Greetings to all OmiseGo followers! The team officially done with the first half of the year! Time sure flies when you’re busy BUIDLing. For June they released the public alpha of Samrong, the OmiseGO Networks latest iteration, and worked on the Ethereum integration for the eWallet which included working on the groundwork for their Plasma node to utilize Potterhat for higher Ethereum connectivity. During these weeks, the team was working assiduously as usual! These weeks were all about Samrong! The team opened up the Network Upgrade to the ODP for testing. During this time, ODP members migrated their tokens onto the network. To ensure a smooth launch over the past cycle, the Plasma development team updated documentation and tooling for compatibility — this included the upgrade guide, a brand new js-starter kit and demos. The network was validated and bugs were fixed. Go.Exchange is now live and open for public signups! If you want to learn more about them, the team’s visions and how they plan to become an exchange used and trusted by people all around the world, please read their latest blog post. And keep in mind that Go.Exchange referral program is live! Refer and earn to help the team grow the community! As for the social side, OmiseGO CEO Vansa shares her insight on how to ensure regulation promotes innovation and growth in the blockchain ecosystem instead of simply stifling it with rigid policy. This month the team is inviting her to respond to community questions on OmiseGo subreddit. Win Sutthiporn, Business Development Manager at OmiseGO, blogged on “Loyalty to our Currencies: Constructing our economic realities”. As for upcoming events, the team will be at Code Elixir London, Bangkok Fintech Fair 2019 on July and Devcon 5 in Osaka. So far so good. The community constantly grows. There is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of OmiseGo official social media channels. And last but not least — big congrats to CEOs Jun, Donnie and Vansa for being selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs! They went through a rigorous process at the 88th Endeavor ISP that identified them as high-impact entrepreneurs. OmiseGo fans, keep track of updates! We’ll show you more stuff along the way of social activity and development in the Public Alpha of Samrong!
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Are you ready to upgrade to Samrong?
v0.2 of the OMG Network is now accessible to all!
OmiseGo team has moved on to the next station with the release of the Public Alpha of Samrong. This hard network upgrade required their partners and ODP participants to migrate their tokens from Ari on to the second version of the OmiseGO Network.
This upgrade requires a change to the immutable smart contract on Ari. For this reason, Samrong will eventually replace Ari entirely. If you wish to continue using the OmiseGO Network, you will need to move your Rinkeby ETH (Ethereum) and ERC20 from Ari to Samrong.
Why upgrade?
Samrong includes a number of significant modifications:
Improved Plasma integration and changes to Plasma smart contracts
Ari launched with Minimum Viable Plasma. Samrong builds on Ari’s Minimum Viable Plasma, and runs on More Viable Plasma (MoreVP). Samrong’s Plasma smart contract will thus be MoreVP compliant, but since the written smart contract can’t be modified, Samrong is implemented as a new, separate network, and will replace Ari.
Greater resilience, less downtime
Samrong’s improved monitoring, reliability, and stability is better at handling high network loads.
New transaction signature using EIP 712
Samrong allows you to sign transactions using the EIP-712 standard, which allows signatures to be carried out through wallet integrations, such as Metamask. EIP-712 also allows Ethereum signatures to display in a structured and readable format.
Meta-data field
A new meta-data field allows users or dApps to store any information in their transactions.
Join the ODP and connect to the latest iteration the OmiseGO Network here.
Technical Update
Integration Team Update 27: the “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us” edition
eWallet
In the past few weeks, the OmiseGO Integration Team has been working on delivering everyone’s favorite Admin Panel updates as well as improving account security with Two Factor Authentication for v1.3. They’re also continue to work on Blockchain integration for v2.0, which will be their primary focus in the upcoming weeks.
Completed
Here are the main items the team has knocked out since the last update:
v1.3
- Fix pagination filter for some fields #1066
- Implement transaction request cancel #1044
- Fix transaction consumption confirmation #1054
- Fix internal server error when providing an association as the filter param #1052
- User detail page improvement #1049
- Wallet detail page improvement #1058
- Implement authentication token expiration configuration #1057
- Implement Two Factor Authentication #1065 #1068
v2.0
- Implement programming interface in preparation for Ethereum transaction #1028
In progress
These tasks are currently being worked on, or are pending review by OmiseGO Integration Team members:
v1.3
- Advanced filtering on all overview pages #1064
v2.0
- API endpoints for Blockchain transactions
- Update tokens to integrate Ethereum compatibility
- Secure private key storage with Shamir’s Secret Sharding
As always, you can also follow their progress on the eWallet GitHub project page and on OmiseGo GitHub Milestones page. If contributing code is your thing, the team has a list of issues suitable for first-time contributors. Be sure to check out!
Potterhat
In addition to eWallet Admin Panel updates, OmiseGO Integration Team has also been working on Potterhat, a Blockchain API orchestrator, to improve the reliability of Blockchain API in general. They’re also looking to normalizing API difference of Geth and Parity to be based on EIP-1474.
Completed
- Node event listener and logger #20
In progress
- CI pipeline #24
You can track Potterhat milestone and progress on the Potterhat repository and read more about it (or add some ideas and make suggestions) on OIP-15.
Integration Team Updates:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
- eWallet Suite More Resources:
- OmiseGO eWallet GitHub repository
- Initial public demonstration of the eWallet
- Chat to the eWallet team
Plasma
Plasma Production Update 23:
The production team has been looking at some optimizations this past cycle to improve their resource usage and reliability. Since they started backing the Samrong child chain and watcher with Parity instead of geth, they’ve seen better reliability and needed to do significantly less wrestling to keep things running. However, they were still seeing high resource usage and spent some time reducing the number of RPC calls they make to Parity to see if that would change Parity’s memory footprint. The team continues to work to improve the metrics and monitoring so that they meet production service standards while operating in PoA. The team believes this is critical as they onboard potential projects to use the plasma chain. The team believes that availability is a required feature to projects that are serious about trying to integrate to the OMG Network.
This cycle, OmiseGo team will be putting their availability and reliability work to the test while they prepare the Plasma Dog Arena event that Hoard will be hosting this month. They’ll set up a test environment to conduct a stress test and see how much load they can throw at it. More details on this will be available in coming weeks.
The team has also broken ground on the plasma abstract contracts implementation. If you recall from my How’s OmiseGOing? post, this contract architecture will allow them to perform opt-in feature upgrades without requiring all of their users to exit and re-deposit into a new chain, as they’re doing now with the Ari to Samrong hard network upgrade. This will provide a significantly improved user experience while enabling them to more easily add features in a trustless manner.
Plasma Updates:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
- 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
20 Blockchain Projects with the Most Dev Activity on Github — June, 2019 in ConsenSys blog:
Social encounters
Striking a balance between innovation and regulation by Vansa:
OmiseGO CEO shares her insight on how to ensure regulation promotes innovation and growth in the blockchain ecosystem instead of simply stifling it with rigid policy.
I recently took part in the World Economic Forum Global Blockchain Council meeting in San Francisco. It is part of the six newly formed councils that form the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Network for Global Technology Governance. The center aims to shape the development and application of emerging technologies for the benefit of humanity. It provides a platform for multistakeholder dialogue and the collaborative development and piloting of policies aimed at mitigating the risks and maximizing the societal benefits of emerging technologies.
The Global Blockchain Council itself is made up of government, business, academia and civil society leaders working to help shape international governance and cooperation on blockchain technology. This was our inaugural meeting. The meeting was set to shape the strategic thrust and initial priority focus areas under the blockchain ecosystem as well as provide an opportunity for discussion of leadership issues that cut across individual technology governance domains. We were exposed to innovative policy and governance models being tested across the world and had the opportunity to showcase our organizations’ efforts in the space.
After knowledge-sharing, collaboration and brainstorming on ways to shape the global narrative on important issues surrounding the blockchain ecosystem, I arrived at these conclusions:
- Cross-border governance framework is needed.
- The need to strike a balance between protection and not stifling innovation.
- Weighing the risks and rewards of forging ahead of regulations.
- Manage further exclusion.
- Turning blockchain into an empirical science.
My experience with the WEF Blockchain Council allowed me to broaden my understanding of the regulatory problems and processes that go on internationally across industries. This couldn’t have come at a more timely manner, as this June we received an AMA question regarding regulation which Kasima answered on video. I agree with his sentiment. Regulation isn’t necessarily a hurdle, it’s just that currently, regulatory bodies are still playing catch up with the emergence of new technology. A core concern is the potential for new technology to disrupt established industries and consumers alike and thus leads to a range of regulatory responses — as we are witnessing in real time. Regulation is a balancing act — creating a framework that can protect the common good between states and individuals while mitigating the stifling of innovation through technology. Given the balancing act required, it should be expected that some regulators and societies will take different approaches to managing technological innovation. As new technologies and their implications become better understood across jurisdictions, I see more and more regulators opening up and embracing more technology in the future. The important thing to do is to have people in the decentralized blockchain ecosystem working with international regulatory bodies to ensure that policies can help technology grow in a responsible, ethical, and sustainable way.
I’m proud to say that OmiseGO is actively participating in the conversation of regulation — locally here in Thailand, in Asian markets such as Japan and Singapore, and in the west like the United Kingdom and with EU member states. Our WEF participation is our way of proactively engaging with supranational policies and regulations. With OmiseGO’s seat on the Blockchain Council, I believe we can help ensure regulations promote growth in the ecosystem.
OmiseGO AMA 25 — Vansa Chatikavanij, Striking a Balance Between Innovation and Regulation
This month the team is inviting OmiseGo CEO, Vansa Chatikavanij, to respond to community questions about her recent blog post Striking a Balance Between Innovation and Regulation.
3 out of the top 5 upvoted comments will be forwarded to Vansa for response via a pre-recorded video to be posted to the OmiseGO blog before the end of the month. For inspiration, please refer to the previous AMA with Kasima.
Big congrats to CEOs Jun, Donnie and Vansa for being selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs! They went through a rigorous process at the 88th Endeavor ISP that identified them as high-impact entrepreneurs.
Endeavor Selects 32 Entrepreneurs from 12 Markets at the 88th International Selection Panel in Tokyo:
Loyalty to our Currencies: Constructing our economic realities
by Win Sutthiporn M, Business Development Manager at OmiseGO.
Where OmiseGO fits in
As long as there are still different tokens and cryptocurrencies out there, OmiseGO will remain a vital piece of the puzzle. Acting as a primary provider of a rail-agnostic payment and currency-agnostic DEX, OmiseGO allows people to pay with whatever digital asset and accept money in any digital asset they prefer.
Besides their primary focus on the OMG Network and eWallet Suite, the team is also continually focusing on loyalty and rewards as an entry point for enterprise eWallet users who are interested to move onto the blockchain but are not ready to jump all the way in. Loyalty points are very much low-risk and are not subject to legal and regulatory compliance as in the case of securities, cryptocurrencies or fiat.
OmiseGO allows digital assets to be transparently transacted in real-time, peer-to-peer manner through a global digital wallet and decentralized exchange infrastructure. Because of this, we can’t think of a better service for handling digital assets and tokens, as well as loyalty programs.
Upcoming events:
July 18th, 2019: Code Elixir London, London.
July 18th–19th, 2019: Bangkok Fintech Fair 2019: Technology Talk, Bangkok.
October 08th-11th, 2019: Devcon 5 in Osaka.
Jun tweeted on May 11th, 2019:
Reddit:
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, AMA #23 with Hoard Exchange.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io):
There is a slight decrease in the number of token holders these weeks.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Go.Exchange sign up open!
Earning Our Place
by GO.Exchange team on July, 25th:
GO.Exchange initial team of five started building the project late in the summer of 2018 with the goal of creating an exchange that earns its place within this crowded space. Throughout this time, they’ve seen countless new exchanges launch and achieve extraordinary amounts of volume in impossibly short periods of time. Many even exceeded billions of dollars in daily volume. This was confusing to them as this large amount of consumer demand seemed to materialize out of thin air. Over time, thanks to internal and external research, they learned that many of these exchanges heavily inflated their volume numbers.
Some exchanges are incentivized to report fake volume metrics for a few reasons:
- It allows exchanges to give the perception that there is large liquidity and user activity. These exchanges mislead project founders into believing that paying costly listing fees would be a worthy investment.
- Exchanges with revenue sharing tokens give users the false perception that owning these tokens would provide lucrative dividends.
- Because exchanges are ranked against each other by their reported volume, some inflate this metric to gain attention and referral traffic, outranking honest exchanges.
GO.Exchange team believes this practice hurts the builders and project creators trying in earnest to create new technologies and paradigms through decentralization. It hurts users looking to understand and invest in honest and reputable projects. It hurts the crypto industry as a whole as outsiders looking in see deception as a norm.
Seeing this all unfold gave them even greater motivation to push forward. At the outset they had the simple goal of improving upon the user experience through creating an intuitive interface, treating their customers right with a world class support team, and engaging the community in novel ways. The team found that these things were not enough. At a fundamental level, the relationship between a user and an exchange is defined by trust.
They believe that users can benefit from a push towards transparency and this is something they are committed to. The team of now over 30 people (and still growing!) has been working tirelessly to build a platform used and trusted by people all around the world.
The team welcomes you to sign up for GO.Exchange here.
Click here to read further on how the team plans to become an exchange used and trusted by people all around the world, please continue reading. They are discussing these main focus areas but please keep in mind that business strategy may change over time:
- Transparency and Trust
- Regulation and Compliance
- Community Burns
Go.Exchange will:
- As mentioned before, they will use the OmiseGO Network to improve user security when it is ready to be integrated with.
- OMG will be used as a discount token on GO.Exchange for 3 months as a launch promotion. Starting on June 25th, 2019, any trader with a balance of at least 500 OMG on their account will have their trading fees reduced by 50%.
- Go.Exchange will set aside 100% of the transaction revenues to burn OMG tokens for 3 months as their inaugural community burn. This is a temporary token burn as part of their launch promotion.
- After the launch promotional period, the tokens burned in community burns will be selected by voting with their native reward token, GO.Exchange Token (GOT), which can be acquired through transacting to GO.Exchange much like a loyalty reward point. In the future, community burns will use 50% of GO.Exchange trading fees, instead of the 100% that they are using for the 3 months OMG burn as part of the launch promotion. You can read more about GOT here.
- As part of the launch, they’re also giving away 20,000 OMG. The first 2,000 users to transact on the exchange for $500 USD equivalent or greater on the exchange will receive 10 OMG. Users from the soft launch are also qualified for this promotion.
Refer and earn to help the team grow the community!
One of OmiseGo community member did an amazing introduction video about Go.Exchange these weeks!
Video created by pwolf88 (@upwolf88), community manager and content writer for OMGPool.
Feel free to follow the progress through these channels:
You can also view their open positions here.
And the trading fees are now live. You can read here for more details.
For more information on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX):
- DEX Update blog
- OMG DEX Design
Roadmap
From the OMG project tracker (July 8th, 2019):
In progress
- eWallet v1.3
- 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
The Metaverse Begins! Hoard Creates a Shared Experience Between Games:
In May Hoard’s CEO, Slawomir Bubel, demonstrated the first ever example of cross-game interoperability using Ethereum and Plasma. He showed how collecting puzzle pieces in My Memory of Us unlocked a secret level in Plasma Dog. As these types of virtual experiences evolve, we’ll begin to see the emergence of the metaverse: Ready Player One in real life!
HRD Token is Now Available on Uniswap Exchange:
The HRD Token is now available on its first decentralized, non-custodial exchange, Uniswap! Uniswap allows for the trustless exchange of HRD for ETH using any browser wallet, like MetaMask.
OmiseGo is hiring.
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:
Reddit discussions:
OMG will be included in the first set of collateral in MakerDAO MCD.
Why is Coinbase’s name on this list not being talked about more?
Is the goexchange available for US customers?
Other:
Plasma Implementers Call #22: Standards and Adoption:
After great implementation updates from the teams, they discuss difficulties with plasma wallet on-boarding, implementation fragmentation, and standardization.
Netflix’s Altcoin Documentary Could Push Bitcoin To $25,000+: Netflix doc with OmiseGo.
OMG Network Guide by OMGPool:
This guide is an extensive non-technical introduction to the OMG Network, and is maintained by OMGPool and the community. It’s their goal to keep this collection up to date to reflect the current status of the OMG Network. Therefore, they also want to welcome contributions from the community and made the repository available on Github for everyone to help!
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
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.
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.
