Greetings to all OmiseGo followers! These weeks, the team was working assiduously as usual. Over the past two weeks, the eWallet team has been working hard on the Ethereum integration, and they’ve made a lot of progress. They are now able to generate a deposit wallet address using an HD wallet system and send funds to the wallet from an Ethereum account. Internal tokens can be turned into ERC-20, and smart contracts for new ones can be deployed from the eWallet. Things have slowed down a bit on the Potterhat side because Unnawut, OmiseGO Integration team software engineer, was helping to review all the Ethereum integration PRs. He was away for a few days, giving a talk at the Elixir conference in London. As for Plasma, things are moving fast and furious on the abstract layer contracts implementation! The team has almost reached feature parity with the existing contracts — they’re able receive ETH and ERC-20 deposits, store block hashes, and support standard MVP exits for payment transactions. On the child chain side, they’ve started working on support for the abstract contracts. This includes some fundamental changes in how they handle transaction types. Go.Exchange is now live and open for public signups! If you want to learn more about them, the team’s visions and how they plan to become an exchange used and trusted by people all around the world, please read their latest blog post. And keep in mind that Go.Exchange referral program is live! Refer and earn to help the team grow the community! As for the social side, OmiseGO CEO Vansa shares her insight on how to ensure regulation promotes innovation and growth in the blockchain ecosystem instead of simply stifling it with rigid policy. This month the team was inviting her to respond to community questions on OmiseGo subreddit. Also, Vansa was joined by Tipsuda Thavaramara, the new OmiseGO Regulations, and Compliance Advisor to answer a bonus AMA question. Find out the video on OmiseGo Youtube channel! The team attended Bangkok Fintech Fair 2019. Last month at the Techsauce Global Summit held in Bangkok, OmiseGO VP of Commercial and Business Development, Dennis Keller delivered a talk titled “Digitalizing the world of financial transactions, assets and payments. Can blockchain succeed?”. In a recent blog post, the team takes a closer look at his talk, OmiseGO in the world of digitized assets, and the potential of blockchain to securely store, verify, and transact data. As for upcoming events, the team will be at Devcon 5 in Osaka. So far so good. The community constantly grows. There is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of OmiseGo official social media channels. OmiseGo fans, keep track of updates! We’ll show you more stuff along the way of social activity and development in the Public Alpha of Samrong! Time sure flies when you’re busy BUIDLing!
“Look at financial systems today. Look at banks. There are barriers to entry, to just getting an account. Our view is that having the ability to transact money easily should be seen as a human right.”
- Vansa Chatikavanij, OmiseGO CEO
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Are you ready to upgrade to Samrong?
v0.2 of the OMG Network is now accessible to all!
OmiseGo team has moved on to the next station with the release of the Public Alpha of Samrong. This hard network upgrade required their partners and ODP participants to migrate their tokens from Ari on to the second version of the OmiseGO Network.
This upgrade requires a change to the immutable smart contract on Ari. For this reason, Samrong will eventually replace Ari entirely. If you wish to continue using the OmiseGO Network, you will need to move your Rinkeby ETH (Ethereum) and ERC20 from Ari to Samrong.
Samrong includes a number of significant modifications:
Improved Plasma integration and changes to Plasma smart contracts
Ari launched with Minimum Viable Plasma. Samrong builds on Ari’s Minimum Viable Plasma, and runs on More Viable Plasma (MoreVP). Samrong’s Plasma smart contract will thus be MoreVP compliant, but since the written smart contract can’t be modified, Samrong is implemented as a new, separate network, and will replace Ari.
Greater resilience, less downtime
Samrong’s improved monitoring, reliability, and stability is better at handling high network loads.
New transaction signature using EIP 712
Samrong allows you to sign transactions using the EIP-712 standard, which allows signatures to be carried out through wallet integrations, such as Metamask. EIP-712 also allows Ethereum signatures to display in a structured and readable format.
Meta-data field
A new meta-data field allows users or dApps to store any information in their transactions.
Join the ODP and connect to the latest iteration the OmiseGO Network here.
Technical Update
Integration Team Update 29: the “Remember who you are” edition
eWallet
The team has been working hard on the Ethereum integration over the past two weeks, and they’ve made a lot of progress. They are now able to generate a deposit wallet address using an HD wallet system and send funds to the wallet from an Ethereum account. Internal tokens can be turned into ERC-20, and smart contracts for new ones can be deployed from the eWallet.
It’s all working, but they need to add more tests, clean up, refactor the code and conduct proper reviews before merging those features.
Since the endpoints aren’t ready to interact with all those cool new features, their admin panel developers have been working on the hot wallets top-up mechanism, which will allow admins of the eWallet to send ETH or ERC-20 tokens using Metamask.
Completed
Here are the main items the team has knocked out since the last update:
v2.0
- Support sending Ethereum transactions from the hot wallets (#1080)
- New UI design components for admin panel #1118 #1098
- Blockchain wallets page for admin panel #1112
- Web3 Metamask integration for admin panel #1114
In progress
These tasks are currently being worked on or are pending review by the OmiseGO Integration Team members:
v2.0
- New configuration page design for admin panel #1122
- Update tokens to integrate Ethereum compatibility (#1081)
- Add endpoint to create cold wallet references (#1111)
- Add ERC20 token generation from the eWallet (#1116)
- Add HD Wallet system and tracking/handling of relevant Ethereum transactions (#1123)
As always, you can follow the progress on the eWallet GitHub project page and on their GitHub Milestones page. If contributing code is your thing, the team has a list of issues suitable for first-time contributors. Be sure to check it out!
Potterhat
Things have slowed down a bit on the Potterhat side because O (Unnawut) was helping to review all the Ethereum integration PRs. He is now away for a few days, giving a talk at the Elixir conference in London. Once he’s back, he’ll hop back on Potterhat.
You can track Potterhat milestone and progress on the Potterhat repository and read more about it (or add some ideas and suggestions) on OIP-15.
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- eWallet Suite More Resources:
- OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository
- Initial public demonstration of the eWallet
- Chat to the eWallet team
Plasma
Plasma Production Update 24
Things are moving fast and furious on the abstract layer contracts implementation. The team has almost reached feature parity with the existing contracts — they’re able receive ETH and ERC-20 deposits, store block hashes, and support standard MVP exits for payment transactions. Upcoming work is processing exits and the in-flight MoreVP exits. Granted the in-flight exits are complex, so this will likely take the whole next iteration. Once the team reaches their minimum viable feature set, they’ll be ready to begin audits.
On the child chain side, they’ve started working on support for the abstract contracts. This includes some fundamental changes in how they handle transaction types. Ideally, they’d be able to support similar kinds of transaction abstraction that they’re designing into the contracts. An update about the stress test — the team ran into some tooling issues which have delayed the process. Once the team is able to gather results, they’ll keep the community updated.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
- For more on Plasma, see these community-produced resources:
- Learn Plasma, a community-led education initiative
- What is Plasma? Plasma Cash? by Jinglan Wang
- This primer from Consensys
- This nifty chart comparing different plasma designs
- Plasma Tesuji Github repository
- How OmiseGO will bring Plasma in everyone’s daily life by u/pwolf88
- An introduction to Plasma by Alexander Butler
- Towards A General Purpose Plasma by Plasma Group
Introducing the OVM
A Correct-by-Construction Approach to Layer 2 by Plasma Group
In this post the team describes the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM): a virtual machine designed to support all layer 2 (L2) protocols. Its generality comes from a reframing of L2 as an “optimistic” fork choice rule layered on top of Ethereum. The formalization borrows heavily from CBC Casper research, and describes layer 2 as a direct extension to layer 1 consensus. This implies a possible unification of all “layer 2 scalability” constructions (Lightning, Plasma, etc) under a single theory and virtual machine: the OVM.
This post:
- Introduces the language of the OVM.
- Describes how a class of L2 applications can be compiled end-to-end using a universal dispute contract.
Social encounters
OmiseGO AMA #25 — with Vansa, OmiseGO CEO
July 2019 AMA with Vansa, OmiseGO CEO. Vansa answers community questions regarding her blog “Striking a balance between innovation and regulation” which talks about her time at the World Economic Forum’s Blockchain Council meeting in San Francisco and her major takeaways.
Read her blog here.
Watch the Bonus Question video here.
Vansa is joined by Tipsuda Thavaramara, the new OmiseGO Regulations and Compliance Advisor to answer a bonus AMA question.
Get to know Tipsuda Thavaramara here.
These weeks events:
July 18th, 2019: Code Elixir London, London.
Unnawut, OmiseGO Integration team software engineer, was at Code Elixir LDN to talk about building an interactive command line interface (CLI) app in Elixir. It will highlight key features to look into for a user-friendly CLI for Elixir applications.
July 18th–19th, 2019: Bangkok Fintech Fair 2019: Technology Talk, Bangkok.
- OmiseGO @omise_go on Twitter on Jul 18:
The inevitability of blockchain and the digitalization of assets
Dennis Keller at the Techsauce Global Summit 2019
Last month at the Techsauce Global Summit held in Bangkok, OmiseGO VP of Commercial and Business Development, Dennis Keller delivered a talk titled “Digitalizing the world of financial transactions, assets and payments. Can blockchain succeed?” In this article, the team takes a closer look at his talk, OmiseGO in the world of digitized assets, and the potential of blockchain to securely store, verify, and transact data.
In his talk, Dennis touched upon four main points: digitalization, security, scalability, and success factors. The first topic, “Digitalization is inevitable and transformative,” examined the significance of the internet across different industries: media, and how information sharing is now direct and immediate; entertainment, which gave us access to unlimited content, including music, videos, and shows; commerce, which has lessened the importance of a physical store presence as global commerce is now at our fingertips. Nevertheless, the Internet has yet to connect people financially: there are still those who belong in the “unbanked” category who have limited to no access to fast, fair, and safe financial services.
Entering an increasingly digitalized world
The world is seeing a trend where we’re moving away from fiat money towards digitized assets. A 2015 World Economic Forum (WEF) survey report indicated that 10% of the world’s GDP will be stored on blockchain technology by 2027, with 58% of all respondents seeing this shift to occur even earlier, by 2025. In addition to this, Deloitte’s 2019 blockchain survey reported that 53% of executives worldwide see blockchain as critically relevant –within the top 5 priorities to their companies and projects. One example that demonstrates this trend occurring at the consumer level is the emergence of cryptocurrencies as a burgeoning method of sending remittances in countries like the Philippines; international companies are making way to accommodate such transactions as reported by Coindesk.
So where does OmiseGO fit in the picture? They have the eWallet Suite, which is a white label, fully open-source and customizable eWallet where users are able to store digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, loyalty points, in-app tokens, and employee benefit points. While the eWallet Suite can stand alone without the need for their decentralized exchange (DEX), the currency-agnostic DEX does offer interoperability, allowing users to trade between fiat, points, crypto, or any other asset that has been digitized and stored on the OMG network.
Security is not a given
In his second topic, “Security is not a given,” we learned how usability challenges turn into security challenges. Anyone who has a crypto wallet knows the importance of protecting their seed recovery phrase. Yet humans are not perfect; errors can be made. These recovery phrases can either be lost or stolen. Conversely, in our daily lives, we conduct transactions digitally, whether for digital banking or internet shopping–activities equally prone to hacking.
Usability challenges turn into security challenges. Humans aren’t reliable… it is hard for us to manage and protect twelve random words.
- Dennis Keller, TSGS 2019
Blockchain falls into the same category of digital banking and internet shopping; it simply adds an additional layer of technology which seeks to enable fast, seamless, and frictionless financial transactions.
Addressing scalability with Plasma
The usual issue with Blockchain is that due to the consensus process, transactions can be slow. So blockchain projects can opt to trade off security (sidechains) or decentralization (DPoS with small validator sets) to make up for this. OmiseGO addresses the blockchain scalability trilemma with plasma, which allows us to “borrow” the decentralized security from Ethereum. In the context of an exchange, with plasma they get a secondary layer where they can process clearing and settlement in a non-custodial manner. What this does is that it allows for faster transactions by matching orders off-chain and settling transactions on a child chain. They get speed thanks to centralized matching, increased settlement bandwith by processing transactions in the child chain, without sacrificing security by still making commitments about the child chain blocks back to the root chain.
Rome was not built in a day
Last but not least, there are factors that come into play in how much the technology the team is building is going to succeed. Community and collaboration is equally important as development innovation. Regulators, developers, and community participants are highly needed to foster understanding, transparency, and clarity. Without one or the other, none of what they’re building matters.
Where blockchain and regulations meet, they believe the market for cryptocurrencies and blockchain will become increasingly regulated. As such they want to take a proactive approach on working closely across jurisdictions. OmiseGo CEO, Vansa Chatikavanij recently took part in the first Global Blockchain Council meeting convened by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and stated in her blog “Striking a balance between innovation and regulation,” that “it’s important that both sides, businesses and regulators, understand where each other is coming from and cooperate to shape a standard regulatory framework. Businesses must work with government to develop an optimal governance framework as neither side can tackle issues alone.”
Within the OmiseGO community, the team has the OmiseGO Developer Program (ODP), which allows participants to participate as Alpha testers for early stage products and Proof-of-Concepts before they are released to the public. This opportunity creates a more cohesive communication channel between participants in the ecosystem as well as the product and engineering team at OmiseGO, allowing them to have a say in the development and integration process of different products and features.
Additionally, they’ve collaborated with UNICEF Innovation and UNICEF Thailand to launch the first ever SURGE Bangkok Hackathon. Their goal was to provide resources and tools to share information about blockchain as an emerging technology as well as help participants create better solutions for problems affecting their communities. Some of the teams that participated include EdChance, Children Future Fund (CFF), and iDonate. The first project solution aimed at funding migrant children’s education via Ethereum smart contracts, Status keycard, Gnosis’s safe, and much more. The second project is a savings solution in which a government issues a digital and e-crypto wallet for each child at birth. Last but not least, iDonate is a crowdfunding platform designed for teachers to raise funds for educational and teaching purposes. Ultimately, SURGE showed the potential for blockchain technology to revolutionize different industries, changing the way we think, how we live and how we experience the world around us.
While there has been an increase in interest in the blockchain industry, user adoption, as with all new technology, will take some time. Even with proper regulations in set and technology ready, we still need to ensure mainstream usage. The moment mainstream adoption can finally be achieved with blockchain technology is when we can use it without knowing we’re actually using it. An example Dennis gives is that of the Internet: it’s something we use all the time, yet the majority of us probably don’t know what HTTP stands for, what IP routing is, how packets are transferred across the Internet, and so on. In a similar manner, people don’t necessarily need to know that the OmiseGO network and exchange is built on blockchain technology — they don’t even need to know their applications are using the network. All they need to know is the fact that they can transact fast and seamlessly through regions and timezones, with the peace of mind that their transactions are secure and fair. Hackathons and initiatives like the ODP are ways OmiseGO is helping to achieve this. The more minds they have collaborating, improving the technology and creating decentralized applications the more they improve on usability and user design and interface.
So…can blockchain succeed?
The team certainly believes so. Blockchain technology is already, for lack of a more suitable term, “disrupting” the financial industry. Across the globe various companies starting to look into blockchain integration. Forbes has reported that from the Forbes 2000 list not only are all ten of the largest public companies in the world exploring blockchain, but at least 50 of the biggest names on the list are doing so as well. On top of this development within the private sector, several central banks and national stock exchanges all over the world — like Singapore, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Lithuania, and Canada to name a few, are starting to open up to digitalized assets. Now that they are seeing more usage, they are initiating programs and setting up regulations to aide in the use of digital assets.
The movement within the private Fintech space, the business industry at large, and of national and international government agencies is a testament to blockchain’s staying power and the inevitability of digitalized assets.
Upcoming events:
October 08th-11th, 2019: Devcon 5 in Osaka.
Jun tweeted on May 11th, 2019:
Reddit:
Responses to previous OmiseGO AMAs: AMA #1, AMA #2, AMA #3, AMA #4, AMA #5, AMA #6, AMA #7, AMA #8, AMA #9, AMA #10, AMA #11, AMA #12, AMA #13, AMA #14, AMA #15, AMA #16, AMA #17, AMA #18, AMA #19, AMA #20, AMA #21, AMA #22, AMA #23 with Hoard Exchange.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io):
There is a slight decrease in the number of token holders these weeks.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Go.Exchange sign up open.
Click here to read further on how the team plans to become an exchange used and trusted by people all around the world, please continue reading. They are discussing these main focus areas but please keep in mind that business strategy may change over time:
- Transparency and Trust
- Regulation and Compliance
- Community Burns
Go.Exchange will:
- As mentioned before, they will use the OmiseGO Network to improve user security when it is ready to be integrated with.
- OMG will be used as a discount token on GO.Exchange for 3 months as a launch promotion. Starting on June 25th, 2019, any trader with a balance of at least 500 OMG on their account will have their trading fees reduced by 50%.
- Go.Exchange will set aside 100% of the transaction revenues to burn OMG tokens for 3 months as their inaugural community burn. This is a temporary token burn as part of their launch promotion.
- After the launch promotional period, the tokens burned in community burns will be selected by voting with their native reward token, GO.Exchange Token (GOT), which can be acquired through transacting to GO.Exchange much like a loyalty reward point. In the future, community burns will use 50% of GO.Exchange trading fees, instead of the 100% that they are using for the 3 months OMG burn as part of the launch promotion. You can read more about GOT here.
- As part of the launch, they’re also giving away 20,000 OMG. The first 2,000 users to transact on the exchange for $500 USD equivalent or greater on the exchange will receive 10 OMG. Users from the soft launch are also qualified for this promotion.
Refer and earn to help the team grow the community!
Feel free to follow the progress through these channels:
You can also view their open positions here.
And the trading fees are now live. You can read here for more details.
For more information on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX):
- DEX Update blog
- OMG DEX Design
Roadmap
From the OMG project tracker (July 22nd, 2019):
In progress
- eWallet v1.3
- Ethereum integration. (v2.0)
- Plasma Mainnet
- Synthetic Minds audit (Tesuji)
- Support Omise Payment (Aji)
- Proof of Stake Design
- Support fiat (Aji)
- Support debit/credit cards (Aji)
- Support top-up/cash-out (Aji)
Partnerships and team members
Rumors
OmiseGO Survey: Usage of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins:
As the team further develop their understanding of the payments and crypto market, OmiseGO is curious to learn more about usage of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins for payments.
The aim of this survey is to collect the views of survey participants. This survey should take between 10–15 minutes.
OmiseGO Survey: Block Explorers:
The team would like to learn more about your usage of blockchain explorers.
Twitter:
Active Reddit discussions:
How does OmiseGO compare technically with new competitors?
A Day In The Life of an OMG Holder:
A message to the OMG Team. Why it’s okay to allow excite :)
Other:
Plasma Implementers Call #23: Tips for PLIPs
First they get some great implementation updates, then they discuss wallet implementations as well as the first two PLIPs!
Plasma is not secure (unless you watch it) by Anthony ESTEBE. Learn more about PlasmaChain security with OmiseGO Developer Program member MESG.
Netflix’s Altcoin Documentary Could Push Bitcoin To $25,000+: Netflix doc with OmiseGo.
OMG Network Guide by OMGPool: This guide is an extensive non-technical introduction to the OMG Network, and is maintained by OMGPool and the community. It’s their goal to keep this collection up to date to reflect the current status of the OMG Network. Therefore, they also want to welcome contributions from the community and made the repository available on Github for everyone to help!
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
OmiseGo community continues to grow. However, there is a slight fluctuation in the number of subscribers of OmiseGo social media channels these weeks.
Twitter — Average number of retweets is 35–75 for one post.
Facebook — 60–90 likes per publication, 5–10 shares.
Reddit — Daily discussions with 100–250 comments.
Bitcointalk.org: since July 15th, 2017. Discussions on latest updates, price.
OmiseGo Chat channels: Announcements; Jobs; OmiseGO — Trading channel for speculation and trading; Random; Rules; Staking; Trading; Wallets; Japanese.
Official China community channel on WeChat (ID: omisego_china).
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of OmiseGo Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
