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OST April 2018 — $OST Monthly Update

OST
ostdotcom
Published in
8 min readApr 13, 2018

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The last few weeks have been a blast: Team OST has been making steady progress on a number of fronts. From launching OST KIT⍺ for public testing to on-boarding new people, and from further advancements on the OST platform and the OpenST protocol to opening new offices! In this month’s update we’ll bring you up to speed on a wide range of topics, starting with the latest additions to our team.

Welcome Adeola, Amulya, Anna, Asaf, Drew, Juhi, Jordan, Marina, Mayur, Nike, Paruyr, Renee, Santosh and Wouter!

14 new talents joined OST in March and April, increasing our total team worldwide to 46. We welcome…

In Berlin

  • Adeola, Vice President of Global Marketing
  • Amulya, Financial Product Manager
  • Anna, Office Manager
  • Jordan, Business Development Manager
  • Marina, Business Development Manager
  • Nike, Junior Product Manager
  • Paruyr, Senior Blockchain Engineer
  • Wouter, Director of Communications

In Pune, India:

  • Juhi, User Experience Designer
  • Mayur, Software Engineer
  • Santosh, Software Engineer

In New York:

  • Asaf, Global Controller
  • Drew, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis
  • Renee, as our CFO and General Manager of North America

You’ll learn more about our team members in a series of weekly interviews, starting next week with Adeola and Wouter from Marketing!

OST KIT⍺ Phase I: Results

We can’t thank you enough for your participation in the first phase of OST KIT⍺. To freshen your memory, we share the impressive results of two weeks of public testing:

1332 testers received their Early Adopter Rewards, and 101 people who took the time to submit a support ticket or raised a forum issue (and who registered for the Early Adopter program) will soon receive their additional reward.

Your feedback is the engine that drives the project forward, and with that we want to tell you more about Phase II, which officially starts on Monday, 16 April 2018.

OST KIT⍺ Phase II: Developer Proofs of Concept

The next phase for OST KITa is called Alpha II: Developer Proofs of Concept. We’ll cover the program rules and rewards in our post on Monday, 16 April 2018, but we can already share the following:

  • We’ve accepted 142 projects (vs our original intent to only accept 100 projects). All applicants will receive an email regarding the status of their application on Monday, 16 April 2018
  • Developers providing successful POC submissions will be rewarded with 50,000 OST
  • There is a Grand Prize of 250,000 additional OST for the Best Ready-to-Ship POC
  • There are four additional categories, each rewarded with 25,000 additional OST

More on this in our Medium post next week!

Our latest Partners

We’ve announced five new Partners in the past weeks, and we couldn’t be more proud of our diverse portfolio of Partner Companies!

Here’s a short recap:

  • TOURIOCITY: Will use OST to complement their tailored city tours with “loyalty and referral schemes, micro payments, tour guide incentives and local promotions.”
  • TRAIPSE: Partnered with OST to “tokenize downtowns to encourage people to visit locally owned businesses and to cut transaction fees for the merchants.”
  • TWILALA: Wants to create their Branded Token with OST to incentivise “exchanging ideas, recommending locations or organising meet-ups for like-minded people.”
  • THE BRIGHTLY CO.: Will work with OST to “power their loyalty program, and to enable customers to ‘give back’ to their favourite charities by donating their tokens.”
  • FAININ: Teamed up with OST to allow its users to “earn Branded Tokens by rating products and experiences, and by responding swiftly to inquiries.”

OpenST Protocol & Platform 0.9.2 Released

PROTOCOL v 0.9.2

OpenST-protocol v0.9.2 improves usability to facilitate application by the OpenST-Platform and other services. Additionally, this release increases test coverage, with additional unit and integration tests, and adds continuous integration with Travis CI.

Detailed change log

PLATFORM v 0.9.2

  • In this release OpenST platform is published as a node module, now independent development can be supported using platform as the base layer. Sample restful APIs have been released in a separate repository Sample Restful APIs. Various services are exposed for handling tasks involved in on-boarding, get balance, stake & mint and transactions.
  • Auto registration is introduced after propose branded token to support requests coming from sandbox environments.
  • Deployment of platform was simplified to help developers to quickly get platform up and running.
  • There was a limitation in the earlier stake and mint process because the keystore files needed to be there on both utility chain geth node and value chain geth node for staker and redeemer addresses. This was solved by change in process in which all the transactions are now done by a single address and the beneficiary address is credited with the desired value in terms of Branded tokens in stake & mint and in terms of Simple tokens in redeem and unstake. Process staking, process minting and claim is now to be done using inter chain communicator.
  • Event listening using web3 websocket provider in inter chain communicator was not robust to process restarts and network glitches. To solve this, the approach was changed to scanning each block and maintaining the last processed block in a file. So if the process restarts, the processing continues from where it left and events are not missed.
  • Inter chain communicators now have SIGINT handling. The current processing is completed and then the process stops gracefully.
  • Stake and mint inter chain communicator needs to confirm staking intent hash in the same order in which it was generated, i.e. in the order of staking nonce. This was solved by adding the option to process events sequentially for the events.
  • OpenST Cache was developed to replace “in process” caching implemented in previous version, which became inconsistent in presence of multiple workers/processes. Caching layer now provide Redis, Memcached and none (in process) options to suite the platform run environment. Decision of which caching layer to use is governed by an ENV variable ‘OST_CACHING_ENGINE’.
  • OpenST Notification was developed to publish events into RabbitMQ. OpenST Platform sends critical events which help subscribers to maintain the state of various transactions.

Detailed change log:

OpenST Protocol Update: v 0.9.3 now in development

We’ve been working hard on the next update of our OpenST Protocol, version 0.9.3. The update covers the following:

  • Completing the Hash-Timelock staking contracts (HTLC)
  • Decentralised Keys Engine with Token Holder contracts
    In order for the end-user to own their branded tokens and for applications to securely integrate token reward actions without hosted keys for the users. This moves us away from the managed keys currently in KIT for development ease, and is a technical requirement to elastically scale the blockchain backend.

OST API Update

We have spent the past weeks collecting feedback from Partner Companies that have used our APIs during OST KIT⍺ Phase I. The following API enhancements are currently being worked on:

  • Allow users to execute transactions with arbitrary value
  • Allow arbitrary transfers of OSTa on the utility chain in order to deploy and interact with other contracts on the utility chain
  • Improve existing APIs logic based on feedback

Circulating Supply

We updated the Circulating Supply forecast to reflect the various OST KIT⍺ Phases, which will be running through the Summer. Our teams will continue to add enhancements and features to OST KIT alpha based on user feedback, leading to live customer implementations later this year.

Whitepaper v 0.8.3

Our updated Whitepaper will be released by the end of May / early June.

New Office in NYC

We opened a new office in New York City in April, currently housing members of our finance, business development, and blockchain strategy consulting teams.

Careers

We have many open positions waiting to be filled by talented people with a passion for everything blockchain: Visit our Careers page for the latest vacancies and spread the word!

About OST

OST is building the complete blockchain toolkit for business.
Our ambition is to be the blockchain technology partner of choice for businesses of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication, enabling any business to create, launch, and manage their own branded digital token economy powered by OpenST protocols and OST blockchain management software. The OpenST protocol enables companies to launch branded token economies on highly scalable, open, cryptographically auditable side blockchains. OST is actively investing in an ecosystem of developers and apps built on OST, to help drive requirements from actual use cases.

Blockchain

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OST
ostdotcom

Written by OST

364 Followers
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Seamlessly integrate crypto micro-transactions into any app. http://ost.com & http://dev.ost.com launching @thepepoapp http://pepo.com autumn 2019

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