Orbs: News from the Foundation, An article on Bitcoin Boom-and-Bust Cycles, A new open-source library, Netta Korin and “Dear President Trump: Here’s why you want everyone using Bitcoin, including the bad guys”
Biweekly update 31st July — 14th August
What’s up, guys? It’s the Paradigm Fund with some news about Orbs! During the last two weeks, the team has been working on the sly; thus, not so much news appeared. However, actions speak louder than words. In their August update, Orbs reflected on the past events and the progress is transparently observable for us. As previously mentioned, Orbs upgraded nodes, taking into account gathered information from production network operating since March 2019, elections and an internal hackathon, which was focused on application development on the Orbs platform. R&D post is coming — stay tuned! Moreover, Orbs updated the open-source library for more convenient use. According to the August Update, Hexa Foundation was successful in the international field, visiting U.S. Senate and Peace to Prosperity Workshop in Bahrain. Netta Korin’s posted an article “Dear President Trump: Here’s why you want everyone using Bitcoin, including the bad guys,” where she discussed Bitcoin use problems and the attitude to the cryptocurrency. Professors Neil Gandal (Berglass school if economics, Tel Aviv University) and Joshua Gans (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto), advisors to the Orbs project, researched Bitcoin Vs. Other Cryptocurrencies, paying attention to the patterns it has. Orbs community is active, thrilled about forthcoming development and price changes. Orbsian enthusiasts even make specific memes. Nevertheless, there is a slight decrease in the number of subscribers in social networks. Well, that happens.
Stay with Paradigm and we will keep you informed!
Development
- Orbs Update August 2019 — there you can find highlights about the things happened to Orbs, excluding ones we have already mentioned in our reports. For detailed July update check our previous bi-weekly review.
Tech highlights
Node upgrade
New node upgrade includes several mini-features and improvements based on requirements gathered from:
- Insights regarding the Orbs production network operating since March 2019
- Insights from elections processing
- Insights from an internal hackathon, which was focused on application development on the
Orbs platform
Normally this news would be relegated to a separate R&D post (coming next week!), but the Orbs core team is very excited to publish the first version that is not a hot-fix and contains actual features.
- Orbs has a new open source library! Check it out.
Social encounters
- Professors Gandal and Gans argue that this $BTC boom is different from the two earlier cycles, as the other prominent coins have declined during Bitcoin’s latest meteoric ride. Here are some numbers. Read about Boom-and-Bust Cycles and why this time the tendency is different.
- Orbs Update August 2019
News from the Foundation
Hexa Foundation was invited to Bahrain!
Netta Korin was part of a very select group of business leaders invited to attend the Peace to Prosperity Workshop in Bahrain, specifically due to blockchain projects in the region which the Hexa Foundation is working on for the last year. The Hexa Foundation’s goal is blockchain for social impact and they focus on education, research, and special projects. Some of the people they met and discussed blockchain ideas within Bahrain include Ambassador Josette Sheeran, Abe Goldschmidt and Will Doffermyre of Oversea Private Investment Corporation of the US Govt Participation in GBBC Round Table at the U.S. Senate.
Hexa Foundation in US Congress!
Ran Hammer, Adv. was sent to represent the Hexa Foundation [and Orbs] at a first of its kind legislative roundtable at the U.S. Senate, discussing the state of blockchain technology and digital assets in the United States. The event was organized by the Global Blockchain Business Council and the Consumer Technology Association. Participants included members of Congress (including Darren Soto (FL-09), David Schweikert (AZ-6), Trey Hollingsworth (IN-09), Bill Foster (IL-11) and Warren Davidson (OH-08), Clyde Vanel of the NY State Assembly, as well as representatives from governmental authorities and municipalities, leading law and consulting firms as well as dominant market leaders.
The timing of the event was great, as it was conducted a day after the two congressional hearings conducted on the matter of the Facebook-led cryptocurrency project, Libra, which received a lot of attention. The discussion was focused on the actual benefits and positive social impact blockchain technology can promote and the means to improve education about and achieve adoption for this ground-breaking technology.
- Check out Netta Korin’s latest post: Dear President Trump: Here’s why you want everyone using Bitcoin, including the bad guys. While Bitcoin can help maintain some degree of pseudo-anonymity in certain aspects, (serving as a tool of economic freedom,) for many law enforcement efforts it can actually be a brilliant tool for tracking bad actors.
Upcoming events:
- August 28 Orbs’ own Danny Brown Wolf will be participating in this panel diving into enterprise blockchain — from RealEstate to medicine. See event via the link.
- 15th September, Ethereal Summit is coming to Tel Aviv, and Orbs is sponsoring.
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 time)
Tools for Guardians: We launched specific delegation template for Guardians, so they can present themselves by deploying their own web-site using our instructions. Later, we are going to create other tools for the comfortable use.
This is how we use the Template to introduce ourselves: orbs.paradigmcitadel.io
Our GitHub with Template: https://github.com/paradigmcitadel/orbs_guardian_delegation
You can delegate your Orbs tokens via link. After the end of the closest voting period, you can check your rewards here.
Roadmap
According to the new 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 to build 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.
13. Prism Block Explorer — Prism is the Orbs block explorer which lets users access the chain directly, find transactions and inspect blocks. Prism is also a developer tool because it lets smart contract developers investigate their contracts and learn how they’re used.
Partnerships and team members
Still excited about partnership with Celsius Network.
Rumors
- Memes from Telegram Chat:
About Orbs
Orbs Architecture
Orbs Speed
Orbs Reliability
Orbs Virtual Chains
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.
