Welcome to post-Public Alpha life! The version of the OMG Network available to the public implements More Viable Plasma for ETH transfer and Minimal Viable Plasma for ERC-20 token transfer, with a single operator, secured against the Rinkeby Ethereum Testnet. It supports the full plasma lifecycle — deposits, transfers, exits, and in-flight exits. In their testing, the team has already been able to process over 1.2MM transactions with a peak measured throughput of over 2700 transactions per second so far. This version, an Alpha release, has a few known bugs that will soon be fixed with a Network Update that is currently under development. The past two weeks the eWallet team has been focused on testing and fixing of bugs in the admin panel for the 1.2 release; Potterhat, a reliability service they’re building to connect to Ethereum and the Ethereum integration. OmiseGO team was at EDCON! During the main conference Pepesza Peregud, Software Developer at OmiseGO, gave a talk on the security threats that centralized cryptocurrencies experience and how OmiseGO is exploring hybrid solutions that look to extend the security of plasma for asset exchange. These weeks more EDCON videos were published. While at EDCON HACK the team encountered a developer duo that was building on the OMGNetwork — Adrian Li and Kendrick Tan, the team behind Plasma Bootstrap. Plasma Bootstrap enables users to deploy a local plasma chain easier by providing a simple GUI to generate the terraform/bash scripts needed to deploy a plasma chain on either a cloud provider (e.g GCP, AWS, etc), or a local Linux machine. This is done instead of having to navigate around a terminal and editing the docker-compose file to start up the app. There is then a coupled analytics suite and alert system to help users diagnose issues, should they occur. OmiseGo friends, office buddies, family members, and stellar team Hoard Exchange were doing an AMA on the OmiseGo official subreddit on what’s like to build in the OMG network. As for upcoming events, Vansa will represent OmiseGO at the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Global Blockchain Council in San Francisco this May, the team will be at Devcon 5 in Osaka. So far so good. The community constantly grows. There is a slight increase in the number of token holders and subscribers of OmiseGo official social media channels. Further updates will follow!
Development
Plasma Bootstrap:
Hackathons and workshops are events where OmiseGO is able to share their tools with the community. EDCON 2019 with its EDCON HACK was a prime stage to showcase OmiseGo product and have other developers build on their network. While at EDCON HACK they encountered a developer duo that was building on the OMG Network — Adrian Li and Kendrick Tan, the team behind Plasma Bootstrap.
What the OmiseGO team liked about Plasma Bootstrap is that it added value to the experience of those working on the OMG Network. It was a simple solution to the lack of real-time activity visibility while working on elixir-omg, their production repo of the OMG network. Adrian and Kendrick experienced difficulty debugging their work. According to them, “(they) felt that the experience required better metrics, data, and documentation, so we thought it would be a nice project to create something that would ease the pain for the community.” This inspired them to develop Plasma Bootstrap.
Plasma Bootstrap enables users to deploy a local plasma chain easier by providing a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI) to generate the terraform/bash scripts needed to deploy a plasma chain on either a cloud provider (e.g GCP, AWS, etc), or a local Linux machine. This is done instead of having to navigate around a terminal and editing the docker-compose file to start up the app. There is then a coupled analytics suite and alert system to help users diagnose issues, should they occur.
During the 48-hour hackathon, Adrian and Kendrick built on top of elixir-omg to provide analytics and real-time feedback from the OMG network to the user. They also constructed a web-app that allows users to generate several deployment scripts easily. According to them “(they) thought that having an intuitive, easy-to-use, one-click solution would provide an experience that is rarely seen in the current crypto space.”
Under the stress and pressure of a hackathon, the team behind Plasma Bootstrap found that understanding and debugging the existing Elixir + Python codebase to be one of the most challenging parts of the build. With the time constraints, Kendrick and Adrian were unable to add all the features they would have wanted. Given more time, the duo would have added in a component to easily browse and search the logs of the plasma server –instead of just metrics.
While the duo has certainly added value to the network, they have also come to appreciate the OMG Network and learned from the build. When asked the question: “What has building Plasma Bootstrap made you learn about working on the OMG Network?” They said:
“A lot of effort has been put to ensure that plasma works as it should, and we are really excited about the future of plasma. We hope that we can contribute to making plasma easy-to-use and more user-friendly for developers from all walks of life.”
More info on Plasma Bootstrap:
Language, tools and Framework used: React (for the UI), Docker, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, Flask (for prometheus exporter), Web3 (for ENS support).
Source codes: Plasma Bootstrap, Frontend and Terraform
Want to build on the OMG Network? Sign-up for the OmiseGO Developer Program (ODP)
The OmiseGO Developer Program (ODP) is an initiative that is part of the product development process. The objective of the ODP is to systematically and carefully facilitate usage and thorough testing of Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) and early stage products in order to gain feedback for improvement. The program is aimed towards those who would like to build their own products, such as games, financial service applications, and education platforms on top of the OMG Network. Applicants of the ODP will fall into the developer category and are willing to work with unpolished and early stage codebase.
Early testers and integrators are given early access to the new products OmiseGO rolls out. Those in the program will also have opportunities to interact with each other and with the engineering team.
The ODP is an ongoing program and applications are accepted on a rolling basis. The goal is for ODP participants to participate as Alpha testers for roll-outs before they are released to the public in Beta. What this means is that there is no real definite timeline or start and end dates.
Technical Update
eWallet Update 24: the “I could stop whenever I want. These are just choices.” edition
The past two weeks have been focused on three things:
- Testing and fixing of bugs in the admin panel for the 1.2 release
- Potterhat, a reliability service they’re building to connect to Ethereum
- The Ethereum integration
Completed
Here are the main items the team has knocked out since the last update:
Improvements:
- Update admin email #966
- Frontend lint release version #971
- Exchange pair default address #973
- Add api_key.get endpoint #994
- Rename admin panel subapp to frontend #997
Bug Fixes:
- Frontend bug fixes #970
- Quality Control Fixes for 1.2 #976
- Fix unhandled error when match_all/match_any format is incorrect #978
- Fix rate exchange bug #984
- Fix exception raised when the given start_by field is not allowed #986
In review
These tasks have been completed, pending review by eWallet team admins:
Improvements:
- Geth ethereum node communication #979
- Blockchain Wallet #981
- Retrieve blockchain balances #982
- 2FA Authentication #920
- Support passing exchange pair rate as a string #1000
In progress
- Potterhat PoC
- Add auth token expiration #1001
- Dialyzer fixes #868
- eWallet Suite More Resources:
- OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository
- Initial public demonstration of the eWallet
- Chat to the eWallet team
Plasma
Plasma Update 19: May 7th, 2019
All eyes now point to the Network Upgrade. The team has been preparing to deploy a slew of new features to the public. They’re approaching the process as comprehensively as they can, by testing exits, preparing their client software, and updating the documentation. Once they’re ready to deploy the upgrade, all UTXO owners on Ari will have the tools necessary to easily exit their UTXOs back to Rinkeby and re-deposit them into the upgraded contract and child chain. With the complication of this upgrade in mind, they’ve also been pushing forward with research around a predicate-like contract architecture. They hope that the new architecture can reduce the number of times the team needs to perform this kind of “hard” upgrade.
In addition to the upgrade, the team continues to work on resiliency. They’ve recently added Parity support into their services so that they can test the relative availability versus geth. Going forward, they may be able to back their watcher and child chain services with multiple Ethereum nodes so that they can tolerate availability issues coming from the nodes. The team has also begun work to support RockDB which is more operationally-friendly. All this work helps their goal of providing production-quality services while they iterate on network features in PoA.
- 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
- Towards A General Purpose Plasma by Plasma Group
Social encounters
April was ushered in with the announcement of the new OmiseGO CEO, Vansa Chatikavanij. Along with the restructuring in Omise leadership, Jun Hasegawa, now Omise Holdings CEO, also discussed the role OmiseGO plays as a subsidiary of Omise Holdings moving forward.
OmiseGO happily welcomes Vansa into her new role as CEO. They now work towards her vision, priorities and business goals for the company which she laid out in her blog.
These weeks events:
- OmiseGo tweeted on May 9th, 2019:
Standing room at the brown-bag-lunch discussion on the developing global trading landscape. We’re finding market solutions through technology by understanding regulations with the help of our guest Jamie from Clearpool.
Upcoming events:
- May 24th–26th, 2019 — SURGE, Bangkok.
- May 31st — June 2nd, 2019 — CryptoChicks Hackathon + Blockchain & AI Conference.
- Vansa will represent OmiseGO at the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Global Blockchain Council in San Francisco this May.
- OmiseGO team is thrilled to participate in Decrypt Tokyo 2019 on June 8th — 9th, 2019. Come the team and others to promote blockchain technologies, applications, and services in Japan.
- Devcon 5 in Osaka — October 08th-11th, 2019.
Jun tweeted on May 11th, 2019:
Reddit:
See Part 1 of 3 of the OmiseGO AMA special with community partner HOARD: In this segment they have Sławomir Bubel, AKA “Malfunction” or “Malf”, HOARD CEO; Cyryl Matuszewski, HOARD Lead Programmer; and Radek Zagórowicz, Hoard Programmer, Plasma Researcher, answer the OmiseGO community’s questions.
Responses to previous OmiseGO AMAs: AMA #1, AMA #2, AMA #3, AMA #4, AMA #5, AMA #6, AMA #7, AMA #8, AMA #9, AMA #10, AMA #11, AMA #12, AMA #13, AMA #14, AMA #15, AMA #16, AMA #17, AMA #18, AMA #19, AMA #20, AMA #21, AMA #22.
Videos:
- EDCON 2019 — Panel: Decentralising economies and funding the commons: Vitalik Buterin (Founder of Ethereum), Michael Faye (Co-founder of Give Directly), Kelsie Nabben (MC, Project Manager at OmiseGO).
- EDCON 2019 — Pepesza Peregud (Software Developer at OmiseGO): Building the OMG Network: Plasma and Securing Exchanges on Plasma.
Other:
- OmiseGO, three months on: choosing, navigating and shaping a landscape by Dennis Keller.
- Blockchain Erodes the Competitive Attention Economy for Video Games by Chris Robison (Hoard).
- OMG Community Tracker and OMG Knowledge Base.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io):
There is a slight increase in the number of token holders these weeks.
For more information on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX):
- DEX Update blog
- OMG DEX Design
Roadmap
OmiseGo March 2019 Newsletter:
Major Milestone Progression. Source: OmiseGo newsletter.
From the OMG project tracker (May 15th, 2019):
In progress
- New permission system and new transaction request features. (v1.2)
- Ethereum integration. (v2.0)
- Plasma Mainnet
- Synthetic Minds audit (Tesuji)
- Support Omise Payment (Aji)
- Proof of Stake Design
- Support fiat (Aji)
- Support debit/credit cards (Aji)
- Support top-up/cash-out (Aji)
Partnerships and team members
Rumors
OmiseGO Survey: Usage of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins:
As the team further develop their understanding of the payments and crypto market, OmiseGO is curious to learn more about usage of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins for payments.
The aim of this survey is to collect the views of survey participants. This survey should take between 10–15 minutes.
Twitter:
Jun twitter thread on Key takeaways from #GAIMopsCayman.
Jun tweeted on May 13th, 2019:
Active Reddit discussions:
Binance and Bitfinex, really highlight why this project can’t come soon enough.
“I don’t know what OMG is doing”.
Other:
The 100+ Projects Pioneering Decentralized Finance. The stablecoins, DEXs, investing, derivatives, payments, lending, and insurance platforms building on Ethereum: OmiseGo mentioned as one of top 100 DeFi projects in the recent Consensys post.
Social media metrics
OmiseGo community continues to grow, there is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of OmiseGo social media channels these weeks.
Twitter — Average number of retweets is 35–75 for one post.
Facebook — 60–90 likes per publication, 5–10 shares.
Reddit — Daily discussions with 100–250 comments.
Bitcointalk.org: since July 15th, 2017. Discussions on latest updates, price. Last publication — April 24th, 2019.
OmiseGo Chat channels: Announcements; Jobs; OmiseGO — Trading channel for speculation and trading; Random; Rules; Staking; Trading; Wallets; Japanese.
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 followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
