months after the Starfleet launch). Such utility-focused commitment from the OriginTrail community is an impressive testament to the expected value of the network and its tokenomics. As the confidence and the value in the OriginTrail Decentralized Network grows, we are confident that it will attract even more participants, which will increase the ODN size, value, and utility.
Multi-chain OriginTrail coming sooner than expected — Warp Beta testnet is live, OriginTrail v5 launch phase about to commence
Apart from developments around Starfleet, the OriginTrail Core developers have made a big leap forward in making OriginTrail nodes able to communicate with multiple blockchains. After the detailed specification in OT-RFC-08, the development team has completed the implementation and has launched the first ODN v5 multi-chain public beta testnet, dubbed “Warp”, which operates on two distinct Ethereum testnet blockchains, Kovan and Rinkeby. The goal of Warp is to establish a relevant environment for testing the new implementation of ot-node blockchain services, reaching the ot-node technology readiness level 8 (TRL8) which indicates system completeness. Detailed instructions on how to join Warp testnet are about to be released, and the OriginTrail core development team invites all current node runners and anyone else interested to contribute to testing by running a Warp node and forwarding relevant logs to the OriginTrail team.
For the final phase in the maturation of the multi-chain ODN (reaching the final TRL9), we are excited to introduce the initiation of the ODN v5 launch phase, which will extend the current ODN with an additional Ethereum-based blockchain — the xDAI blockchain. With the new xDAI integration, the ODN will acquire additional resilience by having the systems be able to operate with two distinct production-grade blockchains, while at the same time providing the final validation of the system operating at the highest TRL9 level. The xDAI chain has been chosen for this phase due to the high maturity of the xDAI ecosystem, which includes two production-grade and security audited bridges to Ethereum (the Omnibridge and xDAI bridge), as well as the capacity to sustainably support the imminent growth of ODN as previously outlined.
The OriginTrail v5 launch phase will be successfully completed by integrating with the Starfleet blockchain once it is launched, making the ODN operational with three different blockchains (Starfleet, xDAI, and Ethereum), after which the knowledge economy and OriginTrail knowledge tools will be introduced exclusively on the Starfleet blockchain. Parallel to the launch of the knowledge economy on ODN v5, the Starfleet bridge launch and the Polkadot integration phases will be initiated.
OriginTrail v5 bounty program to kickstart the launch phase — 5,000,000 TRAC tokens for all boarding Starfleet
To ensure a significant testing of the ODN v5 initial dual-chain deployment, a bounty program will take place to motivate the Starfleet boarding participants to be active network participants on the xDai chain as well. As part of the bounty program, 5,000,000 “TRAC on xDAI” (transferable to Ethereum blockchain TRAC token via the xDAI OmniBridge) tokens will be distributed across Starfleet boarding participants, proportionally to their staked amount. Assuming the hard cap of 100MM TRAC is reached, this bounty translates to 5% of the staked amount and is intended to help kick off the OriginTrail v5 deployment by utilizing the xDai chain.
It’s the final countdown: TRAC staking to launch the OriginTrail Knowledge Economy starts on February 18th
Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we have seen a significant increase in registrations for staking TRAC for Starfleet. The total expressed interest has now surpassed 80MM TRAC, clearly showing that the 50MM threshold might leave a significant amount of the community without the opportunity to take part in the upcoming Knowledge Economy Phase. Wanting to give TRAC holders and those yet to get familiarised with how the OriginTrail Ecosystem works a chance to take part in this phase, as our core value of inclusiveness suggests, the Starfleet Task Force has unanimously confirmed the proposal of the Core development team to increase the maximum staked TRAC amount to 100MM. The rest of the characteristics of the staking process (a four-week window, locking times, etc.) are remaining the same, the only change is the total amount allowed by the smart contract.
The future is multichain and OriginTrail Tracers are its pioneers!
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