This is not financial advice.
Orbs tend to commit development on GitHub regularly. Their Mainnet, which is planned on 28th of March is thrilling the community and team. Everything is going right, but the following weeks are going to be insane. Closer to launch they’ll publish a set of dedicated posts outlining their vision of the upcoming ecosystem, what exactly is being launched in this version and what are the plans for the next version. Follow their progress with us!
Development
- Some special info about the Mainnet Launch in their March update:
- R&D Updates — They’re working around the clock to get ready for V1 release. This release is special because with it, they’re no longer developing in the shadows of private repos: the vision has always been to build an open source ecosystem around Orbs, with open contributions from the developer community.
- Final Updates and Testing — Over the last month they engaged in a variety of testing processes — both internal and external — to make sure that the network is ready. Thus far, everything is running smoothly allowing to focus on the final touches to make sure the launch of production ready environment goes as smoothly as possible.
- They are to move to absolute transparency and open everything they’ve been working on.
The entirety of the Orbs codebase (over 60 repos on Github, at the time of this writing) is going to become completely open-source to the global developer community. This means that:
- Anyone can begin reviewing the system. This is the best way to reach the target of a secure implementation is by welcoming external audit.
- Anyone can fork and make their own versions of what the team built. The IP is being made available to the community.
- External contributors can start joining. In a sense, the ecosystem is going to be launched in full.
- What they are tying up in the next couple of weeks:
- Integration of the validator Voting and Elections flow. It’s an interesting mix of contracts running on Orbs and contracts running on Ethereum that are communicating together.
- Integration of the subscription mechanism that will allow virtual chain owners to pay fees for their virtual chain using a contract on Ethereum.
- Stability testing of Lean Helix consensus algorithm in varying conditions, such as nodes restarting (to check for correct sync behaviour) and elections modifying the active committees.
- Prism block explorer. Beyond showing transactions and blocks, they are adding details such as which contracts were executed and what arguments were given to them — an invaluable tool for debugging smart contracts.
- Integration of validator flows to Nebula, to assist the rollout of new validators in the months after launch.
- Tweaking finality threshold for Ethereum interoperability. The Orbs protocol offers finality whereas Ethereum does not (longest chain wins).
Social encounters
- Watch Orbs Technological Co-founder Tal Kol answering questions submitted by Orbs fans in Korea via link.
- “Encouraging a discussion on tech tyranny could show giants like @Google that it may be worthwhile to cater to citizens themselves, and not governments.” The case for a decentralized alternative to @Patreon. Read here.
- Handful of blockchain favorites — learn more here.
- Orbs is incredibly proud and fortunate to have Netta Korin as a partner. If you’re looking for inspiration, its right here. Korin began her career on Wall Street in 1994 as an investment banker for the Israel team of Lehman Brothers. She later moved on to work at well-known hedge funds, managing teams and funds for Ron Lubash, Noam Gottesman and Steve Cohen before founding her own hedge fund in 2002. She retired from Wall Street after moving to Israel in 2009, in order to dedicate more of her time to philanthropic efforts in the country. “It is important to use the technology to drive the sector forward but even more invaluable if you are making the world a better place at the same time”.
- Kakao had invested $57 million towards creating new Artificial Intelligence and blockchain technology. The company invested an undisclosed amount of money in Orbs network, the first such investment in a blockchain startup by the Korean company.
- Districts around the world are quickly following suit: Denver Colorado announced it will be deploying the technology for its overseas voters and citizens currently on military service.
Upcoming events:
- On March 23rd, Orbs will be hosting a premium meetup ahead of the launch at the Grand WalkerHill in Seoul. Spots are very limited so reach out to them if you’re interested in attending.
Finance
(Waiting for a mainnet.)
Roadmap
Next Roadmap will come soon with more details to the releases leading up to v1 launch.
What’s next?
- Performance optimization — Improving stability under stress for broad release of the network in the short and long terms.
- Hubble Block Explorer — Release of the web-based tool used for acquiring information from the virtual chain (e.g. committed blocks and transaction confirmations), as well as show diagnostics data related to the network health and performance. The new explorer will also perform analytics on contracts running on virtual chains.
- Helix Consensus Protocol — Integrating the Lean Helix Consensus Protocol into the node software stack. The implementation of Lean Helix has been a massive and intensive project ongoing for several months by the Orbs dev team.
- Autonomous Swap Bridge — mechanism for transferring existing ERC20 tokens from Ethereum securely into Orbs and then back again. This will enable the scaling of apps running on Ethereum, while still maintaining the native benefits of Ethereum as a base-layer.
- POS Security Model — Put into high gear the development of Orbs’ proof of stake model designed to ensure the sustainability of the decentralized, public ecosystem.
Partnerships and team members
No updates.
Rumors
- Shai Yallin tweeted “This is where it gets interesting. orbs_network now has a monitoring dashboard for our (internal) testnet.”
- Gif about the launch of the mainnet.
- According to Orbs Announcements, the company is very excited to announce that top Korean Blockchain influencer, Spunky has become Head of HEXA, Korea. Learn more here.
Pro-BIT is a digital asset exchange.
Social media metrics
There is a slight decrease in number of telegram followers and behind this, community is growing.
