Dear OmiseGo followers, as many of you know, one of the biggest challenges the OmiseGO team is tackling is scaling the blockchain. They’re trying to achieve this through Plasma, a blockchain scalability framework that doesn’t sacrifice security. Now you can get to know OmiseGO’s Plasma scaling solution More Viable Plasma! The details are in our report below.
These weeks, the integration team focused on Ethereum integration finalization. UI work was done by implementing deposit fund management and adding screens to the admin panel. Merging of support for transferring funds from local ledger wallet to a blockchain address is done, as is deposit wallet funds pooling. Most planned features for Ethereum and OmiseGO Network transactions are complete so now the team will be focusing on code refactoring and covering edge cases to make sure those features are stable and maintainable.
The work on Plasma continues. During these two weeks the Blockchain team has implemented the In-flight Exits on the contracts and consider them feature complete. They’re now cleaning up issues they’ve found and fleshing out all the documentation. The team has prepared a demo integration between elixir-omg and the current set of contracts. They will be deploying all the pieces to a new environment for testing shortly. This will be the first time they meld the child chain and watcher to the new ALD contracts. Once the team is sure that the contracts are functionally complete and secure, they can begin the audit process. The work on elixir-omg can, and will, continue while the contracts get audited.
As for the social side, last month, Kasima, OmiseGo CTO was invited to the Bank of Thailand Fintech Fair. There, he gave a talk on Plasma, and was on a panel that discussed decentralized exchanges, taxes, and compliance regulations around the blockchain industry. Kasima was joined by Anthony Lewis of R3, Billy Rennekamp of Tendermint, Sagar Sarbhai of Ripple, and panel moderator Paul Sim from Deloitte. Last week, the videos from the conference were published. The team also invited OmiseGO team leads, Pong and Win, to respond to community questions about the P2P payments function of the OmiseGO Network as detailed in the “Meet our P2P Payment Network” blog post in the latest Reddit AMA. Watch the replay in our report.
And last but not least, the OmiseGo team is going to UnblockTokyo and Devcon 5 in October. Come talk to them if you’d like to build on the OmiseGO Network!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
OmiseGO’s More Viable Plasma Solution:
At present, Ethereum can only support 12 transactions per second (TPS). By contrast, most major credit card companies regularly process thousands of transactions a second. Scalability is a major obstacle holding back crypto and blockchain from mainstream adoption, which is why the OmiseGo team has been working hard on plasma. With plasma, their network can currently handle up to 4,000 TPS, and with future iterations they plan to do more.
Think of plasma like its own blockchain that can have whatever functionality the builder desires.
Plasma groups up several payments off-chain so Ethereum (root chain) can verify transactions in batches instead of individually. This equals to faster throughput and low cost transaction fees.
Moreover, users can exit funds from a plasma chain onto the root chain whenever they wish.
During the Bank of Thailand Fintech Fair 2019, Kasima, OmiseGO CTO, discussed two versions of plasma: Minimal Viable Plasma (MVP) and More Viable Plasma (MoreVP).
Both share the following features:
- Fungibility: Fungibility is a feature of a commodity or a good, which, if possessed, means that the units of the particular good or commodity are interchangeable.
An example of a fungible commodity is the dollar bill. There are millions of dollars in circulation, yet every single bill has the same value, and can be exchanged for one another (interchangeable).
- UTXO-based: An Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) is the output of a transaction that a user receives and is able to spend in the future.
Here’s an analogy that explains UTXO’s well:
Let’s say you have $25 in your wallet, you must have a combination of bills because there’s no such thing as a twenty-five dollar bill.
In this simple example, you could have any of the following combinations of fiat bills:
- Twenty five $1 bills
- Five $5 bills
- Two $10 bills and one $5 bill
- One $20 bill and one $5 bill
- And so on.
There are many more combinations of bills that add up to $25 but you get the idea. In each case, you have exactly $25 despite the fact that you have a different number of bills in each scenario.
This combination of bills is called UTXO. So even if you see $25 in your crypto wallet, you may have different UTXOs sitting in your wallet. The UTXOs vary in size, but when added together, equal the total balance of your wallet.
- Exit priorities: Exit priorities are an underlying mechanism that secure the plasma chain. They use exit-games, which ensures that all parties sign-off and validate transactions. This prevents bad actors from stealing user funds, and allows for the plasma chain to be scalable while remaining secure.
The two flavors of plasma share a few similarities and may seem interchangeable. However, the big difference between the two plasma chains start with their treatment of confirmation signatures and how MoreVP exit games determine transaction authenticity.
Confirmation Signatures in Minimal Viable Plasma
In Minimal Viable Plasma, transactions are considered invalid until they are signed twice.
Whenever a user makes a transaction, they will first sign a signature to be included in the block. Once the transaction is included in a valid block, the user will sign a second signature, known as the confirmation signature.
Both signatures then, must be sent to the operator as part of the Proof of Authority consensus.
If a user wants to exit to the root chain, he or she also has to provide the confirmation signature. If the operator includes a user’s transaction after an invalid transaction, the user simply opts out of signing the confirmation signature. Because a transaction included after an invalid transaction does not have a confirmation signature, it is thus considered invalid.
Confirmation Signatures in MoreVP
In MoreVP, there are no confirmation signatures, simply because the process through which users withdraw their funds is modified.
Transactions on MVP assumed invalid. A sender needs to see the transaction mined and reported back into the root chain before it is accepted. This slower reporting process is called a confirmation signature, a design which involves a concept called exit-priority. With MoreVP this isn’t the case. MoreVP assumes all transactions are valid by default. Here users can exit their funds through an in-flight-exit-game. This verifies transactions by rewarding parties when they challenge a “non-exitable” output with one challenge condition. This faster alternative provides users with an overall better design and experience than MVP.
Learn more about OmiseGOs Plasma MoreVP by watching Kasima’s explainer during the Bank of Thailand Fintech Fair 2019:
Find the Network:
- OmiseGO Developer Portal
- OmiseGO Developer Program (ODP) Application
Technical Update
Integration Team:
These weeks, the integration team focused on Ethereum integration finalization. UI work was done by implementing deposit fund management and adding screens to the admin panel. Merging of support for transferring funds from local ledger wallet to a blockchain address is done, as is deposit wallet funds pooling. Most planned features for Ethereum and OmiseGO Network transactions are complete so now the team will be focusing on code refactoring and covering edge cases to make sure those features are stable and maintainable.
Integration Team Updates:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33.
eWallet Suite More Resources:
- OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository
- Initial public demonstration of the eWallet
- Chat to the eWallet team
Plasma
Blockchain Team Update 29
The Blockchain team has implemented the In-flight Exits on the contracts and consider them feature complete. They’re now cleaning up issues they’ve found and fleshing out all the documentation. The team has prepared a demo integration between elixir-omg and the current set of contracts. They will be deploying all the pieces to a new environment for testing shortly. This will be the first time they meld the child chain and watcher to the new ALD contracts. Once the team is sure that the contracts are functionally complete and secure, they can begin the audit process. The work on elixir-omg can, and will, continue while the contracts get audited.
Plasma Updates:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.
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
Social encounters
Blockchain IN DEPTH: NO MORE HYPE — Panel discussion
Last month, Kasima, OmiseGo CTO was invited to the Bank of Thailand Fintech Fair. There, he gave a talk on Plasma, and was on a panel that discussed decentralized exchanges, taxes, and compliance regulations around the blockchain industry.
Kasima was joined by Anthony Lewis of R3, Billy Rennekamp of Tendermint, Sagar Sarbhai of Ripple, and panel moderator Paul Sim from Deloitte.
Watch Kasima’s talk on OmiseGO’s Plasma here.
Read the highlights from this video on OmiseGo blog.
Catch up with Kasima behind the scenes at BoT Fintech fair 2019:
OmiseGO AMA 27 — P2P Payments:
This month the team invited OmiseGO team leads, Pong and Win, to respond to community questions about the P2P payments function of the OmiseGO Network as detailed in the post “Meet our P2P Payment Network”.
Learn more about the OmiseGO network, visit OmiseGo website.
Understand the key benefits of the P2P Network on OmiseGo blog.
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, AMA 26 with Integration Team, AMA 27.
Upcoming events:
October, 5th: Unblock Tokyo: Ecosystem Fast Track with Mr. Pong Cheecharern, Technical Product Manager of OmiseGo.
October 08th-11th, 2019: Devcon 5 in Osaka.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io):
There is a slight increase in the number of token holders these weeks.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Go.Exchange:
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
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.
Roadmap
OmiseGo Newsletter:
From the OMG project tracker (September 30th, 2019):
In progress:
Partnerships and team members
Rumors
The team has launched their new website. The updated site includes changes to design and navigation. The team has also improved how they’ve laid out the content, so you’ll get more from a quick scroll.
OmiseGO Survey: Block Explorers: The team would like to learn more about your usage of blockchain explorers.
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.
Check out Stablecoin Survey first results. Based on the survey results, a majority of crypto users have exposure to stablecoins and a demonstrated interest in this asset class. Stablecoins are an attractive cryptoasset for volatility resistance as well as capital gains and dividend return. However, regulatory and technical concerns still exist. The team believes there is a large area for improvement, especially in the regulatory landscape as was shared during their recent AMA on regulations.
Twitter:
Active Reddit discussions:
Demo of eWallet with all the completed features.
Are there any scaling solutions ready for tether?
OMG transaction throughput question.
General U.S. Public Ready for Tokenization (esp. Reward Points).
Other:
OmiseGO added to Gemini custody:
How OmiseGO Can Help Ethereum Scale Up to Millions of Transactions Per Second by Jeremy Wall on publish0x.com
Netflix’s Altcoin Documentary Could Push Bitcoin To $25,000+: Netflix doc with OmiseGo.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
OmiseGo community continues to grow, 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.
