Feb 20, 2019
OmiseGO: Alpha Release is out, OmiseGO Developer Program launched, eWallet and Plasma updates
Biweekly update 6th February — 20th February
This is not financial advice.
During the last two weeks, OmiseGo team made progress with development. They released Ari — Plasma MoreVP implementation on a public Ethereum network. Last week Ari was tested by Hoard at ETHDenver. The next version (beta) of OmiseGo network will be a publicly available release that anybody can use. The team will use the beta phase to observe real-world usage and look for bugs or flaws that haven’t been discovered in the alpha phase. Also, this week OmiseGo team launched ODP — an ongoing developer program of early testers and integrators who will be given first access to OmiseGo products, documentation and tooling. As for social encounters, the team attended ETHDenver, there were several Reddit AMA. Jun Hasegawa will take a stage at Tokyo Slush on February 22th-23rd, 2019. The team is planning a video workshop pre-event and a face-to-face workshop during EDCON HACK, which takes place on 8th-14th April in Sydney, Australia. And the last, but not the least — OmiseGo community continues to grow, there is a slight increase in the number of token holders and subscribers of OmiseGo blog, official Telegram, and Youtube channel these weeks.
Development
OmiseGO’s Alpha Release (Ari):
What is the alpha release (Ari)?
The alpha release Ari concludes the current stage in OmiseGo development cycle. The team feels they’re in a good place with their builds, deployments, and smart contract development where they’re ready to start using Plasma MoreVP implementation on a public Ethereum network with users. This allows them in tandem with partners, to test the integration of third-party apps with their Plasma MoreVP network. Hoard is using OmiseGo test network Ari at ETHDenver.
Getting to this point has taken a lot of hard work and dedication to overcome the issues OmiseGo has discovered while building. Here are some of the challenges that they’ve found and addressed along the way in 2019 alone:
- In certain conditions exits from the Plasma chain were unchallengeable. This meant that anybody could deposit to the Plasma MoreVP contract, perform an exit, and the entire chain would become invalid. This results in a denial of service (DoS) condition which would have taken down the whole network for everyone.
- A race condition on the Watcher start-up was discovered where unchallenged exits were processed before other modules of the system started. This meant that for users running their own Watcher, it would appear the chain is faulty (has a byzantine condition) — which would prevent normal operation, including transactions.
- The team found a bug where an attacker could drain all the ETH from the deployed Plasma MoreVP contracts.
- Protection against re-orgs on Ethereum has been added to the Plasma MoreVP contracts.
- The team implemented a flexible deployment mechanism for deploying services in production or locally on a developer laptop.
- Support was added for other components of the exit game including in flight exits and piggybacking.
Why Ari?
The naming convention for test Ethereum networks is to use train stations. Rinkeby and Ropsten are stations in Sweden, Kovan is a station in Singapore. When the team turned up the environment that was used for Devcon 4, they were huddled in a hotel room as we deployed the services and ERC20 tokens that would be needed by Hoard to operate Plasma Dog. During this, they realized they didn’t have a name for the network. They checked on a map and just around the corner from the conference center was Vyšehrad station. So that’s how OmiseGo named that one.
The team wanted to continue the naming convention with their alpha release and decided it was time to put Bangkok on the map. Ari is: 1) Easy to say for non-native Thai speakers, and 2) Can also mean “hospitable”, “accommodating” or “gentle”.
What’s next?
OmiseGo team is going to continue the same iterative process that they’ve been building with to date. All software has bugs and they will not rush releases or perform any activity that has the potential to compromise user safety. The next version (beta) of their network will be a publicly available release that anybody can use. They’ll use the beta phase to observe real-world usage and look for bugs or flaws that haven’t been discovered in the alpha phase. They’ll deploy the network to mainnet when the code has been thoroughly tested and audited and they are confident that it’s a safe place to put real money.
The team will have a bug bounty in place to catch more bugs and security vulnerabilities as a part of the process of getting ready for mainnet. They will develop more tooling around the interaction with services and the status of the systems they’ve deployed — eWallet Plasma integration.
The OmiseGO Developer Program: The ODP is an ongoing program of early testers and integrators who will be given first access to OmiseGo products, documentation and tooling.
Technical Update
The version introducing blockchain integration was originally planned to be named 1.2. Although there’s no change in the order or speed of operations, the team decided they wanted to get a couple of specific features into production ASAP, so they decided to sneak in an extra release with a very small scope, which will be called v1.2. The following release (with blockchain integration) will be called v2.0.
Completed
Improvements:
- Documentation and setup updates for v1.1 #780
- Upgrade to Elixir 1.8 and Ecto 3.0 #771
- Release v1.1.1 of iOS SDK with some improvements to the QR code scanner #115
- Add support for transaction request scanning in Point of Sale iOS app #45
Bug fixes:
- Fix various `/*.get` endpoints returning error 500 when not provided with `id` #773
- Fix missing BALANCE_CACHING_FREQUENCY config migration #777
- Fix settings being loaded before all settings are refreshed. #796
- Fix configurations loading order. #802
- Fix deprecated `NODE_NAME` interfering with deploy. #792
In review
These tasks have been completed, pending review by wallet team admins:
Improvements
- Blockchain wallet schema #806
In progress
These are the tasks the team is focusing on right now:
- Initial integration with Ethereum network
- Ability to import ERC-20 token
- New permission system #730
- Revamp Admin Panel #779
OmiseGO eWallet Suite Demo:
The OmiseGO eWallet Suite is a white label, open-source, and fully customizable eWallet to digitalize and store all types of assets. Being white-label, the eWallet is yours to brand as your own and as it is open-sourced and fully customizable, you can change and develop it to suit any need you may have. You may use it to store company loyalty points, employee benefit points, game tokens, cryptocurrency, or even fiat.
While the eWallet Suite can certainly stand alone on its own without having to be linked to the decentralized exchange (DEX), it was created with future integration into the OMG network in mind. With OMG network integration, a company can offer multiple transactions at high speeds. The decentralized exchange enables interoperable trade of different types of assets be it points, fiat, crypto, or any other asset that has been digitalized and stored on the OMG network.
In the video Thibault, Integration Lead Engineer at OmiseGO, walks us through the various features of the eWallet Suite, and show us how the eWallet and its features may be used in the real world.
You can also follow the progress on the eWallet Waffle board and in GitHub Milestones page.
- eWallet Suite More Resources:
- OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository
- Initial public demonstration of the eWallet
- Waffle board
- Chat to the eWallet team
Plasma
Research
The big news in the wider world of plasma research was Plasma Group’s first official announcement, accompanying the release of a “toolbox for deploying, transacting on, building with, and developing on plasma chains.” They’ve spent the months since Devcon IV putting together a Plasma Prime testnet (for anyone who doesn’t know, Plasma Prime is an iteration on the Plasma Cash design) and tools to help interested developers either interact with or deploy their own plasma chains.
Another cool thing here — in anticipation of a future where many plasma chains coexist, they’ve created a registry, where trusted deployment is verified via a contract so that users can be sure that funds are safe on the chain they’re using.
Plasma Group has published a thorough writeup of the design here.
Production
OmiseGo is considering their current testnet, which has been running on Rinkeby since December, a release candidate of the OMG Network. They’ve merged the initial updates to omg-js and have been testing these to ensure that things are going smoothly. They found and fixed a handful of bugs in the process, including addressing exceptions from the watcher when geth crashes, mitigating those crashes, and various improvements in syncing with geth.
Development continues on in-flight exits for ERC-20s and transaction metadata support. OmiseGo team also had some housekeeping to do, updating Elixir and our Exthereum dependency (Exthereum is an Ethereum client written in Elixir). To support testing in this phase, they’ve made it easier to adjust exit period times during deployment.
The team is excited eager preparing with zen-like composure to get wider involvement in testing in the coming weeks.
- For more on Plasma, see these community-produced resources:
- Learn Plasma, a community-led education initiative
- What is Plasma? Plasma Cash? by Jinglan Wang
- This primer from Consensys
- This nifty chart comparing different plasma designs
- Plasma Tesuji Github repository
- How OmiseGO will bring Plasma in everyone’s daily life by u/pwolf88
- An introduction to Plasma by Alexander Butler
Social encounters
- Tousthilagavathy — Developer Spotlight — Q&A in OmiseGo blog:
Tousthilagavathy has been a member of the OMG community since October 2017. As an active member on the OmiseGO’s reddit, he has developed content made available to the OMG community including a comprehensive ELI5 OmiseGO whitepaper.
See more of Tousthilagavathy’s work here.
- February 15th, 2019 — OmiseGo at ETHDenver.
Upcoming events:
- February 22th-23rd 2019 — Jun Hasegawa will take a stage at TOKYO SLUSH.
- February 26th–27th 2019 — Mobile Money and Financial Inclusion, Yangon.
- The team is currently planning a video workshop pre-event and a face-to-face workshop during EDCON HACK, which takes place on 8th-14th April in Sydney, Australia.
Reddit:
See also OMG Community Tracker and OMG Knowledge Base.
Finance
For more information on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX):
- DEX Update blog
- OMG DEX Design
Roadmap
In this blog post, the team attempts to summarize the different elements of OmiseGO and the OMG ecosystem, captures key developments over the past months and provides some information on where they’re going . They included an updated roadmap with key milestones. And they’ve been working with community members as well on the OMG project tracker to track progress on a smaller timescale.
Partnerships and team members
- More Viable PlasmaDog Premiers at ETHDenver on Rinkeby: The newest version of Plasma Dog is now running live on the first ever public dapp deployment of More Viable Plasma.
- Play the Game
- Watch the Leaderboard
- Monitor the Transaction Viewer
See also Hoard Tech Update: January 2019.
Rumors
Active Reddit discussions:
Ari testnet based on Bangkok train line.
Let’s play Plasma dog and let the world know full capacity of OMG.
Just Played PlasmaDog. Retro Soundtrack & Gameplay Are Awesome!
Other:
- OmiseGO (OMG): What’s The Hype Behind The Coin on Todays Gazette.
Social media metrics
Twitter — average number of retweets is 35–75 for one post.
Facebook — 60–90 likes per publication, 5–10 shares.
Reddit — Daily discussions have 100–250 comments.
Bitcointalk.org — since July 15th, 2017. Discussions on latest updates, price. Last publication — February 16th, 2019.
Chat.omisego.network channels: Announcements; Jobs; OmiseGO — Trading channel for speculation and trading; Random; Rules; Staking; Trading; Wallets; Japanese日本語.
New official China community channel on WeChat (ID: omisego_china).
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of OmiseGo Reddit subscribers and Twitter likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
