Hello, Orbsians! Welcome to our biweekly update on Orbs — we have a lot to share! Daniel Peled recently published a team update where he wrote that they have not only achieved everything they set-up to do in the 2019 research and development roadmap but are also slightly ahead of schedule.
By the end of March, they will launch the Orbs Staking Wallet, allowing token holders to manage their tokens, play an active role in bringing the Orbs Network to life, and earn rewards for their contribution.
Another essential development news was shared in a February technology update. It touched upon new token locking in PoS, the elusive reputation bug, improvement of node-level services, and more. The ecosystem & Research report is to come!
Orbs’ public activity was also extremely vivid. The fresh AMA Session was published, featuring some exciting questions and profound qualified answers by Jonathan Noam, Assaf Bielsky, Tal Kol, and Danny Brown Wolf. This AMA was mostly focused on inquiries related to enterprise use-cases and the Orbs project in general. What’s more, Kirill Maximov wrote an excellent blog post about his participation in EthDenver as a representative of the Orbs team. “What I most liked about the conference was that it validated a lot of my own ideas and confirmed that Orbs is moving in the right direction,” — he said. Another article was written by Eran Peled, who juxtaposed Private and Public Blockchain and highlighted that the real innovation and disruptive potential for blockchain technology lie with public, permissionless, open-source blockchain protocols.
Furthermore, in the team update mentioned above, Daniel Peled shared responsibility distribution between Orbs co-founders, including Uriel Peled, Tal Kol, and Netta Korin. The community continues to grow in social networks and chats. The migration to the new official Orbs Telegram channel is ongoing: people leave an old chat and move to the moderated one. Don’t forget to join it, not to miss anything! See you in two weeks!
Development
- ORBS PoS Wallet is officially registered on the stores. Try it for free: (If you had beta version, uninstall old one and try again.) — Galaxy Store; Google Play.
KEY features Include:
- Send, Receive tokens
- Easy delegation via simple GUI
- Guardians list and information of guardians
- POS rewards information (estimated amount, previous distributed history, etc)
- Election information with countdown
Specification requirement:
- Android 8 (sdk 26) or above
- Samsung blockchain keystore (for full wallet features)
- New Token Locking in PoS — Part of the new PoS V2 model update includes a shift to factor *locked* tokens for the PoS election process. It’s better to move towards PoS V2 in small steps when possible so the new staking contract to the current election process is integrated.
- The Elusive Reputation Bug — An interesting and somewhat entertaining bug occured in the reputation mechanism a few weeks ago. The reputation mechanism is the part of the protocol responsible for automatically detecting and “punishing” misbehaving validator nodes. After some investigation (and a toy simulation which reproduced this) it was found that the bug was actually in the design of the probabilistic model itself. To fix it, it was decided to change the model altogether, to one which is more straightforward and does not require heavy parameter adjustment. The new model is now live in Orbs as of version 1.3.9. You can take a look at the pull request here.
- Improvement of Node-Level Services — There are two services that are responsible for managing the node: Nebula (CLI tool that provisions, re-deploys, and destroys a node) and Boyar (golang service that runs inside the node, reads the state of the network and executes virtual-chain processors and other services). Since an Orbs node executes multiple virtual chains side by side and these virtual chains are completely isolated, this management layer is in charge of orchestrating the various virtual chains — each running in its own docker instance. Thus, they added a new node-level service called “service 2” (working title, suggestions for a cool name are welcome!) that will serve as a proxy between the new contracts and the legacy Boyar. Implementation-wise, this service will generate the JSON file Boyar is relying on from Ethereum events.
Social encounters
- Orbs Team AMA — February 2020. Numerous answers were given by Orbs team members — watch full video or check some ideas that we highlighted below! This AMA will focus mainly on inquiries related to enterprise use-cases and the Orbs project in general.
Q: What is the Orbs’ role in GLF’s CBAN? Please compare to other blockchains who are also providing tech.
A: “…One of the main principles of this event which is the communication business automation network, is inclusivity and non-reliance on one infrastructure, one technology and for that, they wanted to make sure the multiple technologies can be used for applications and they want to establish parallel chains. At first there will be a Orbs chain, a Coda chain, and an Ethereum chain and maybe others will join. And later the nodes will run all those changes in parallel, and then applications will be able to choose which infrastructure or infrastructures they want to use. Orbs will be one of those chains, and in addition, we’re working with several vendors that are participating in this event so they will launch their application using the Orbs infrastructure.” “Orbs will donate knowledge and architecture”.
Q: Are Orbs network costs competitive in comparison to Hyperledger? What are the similarities and differences?
A: Firstly, Hyperledger is a private blockchain and Orbs is a public blockchain. In Hyperledger you need to run your own node, and thus, hire a person who knows it. In Orbs you don’t need to do it; you can only pay the actual runtime cost. So, it’s the way much cheaper.
Q: Most enterprises seem to prefer building on private blockchains. Why do you think it is? How does Orbs plan to convince them to build on a public blockchain?
A: Big companies are built traditionally. They are normally afraid of taking risks and experiments. Starting tackling disruptive blockchain technology is just a way to start. Sooner or later, their fear of losing the safeness and security of the business data because of switching to a public blockchain will disappear.
Q: Orbs has spent the last year focusing on the Korean community. Are you planning to expand to other global regions?
A: Orbs is already established in Israel, Singapore, Korea, Japan and they are also planning to push the development of the community outside these countries.
Q: What is your enterprise approach?
A: “First of all we like to work with system integrators and product studios. The reason is that they already understand their clients and their client’s needs, and they’re already building something for their clients and usually, these system integrators are just looking for the best technology to implement for their class the solution, for their clients and bring them value. We already have a few partnerships exciting things on the way.
The second approach that we have is directly with the client, so I would divide that as well. The first would be companies that already know that they want to block to your product, probably already experimented with it. Usually, the experiment is with a private blockchain and they come to realize that for their specific use-case, the value of blockchain is only in public blockchain and that’s where we come in. We explain the vendor the benefits of a public blockchain, we help with the architecture and tech side…
The third approach would be in-house use-cases that we develop. So we have an enterprise solution team that specializes in researching what are the best use-cases for blockchain and specifically for Orbs, for a public blockchain, and for enterprise, where is the value that will move the needle. And the way we assess it is on a matrix that we’ve developed that also takes into account impact and visibility. So what is the impact that blockchain specifically has as opposed to other technologies that are centralized that they can use, and what is the visibility that this specific use case or this industry would adopt this use case; how heavily regulated, etc…”
Q: What major conferences will you be attending this year, and where can we meet the team?
A: San-Francisco Blockchain week, New York blockchain week, Tel Aviv, Tokio, Singapore, local conferences they usually turn around the United States and especially in the Bay Area. This year they’re also adding different focus, which is general tech conferences in the verticals where we have use-cases or clients, so a lot of conferences in the fields of insurance, supply chain, management, media, digital rights, and government tech.
- My time at the EthDenver Hackathon by Kirill Maximov. He attended EthDenver to represent the Orbs team. Both the BUILDWeek and the conference that followed have been a blast, with many great talks and tech showcases.
“What I most liked about the conference was that it validated a lot of my own ideas and confirmed that Orbs is moving in the right direction.”
- Can blockchain help combat Coronavirus? Watch Dr. Inon Schenker and Danny Brown Wolf discussion on BLOCKTV.
- Private vs Public Blockchain by Eran Peled. Orbs team does not believe that the future will favor permissioned, private blockchains. In their opinion, the true innovation and disruptive potential for blockchain technology lie with public, permissionless, open-source blockchain protocols.
Short-sighted enterprises that choose to build on private blockchains today face the risk of a painful, expensive, possibly impossible migration to a public blockchain infrastructure in the future.
However, not all public blockchain projects are fit for enterprise use-cases. In fact, the vast majority of them are oriented towards decentralized applications (such as defi, web3, etc.), and are not fit for large scale consumer applications. Orbs is uniquely positioned in the solution landscape as it is the only public blockchain infrastructure with a live mainтet that is designed for enterprises use-cases. They believe that targeting enterprises is the best path to unlocking mainstream adoption for public blockchains.
“With increasing numbers of pilot projects seeking orbs, it is just a sign of improvement in client confidence. Orbs have a mass-market appeal due to their functionality in the consumer applications marketplace. The specific needs of large consumer application developers are taken care of by specialized blockchain applications.”
- Orbs was honored to host the US Treasury Department delegation, including the Acting Assistant Secretary, Mitchell Silk, at Orbs’ Tel-Aviv headquarters. They presented the technology and dived into practical use-cases, with an emphasis on public sector and social impact:
Upcoming events:
No updates.
Orbs Universe
Delegators, in order to receive rewards, you should delegate to an active guardian who does not miss voting deadlines. If your guardian misses voting deadlines, you will not get rewards in this period.
Guardians, please note that elections are every 20000 Ethereum blocks, it is approximately 3 days. A Guardian vote is valid for about 1 week. We recommend voting every 6 days to be on the safe side.
Voting deadlines calendar (estimated)
You can delegate your Orbs tokens via link. After the end of the closest voting period, you can check your rewards here.
Finance
Roadmap
Recently, Daniel Peled shared that they have not only achieved everything they set-up to do in the 2019 research and development roadmap but are also slightly ahead of schedule.
By the end of March, Orbs will launch the Orbs Staking Wallet, allowing token holders to manage their tokens, play an active role in bringing the Orbs Network to life and earn rewards for their contribution.
According to the Roadmap:
- Proof-of-Stake Core Infrastructure V2 — Implement the next version of the Orbs Proof-of-Stake architecture with various improvements making the existing implementation more efficient, easier to use and more powerful with the ability to rely on stronger incentives like locking.
2. Proof-of-Stake Ecosystem Tools — Create tools for participants in the Orbs PoS Universe. Validators will benefit from easier ways to keep their node healthy. Guardians will have better ways to measure Validators. Delegators will have easier ways to stake and observe network activity.
3. Orbs Audit Node — Audit nodes are important for network security. They allow any external participant (not necessarily a Validator) to verify that the network operation is correct. Audit nodes may choose to audit only a single or subset of virtual chains.
4. Orbs Two-Tier Consensus — Two-tier consensus is the hybrid aspect of Orbs. It allows building permissioned apps — where the app can select its own block producers. These apps run over a permissionless infrastructure — where validators are selected by the network.
5. Virtual Chains Infrastructure — Virtual chains are a key feature of Orbs that provides isolation between apps. It gives the network infinite scalability and sharding; and provides apps with lower cost of operation, guaranteed resources and independent governance.
6. Validator Node Deployment V2 — The next generation of how a Validator deploys and operates an Orbs node. Improvements include efficiency for reduced operation cost, higher availability and uptime, optimizations for even more scaling and improved security.
7. Orbs Smart Contract SDK — Allow developers to build even better apps with Orbs for more versatile use cases. Developers are requesting richer API’s that support more languages, more powerful data structures and more flexible interoperability.
8. App Developer Experience — Increase developer adoption by making the app development experience on Orbs easier than ever. Help developers learn how to build on Orbs and give better developer tools to debug and test their smart contracts.
9. Ready-Made Use Case Templates — Increase business adoption of the Orbs network by offering solutions for popular blockchain use-cases. These templates reduce the integration time of blockchain technology into a business from months to days.
10. Network Production Enhancements — The Orbs network is in production mainnet from March 2019. Continue the process of making the network more mature, reliable stable, performant and secure — so it can host even bigger apps with more users and more value.
11. Protocol Enhancement Research — Long term research for core improvements to the Orbs protocol. Every big feature like privacy with zero-knowledge proofs requires months of academic research before being implemented in production and added to the core.
12. Online IDE for App Developers — Similar to Ethereum’s Remix, the online IDE lets app developers write smart contracts directly from their web browser without installing any tools. This is a great way to make experimentation with Orbs easier with less friction.
Partnerships and team members
With the successful launch of the network behind us, they are shifting the development teams from building the network, to managing and automating it and consequently decided to make a few changes to the team structure:
- Daniel Peled will be taking on a more hands-on role in managing the Business Development, Marketing, and Operation teams, as well as being more actively engaged with the Orbs stakeholder community.
- Uriel Peled will continue to work with the team as an external advisor while they build the Orbs Universe.
- Orbs’ Technical Co-Founder Tal Kol will be diving back, and even deeper, into the technology and manage the engineering and research teams
- Co-founder Neta Korin will continue her work at the Hexa Foundation focusing on government and educational efforts, in addition to helping me with business development efforts.
Rumors
- There was a question in Telegram chat about the state of Singapore community and Ran, Head of Asia at Orbs, based in Singapore answered:
“There is a crypto community in Singapore, though perhaps not as vibrant as in other countries across the region. As for enterprises, some are exploring blockchain. However, I’d say that most of the adoption is driven by government agencies. We’re in touch with a few regarding adopting Orbs technology.”
Social media metrics
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Orbs Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
