Welcome to our Orbs update! We know You missed these guys. At the moment, Orbs is doing well — they didn’t lose their touch with the Ecosystem Development: 17 active Guardians, 14 Validators, over 1300 Delegators, 18 election rounds and 0 Validators have been voted out by the Guardians. Stratx Consulting Inc. became an elected Validator, and has been recently listed as Guardian in the Orbs Universe. Consequently, an active monitoring tool will appear for the benefit of Validators, so they will be able to monitor their performance and health. Moreover, the process of rewards distribution was explained taking into account all types of participation. At the beginning of July 2019, the first Orbs rewards distribution will occur. Orbs’ social activity was super fruitful during the last two weeks. Say, Tal Kol rocks as always! He was interviewed in the newest episode of BankOnIt Podcast with John Siracusa and he has just gone live with David Yakira as part of the Live Bitcoin Interviews series to talk about the open-source blockchain built for big businesses. Orbs continues its worldwide expansion: Korean and Indian communities develop. Orbs team met local teams that already delivered hundreds of blockchain-based PoCs and tens of production/trial projects. Not only Orbs expands worldwide but also works towards the growth of development in Israel: Israeli CFO Forum seminar on the topic of blockchain and the industry’s CFOP experience was hosted at Orbs HQ in Tel Aviv. The Orbs community is amazingly active, however, the number of followers in social networks decreased sharply. Probably, speculators finally realized Orbs AirDrop is nonexistent. Don’t be a speculator, be HODLer, stay tuned with Paradigm!
Development
- There are 17 active Guardians currently registered and 14 Validators running in production.
- There are now over 1300 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem.
- Up until now, there were 18 election rounds and no Validators have been voted out by the Guardians.
- The next big event coming up, according to the protocol, is reward distribution. As you may recall, the spec is available here. Many community members have been inquiring in the forums about the technicalities of the process, how exactly it works, and how to better understand the spec.
- Stratx Consulting Inc. is currently an elected Validator, and has recently become a listed Guardian in the Orbs Universe. Stratx is building an active monitoring tool for the benefit of all Validators in the Orbs universe. The tool is available here. The tool will allow Validators to monitor their performance and health. The goal is to empower all Validators with an intuitive dashboard for inspecting the status of their node and the overall Orbs network. Stratx believes that by sharing this tool, more members of the community can collaborate to include features valued by Orbs Universe participants. Stratx looks forward to applying its technical experience to continue to support and collaborate with the Orbs community going forward.
- Complete Guide to Writing an App on the Orbs Network (Part I of II) — an easy start with Kirill Maksimov, who describes how to write a simple smart contract on the Orbs network, test it, and finally to deploy it.
- At the beginning of July 2019, the first Orbs rewards distribution will occur! This post describes the various rewards, how they are calculated and the distribution process.
- Rewards types:
- Participation Rewards (Delegators and Guardians): Token holders that delegate their voting weight to an active Guardian directly or indirectly, are rewarded proportionally to their stake. In order to receive the delegation reward for an election term, Delegators must have delegated to a Guardian that participated in the election. An annual aggregate sum of 60M ORBS tokens is allocated to reward participation (of Delegators or Guardians). Token holders that delegate their voting weight to an active Guardian directly or indirectly, are rewarded proportionally to their stake. In order to receive the delegation reward for an election term, Delegators must have delegated to a Guardian that participated in the election. An annual aggregate sum of 60M ORBS tokens is allocated to reward participation (of Delegators or Guardians).
- Guardian Excellency Rewards: Guardians enforce the security of the network and are rewarded for their own stake as part of the participation reward (described in the previous section). In order to encourage Guardian participation, top-ranking Guardians are also rewarded with the Guardians Excellence Program. An annual aggregate sum of 40M Orbs is allocated to reward top-ranking Guardians for their work. The reward allocation per election term is determined as a fraction of the annual allocation proportional to the duration of the election term.The reward allocated to any specific Guardian at any specific election term shall be capped to such Guardian’s total delegated stake for that election term multiplied by 10% divided by the annual number of election periods.
- Validator Rewards: Validators are rewarded for running the network protocol and the actual steps they take to keep the network active and secure. Comprise: 4% annual rate of the Validator own stake. Awarded for the duration the Validator was elected. Fees paid by any applications which may run on Orbs, divided equally between the active Validators. Validator Introduction Program — 1M ORBS tokens per Validator, on an annualized basis. Awarded in proportion to the duration the Validator was elected, for the duration of the Validator Introduction Program.
2. Rewards Distribution Process:
Rewards will be distributed at the beginning of July (exact schedule to follow).
The rewards will be pushed to the recipients’ addresses on Ethereum.
The rewards will comprise the accumulated rewards for each address (for all its relevant roles), up until (and including) the 27th elections, which will be based on Ethereum block number 8048900, which will occur at the end of June.
3. Rewards calculation:
The rewards calculation is available in the “Orbs PoS Ecosystem” document. An example of calculated rewards for the 19th election cycle is available here. Note — these rewards are just for the 19th election cycle, NOT the total accumulated rewards.
4. The actual calculations:
For elections and rewards calculation purposes, only whole ORBS tokens are considered:
For example, for a Delegator stake of 15,240.13 ORBS the participating stake is 15,240 ORBS
This “whole ORBS only” approach is carried throughout all calculations
Number of election periods in a year = 117.23
This calculation is based on the original blockheight progression on the Ethereum network
Elections occur every 20,000 Ethereum blocks
Per election Validator reward = validator_stake * (4%/num_periods) + (1M / num_periods)
At this point, there are no application fees on the network
Per election Guardian Excellency reward = top10_guardian_reward_ratio * guardian_total_voting_power
Where top10_guardian_reward_ratio = MIN(10%,(40M / sum_of_top10_guardians_total_voting_power)) / num_periods
This reward is for the Top 10 (by their total voting power) of the Guardians who voted in this election round
Per election Participation reward = delegator_reward_ratio * delegator_stake
Where delegator_reward_ratio = MIN(8%,(60M / all_participating_stake))/num_periods
Social encounters
- Hosting of the Israeli CFO Forum seminar on the topic of blockchain and the industry’s CFOP experience, at Orbs HQ in Tel Aviv.
- A monthly update! Including:
Crazy busy week in New York: On the tech level, the all-hybrid concept of Orbs PoS over Ethereum was received really well and left a very good impression with the enterprises they’ve talked to. Orbs’ Identity model was very helpful in having concrete discussions while generating a lot of interest; it appears to be a good way to onboard enterprise partners. In terms of market maturity, an increasing number of enterprises are past the exploration phase and are actively doing PoCs for blockchain related projects (if not already beyond that point). Private vs public arguments were a huge success, and it felt like they are able to really convince with our position of the need for an external 3rd party to generate guarantees and trust. It appears as though the industry is beginning to understand that private blockchain is not a sustainable solution, which seems to indicate another important step in the majority of the market.
Orbs around the world:
Techstars Demo Day & CIO Summit
Danny Brown Wolf spoke at the CryptoChicks Blockchain & AI Conference & HackAThon in Toronto with Vitalik, Vlad, and other real and honorary Crypto Chicks
Masters of the Crypto Universe panel — Silicon Valley Blockchain meetup moderated by Marco Santori aka ‘Father of the SAFT Agreement’ President of Blockchain.com and Managing Partner at Blockchain Ventures, and Tony Perkins, Founder & Editor at Cryptonite.
Orbs’ road to India: During mid-May, some of the leading global system integrators had the opportunity to see the Orbs technology firsthand. They met with local teams that already delivered hundreds of blockchain-based PoCs and tens of production/trial projects. They then presented to SIs (spread across the country from New Delhi to Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru and all the way south to Kochi in Kerala) the Orbs PoS ecosystem and held in-depth discussions regarding the addition of permissionless validators to improve the overall security of the networks without exposing private data.
IEEE International Conference in Seoul with Ori Rottenstreich — At the conference, I presented a paper on ‘Enforcing Fairness in Blockchain Transaction Ordering’. This work further strengthens fairness aspects in the way transactions are selected to be included in blocks as first suggested in Orbs’ Helix paper from last year.
Orbs roadmap update! (See in the Roadmap part of this update.)
Just highlights: Watch Tal Kol (Orbs) explain Blockchain guarantees to CryptoWeekly.
Orbs expansion highlights: First, they have completed the first step of scoping for the digital identity proposition (see blog post). Orbs is preparing for an Identity Week in London, where they will participate in several events, present the identity concept and discuss its potential implementations with various companies, from identity startups to banks and telcos. During the London trip, they will also plan to meet several system integrators that expressed interest in using Orbs, educate them on the platform and explore potential use cases. The document notarization SDK is nearing completion of its design, and work will begin this month on a reference product that will demonstrate its capabilities while starting to get the word out for potential users.
Korea highlights: Orbs was selected to be part of Fn Idoedu Group, a company specializing in online education and software consulting selected by the Korean Government as the de facto educational org for blockchain engineers (Our Korean fans can see the announcement here). There are a lot of Korean guardians and Korean community keeps growing. One of the Orbs Network’s Guardians from Korea recently released a neat tool for the PoS ecosystem: It sounds an alarm when every election is completed, while also verifying delegator reward by registering to the delegator staking Ethereum address. Add the @ORBS_Delegator_bot on Telegram and try it out.
- SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Orbs. Hybrid blockchain developer Orbs wants to continue the open-source movement by enabling the ability to open data, share source code on a server, and share a running instance of that server.
- Newest episode of BankOnItPodcast with John Siracusa released an interview with Orbs’ Co-founder! Tal Kol rocks! Anyone interested in opensource and blockchain should check it out.
- “If we want to avoid this blockchain deathcycle, businesses need to use them the right way; bringing what public BC does best as an external, unbiased 3rd party verification and applying it to their enterprise-specific needs” Orbs’ Co-founder Tal Kol comments on this article.
- How can BC improve users’ security online? “blockchain is a global bulletin board that attackers cannot tamper with or prevent others from being exposed to the data. It’s a new way to publish data to the world in a unhackable way.” — Chief Architect Noam Oded at Customer Management.
- “Guardians play a central role in the Orbs PoS model; they are expected to be key participants within the Orbs Universe, to enforce the security of the network, align with the long term Orbs vision, and actively work to make this vision a reality.” — read via link.
- From the YahooFinance article: ‘Co-founder of the Orbs public blockchain also commented on Google’s power to shape opinions and called for change that allows people to protect themselves from what he sees as abuses of such power:’
- “Facebook has +2B users. Since WesternUnion charges can easily reach more than 7%t of a transfer, WhatsApp users will be able to transfer Libras among themselves and then convert the Libra into fiat in order to spend it outside the FB ecosystem” — this and much more info in the article on Cryptocurrencies and Payment Systems.
- New article: “Of all the potential positives that blockchain can enable, improving the efficiency of government-related services is among the most prominent.” Read about Blockchain Aid for the Refugee Crisis. What if a blockchain-based solution could tackle the challenges mentioned above and provide a transparent infrastructure that governments and NGOs alike could easily adopt and share? Imagine a biometric platform deployed as a permissioned/consortium blockchain, meaning that there are certain restrictions on joining as a node and accessing data, in order to tackle privacy concerns. The proposed platform would entail the following steps for refugees declaring themselves at a border checkpoint:
- Enrollment — regardless of whether the person obtains an official ID or not, she enrolls in the biometric identity platform, i.e. a new biometric ID is generated on the spot along with a cryptographic wallet. This wallet stores the new ID and all other relevant metadata, e.g. location, time, additional documents provided by the refugee, relatives, etc.
- Identification — once the biometric ID is available, the checkpoint tries to identify the individual, to verify whether there are no other matching IDs on the ledger
- Data transmission — the individual makes her first transaction on the blockchain, in which she sends all that info to the checkpoint. The data is encrypted so that only both sides can read it. All other nodes will only be able to verify that there has been a transaction between user X to node Y at time Z. They know where node Y is located, and they are able to extract from this transaction the cryptographic digest of the biometric identity. This allows them to look for a match when they generate a new biometric identity for a refugee
Upcoming events:
- Bynet Expo 2019 Tel Aviv, June 19
- Asia Blockchain Summit Taipei City, July 2–3
- Blockchain Central Astana, June 27–28
Orbs Universe
- Orbs Universe: The First Six Weeks
The data that serves as the basis for the findings of this report was gathered from various sources, as noted throughout the document. Naturally, due to the pseudonymous nature of the Ethereum blockchain, there is definitely some potential margin of error in conducting such analysis.
- Community interest: Delegated stake growth over time
In the Orbs Universe, the Delegators assign their voting power to the Guardians, who, in turn, participate in Validator election on their behalf (DPoS). Growing delegated stake shows increasing interest in participating in the Orbs ecosystem:
2. Acquired stake (from Exchanges) and delegation over time. This analysis is based on collecting known addresses of cryptocurrency exchanges from various online sources (Etherscan, Bloxy) and employing basic heuristics on address activities. The tokens retrieved from exchanges that changed their delegation status were identified. The following graph shows the percentage of the delegated stake of tokens acquired on exchanges:
3. 70% of Delegation over time
In the current PoS model, Guardians vote frequently to exclude misbehaving Validators from the network. A Validator that was voted out by 70% of the participating vote over a course of 3 elections cycles will be removed from the Validators list. The diagram below indicates how many different addresses hold the top 70% of delegated ORBS tokens, which means the minimal number of Delegators needed to reach the threshold of 70% of delegated stake in order to vote out a Validator:
4. 80% of ORBS float holders over time.
In addition to the delegated stake, they also analyzed the distribution of ORBS token holdings. A significant portion of ORBS tokens is being held at exchanges (see above), which obscure the number of holders and their stakes.
5. Guardian activity — Guardian growth over time
The initial number of community organizers indicates the commitment of large private sale holders to the network long-term. The later growths show an increased organic interest for creating new communities around the Orbs PoS Universe.
6. Guardian weight change over time — Guardians are soliciting appointments from Delegators to vote on their behalf in Validators elections. An interesting metric of decentralization is the Guardian voting weight over time relative to the overall voting weight. The following chart shows that the voting power of Guardians becomes more evenly distributed over time:
7. Validators adaptations — The reference implementation provided by Orbs includes tools to deploy the Orbs Validator node on AWS. Several Validators expressed interest in further developing the tools to support node operation on their own infrastructure. One Validator operates several data-centers around the world and has developed and implemented a toolchain to deploy the Orbs node on a bare-metal server. Another Validator developed an alternative deployment procedure to deploy the Orbs node on any server and is planning on sharing the solution with the other Validators to provide an alternative deployment option reducing operational costs.
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
What’s next?
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
No updates.
Rumors
- Core team chillin’:
- Orbs fan in Tel Aviv:Orbs fan in Tel Aviv:
- Telegram Chat meme:
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.
