Hello, Orbsians! The team continues contributing to the stable development of the ecosystem and seeking for new use-cases. During the past two weeks, Orbs has been mostly focused on public activity. The first Orbs Guardians and Validators online meetup passed successfully! Moreover, in November, Danny Brown Wolf represented the Orbs team in Washington DC for “Demo Day on the Hill,” organized by the Global Blockchain Business Council in conjunction with The Congressional Blockchain Caucus. She presented the Images Copyright Registry launched by the Hexa Foundation on the Orbs Blockchain infrastructure, and the process by which the Orbs team identify value in blockchain use-cases. Read the article with Danny Brown Wolf event afterthoughts and watch her interview by BLOCKTVnews in our update.
Furthermore, Netta Korin wrote an article on a blockchain-based solution against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Fraud, as it is a hot topic that stimulates a broader debate on the US welfare program. In addition, you can read an interview where David Acton from the winning team of Un Hackathon shares his experience building an app on the Orbs network. Besides, a partnership update: Korea’s biggest online bookstore is now using Orbs technology! It was only a few weeks ago that YES24 announced the launch of Sey Chain, the retail giant’s private blockchain and token. This project was built on the technology underlying the Orbs network. It will be used for various purposes within the company’s ecosystem, from the purchasing of items and tickets to incentivizing rewards for authors and artists.
The number of subscribers in the social network significantly increased. Let’s wait for December development, social, and ecosystem updates with us!
Development
Social encounters
- US lawmakers wanted to better understand how decentralization can give real value today. Lead by Danny Brown Wolf, Orbs made the case for blockchain up-close and personal on GBBCouncil’s Demo Day on the Hill in front of Congress. Full interview by BLOCKTVnews, check it out here.
“The idea is we come to a client and we tell them explain to us your needs and we will tell you if blockchain can bring value in a solution to your needs.” — Danny Brown Wolf
- Evangelizing Blockchain to the US Congress — Danny Brown Wolf represented the Orbs team in Washington DC for “Demo Day on the Hill”. The event was organized by the Global Blockchain Business Council in conjunction with The Congressional Blockchain Caucus.
{Why Orbs participated?}
Firstly, the Orbs team has been an active member of the GBBC for the past year, enjoying great value from their events and a strong network. Secondly, they, together with its social impact arm the Hexa Foundation, believe strongly in engagement with regulators and opportunities to educate and advocate for blockchain usages.
{What Orbs shared/presented?}
Danny Brown Wolf presented the Images Copyright Registry launched by the Hexa Foundation on the Orbs Blockchain infrastructure, and the process by which the Orbs team identify value in blockchain use-cases. In order to create a trusted images copyright registry, the Orbs team created a simple solution that can be added to any app or service that provides services for the creation, storage or sharing of images. For every image added to the service, a hash (unique identifier) is created which is recorded on the blockchain, along with any relevant meta-data, owner’s information, a timestamp, geographic location, licensing and more. Thus they create a decentralized database that is extremely hard to manipulate, that can be used by creators to prove ownership over their images and by news consumers to verify the publisher’s metadata of a picture or video.
{Potential Uses}
In addition to being a tool for proving ownership, such a registry can be used to create different services, such as:
- Monetization tool for creators, based on different rights regimes and licenses.
- Allowing and managing lawful access to content for different types of users
- Fighting fake news/fake images.
- A way for large content distributors to collaborate with startups and SMEs on image sharing (open-source data platform).
- A tool for online services to ensure that content shared on platforms is not in violation of copyrights.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the name of the formerly known Food Stamp Program. The most common abuse of SNAP is referred to as “trafficking”. It means an exchange of SNAP benefits for cash, unapproved items or other goods (e.g. controlled substances, firearms, ammunition, etc.).
Blockchain technology allows safe interactions between parties who do not necessarily trust each other. An example for such interaction is selective sharing of relevant information across multiple participating entities in the network. With regard to US welfare programs, this allows each participant in social program(s) to create her own digital identity (containing all her relevant personal details) combined with a cryptographic digital wallet, and share this information selectively with different programs, only as required.
Given that certain programs already provide benefits through EBT, the transition to a cryptographic digital wallet will be simplified. In fact, the participants will not notice any difference in their day-to-day use of EBT. Having said that, in order to maximize overall efficiency, more (and eventually all) programs should use the new cryptographic EBT with time. There are several advantages for the cryptographic wallet:
- It allows generating multiple addresses, all under the same master wallet, each for a different social program if required
- As additional programs use EBT, its importance increases for the participants. As a direct result, it is less likely that those individuals will tend to illegally exchange them for cash, thus a positive externality may be reduced SNAP trafficking
- Lastly, as far-fetched as it may be right now, these cryptographic EBT wallets may possibly serve as alternative bank accounts for individuals receiving social benefits and who are considered as “unbankable”
- Unqualified Opinions with Oded Wertheim, CTO of Orbs, Oded & Ryan Selkis discuss:
- building public blockchains for enterprises
- enterprise use cases beyond finance
- how the trust will be built into the products of the future
Listen to the episode (27 min) to better understand the problems that public chains solve for enterprises and how the trust will be a standard feature built into them.
- Gili and Danny Brown Wolf presented on trust and guarantees in enterprise business models to LinkedIn Co-founder Eric ly, as part of a Crypto Mondays meetup in San Francisco.
- Watch how increasing demand for trust and transparency will drive for-profit companies to adopt the public blockchain: Orbs Co-founder Tal Kol with Alessandra Sollberger.
- Orbs Guardians and Validators Meetup — check out the first online meetup!
Last month in New York, the Global Business Blockchain Council hosted a hackathon event to demonstrate and discover the ways blockchain technology can be used to advance the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Several leading blockchain networks including Microsoft, Bitfury, JPMorgan’s Quorum, and Orbs were made available to participants by providing them with the tools and resources to build their proposed solutions.
David Acton from the winning team Dynamic Digital Cooperatives shares his experience building an app on the Orbs network:
Q: What made your team choose the Orbs blockchain? How would you describe your experience building on the network (toolset, documentation)
A: Ease of use for sure, as well as the writing of smart contracts in Golang, which is a great idea. I’ve done Golang development in the past; one of the problems with other platforms using proprietary languages is the learning curve of the blockchain itself, atop of the learning curve of the language used. I’ve seen even expert developers make very serious security mistakes. If you’ve got a language you’re familiar with, you can be more productive more quickly in my opinion.
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)
Tools for Guardians: We launched a 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 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 a 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 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
- Sey Chain: Partnership between YES24 & Orbs — Korea’s biggest online is bookstore now using Orbs technology! It was only a few weeks ago that YES24 announced the launch of sey Chain, the retail giant’s private blockchain and token. The launch of sey Chain is just a first and arguably most important step of building the company’s new ecosystem: The broader vision is to create a consortium of YES24’s partner companies in the space and work together to develop better e-learning and e-commerce opportunities. By using the Sey Coin, readers can now reward and be rewarded based on their support and ranking within the new ecosystem. In addition, the coin may be used to purchase concert and movie tickets, as well as other goods at Seycoin mall.
In recent months, the Orbs team has been putting substantial efforts in East Asia, highlighting Korea and especially Korean enterprises. This exciting announcement is the latest to highlight the network’s production capabilities, resilience, scalability, and universality for corporate-grade applications.
Rumors
No updates.
About Orbs
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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.
