Oh, hey! Happy to see You in our biweekly report or Orbs Network! The second part of January was pretty busy for the team: non-stop development and ecosystem support, events and conferences, community transfer, and social media publications! Recently, the team shared an update regarding their activities of this winter; the development update is to come! Currently, there are 19 registered Guardians and 16 Validators running in production, over 1700 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem. Moreover, two applications are stably running on the Orbs!
Orbs team gathered to congratulate the Korean community on the occasion of the Korean New Year. In the update, they mentioned the expansion of the Orbs community in Korea. Besides, a new POS app is coming soon! This app is mainly developed by the Korean team and will support the local language to increase accessibility to the POS universe.
As for social media updates, a couple of fresh must-reads and videos appeared. Tal Kol, the Orbs star co-founder, managed to publish two articles. The first reflects on the question, “Is the Future of Blockchain Tech Innovation in the East?” The second one touches upon the topic of why blockchain is the necessary safeguard against data breaches, its features, and solutions it proposes. Tal also created an informative video on how Orbs is tackling one of the biggest hurdles to global blockchain adoption — costs.
By the way, don’t miss Orbs Davos’ stories! “One of the things Chris Giancarlo told me that really resonated is that the U.S. doesn’t have to be first. What it does need is to get it right.” — said Danny Brown Wolf, Head of Partnerships and Strategy at Orbs. See videos, photos, and a bit more in our report!
The community is prone to grow in social networks; the transfer of the Telegram chat went successfully. Also, the Orbs team is planning an AMA session — if you have questions, it’s the right time to ask!
Stay with Paradigm = stay informed!
“Crypto startup Orbs has proposed a blockchain-driven system to trim unnecessary government spending while also cutting down on food stamp fraud.”
— A Blockchain Solution to Government Welfare Fraud on Decrypt.co
Development
- State of the Network, according to the latest update:
There are 19 registered Guardians and 16 Validators running in production. There are now over 1700 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem.
There are 2 applications running on the Orbs Network:
- Vchain 1960000 — Open-Rights (https://www.open-rights.org/)
- Vchain 1970000 — Receipts Notarization (https://www.linet.org.il/)
Social encounters
{Korean Community}
(Amazing video for the Korean community on the occasion of Korean New Year.)
“2020 will be a great year for the Korean presence too: The Korean team is frequenting many meetings with several conglomerates to discuss the usage of blockchain for scaled use-cases. It is important that we maintain strong relationships with these industry giants.
While we already have a thriving Kakao chat group; the KR team built another community forum to facilitate productive discussion in non-volatile environments. Almost all information in the Korean language will be integrated into the forum.
In Korea, there will be a parliamentary election in April, so fake news is an increasingly emerging issue. If you can read Korean, don’t miss the post on How Blockchain Helps Solve Fake News Problems.
At last, a new POS app is coming soon! This app is mainly developed by the Korean team and will support the local language. We hope this will increase accessibility to the POS universe. Stay tuned for the app-launching!”
{Orbs around the world}
- In early December, the Orbs team co-organized a meetup with the co-founder of LinkedIn, Eric Ly as part of the Crypto Monday event. Eric co-founded a new blockchain company named Hub.
- Edge computing — Took place in Silicon Valley on December 9th as part of a fireside chat with Hedera Hashgraph, Talking about the difference and comparing some of the similarities in our approach to the market.
- The second conference named Elev8 was held in Vegas on December 9th, this time I was part of a panel called “What Blockchain Business Models are Working and Why?”
- Orbs Project: Public Vs Private Blockchain Costs — Orbs Co-founder, Tal Kol, on how Orbs is tackling one of the biggest hurdles to global blockchain adoption: Costs
- Orbs was featured in GBBC’s annual report — check page 40.
- “With the wonderful Thomas Hardjono and Prof. Alexander Lipton of Hebrew University at World Economic Forum in Davos 2020: So much Crypto, Finance and Tech in one place.” See post.
- Great panel moderation by Lory Kehoe at WEF2020, Davos with Interfaith Alliance on the topic of the Role of Faith in Tech! With John C. Havens, Cyrus Hodes and Danny Brown Wolf performing:
- “One of the things Chris Giancarlo told me that really resonated is that the U.S. doesn’t have to be first. What it does need is to get it right.” — Danny Brown Wolf. See Head of Partnerships and Strategy at Orbs, analyzing the developments at Davos.
- Watch Danny Brown Wolf speaking on World Economic Forum and their objectives to attend it!
- Is the Future of Blockchain Tech Innovation in the East? An article by Tal Kol.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has been an undisputed global leader in innovation. However, nowadays the power shifts to new “tech leaders” — China, Korea, India.. Read an article and learn more about blockchain development priorities in these countries.
- Why blockchain is the necessary safeguard against data breaches — another cool post by Tal Kol.
Data breaches caused by third parties cost large companies millions of dollars. When access to data is dictated by a set of smart contracts that are guaranteed to execute, the margin for human errors or compromise is significantly reduced. Check the link to get acquainted with the solutions offered by blockchain technology.
Upcoming events:
- Orbs AMA Sessions — add your question and they’ll do their best to address it on the upcoming AMA.
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
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.
Partnerships and team members
No updates.
Rumors
- Just a wonderful shot from Orbs-looking building at WEF, Davos:
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.
