Hi, everyone. We are pleased to announce the Ontology Biweekly Update again. There is a lot of news we want to share with you. To cut a long story short, the Ontology made significant progress in their development.
First, there is a new use-case for Ontology token. Since now, everybody is able to book more than 450K hotels and pay with ONT via Tripio. So, Ontology is pleased to announce its partnership with Tripio, a leading travel blockchain project, on customer payments with ONT token. Tripio will connect ONT to its payment system, enabling customers to book and pay at more than 450,000 hotels all over the world with ONT. Besides, Ontology and Tripio will strengthen cooperation in the cryptocurrency credit card and protocol development based on the Ontology network. In our point of view, it is going to be a great growth driver. According to classical economics, more usage reacts to the higher price.
Second, we have heard about the new partnership between NEO and Ontology. They announced a partnership to build an open cross-chain platform and establish the foundation for the next-gen Internet. As a new era of blockchain adoption approaches, the partnership will facilitate the industry’s accelerated growth by leveraging both parties’ strengths to introduce an efficient and inclusive interoperability protocol. Based on both parties’ leading positions, this partnership marks an industry-wide milestone. We believe that improving the network could be likely for any project in this market. So, since NEO is one of the largest crypto-projects, Ontology made an excellent friend who can help ONT to grow.
Third, Ontology is developing its community. As we know, Ontology will soon hold a series of workshops at universities around the world. The workshops are aimed to help university students worldwide deepen their understanding of blockchain technology and equip them with the necessary knowledge for the future world. The first stop of the workshops will be in South Korea. Ontology will run several blockchain courses and share the latest developments of Ontology and the blockchain industry at large. To be honest, it seems Ontology also intends to evolve the whole crypto community and we, of course, go for it too.
To end with, we looked through all the updates of Ontology, and we are ready to say that its team is striving to become an excellent blockchain platform.
Ecosystem
Ontology will soon hold a series of workshops at universities around the world. The workshops are aimed to help university students worldwide deepen their understanding of blockchain technology and equip them with the necessary knowledge for the future world.
The first stop of the workshops will be in South Korea. Ontology will run a number of blockchain courses and share the latest developments of Ontology and the blockchain industry at large. Ontology’s Founder, Co-Founder, technical experts, and core developers will share their insights and answer questions from students at the workshop.
So what makes this course stand out from other blockchain courses? What can this course offer? Let’s find out!
1. Business-oriented
The Ontology network is specifically designed for businesses. For example, the Ontology sharding design serves business contracts and the cross-chain solution is used for asset exchange. The entire Ontology system is dedicated to serving businesses and creating a trust platform for healthy business competition, whereas other projects are more focused on the financial side from the very beginning. The core goals of these projects are to serve node operation and maintenance (miner) applications and increase their revenues.
Ontology is dedicated to building a general-purpose infrastructure platform that can serve all business scenarios and strengthen the competitiveness of applications.
2. Systematic Blockchain Solution
If summarized in one sentence, the Ontology infrastructure solution is a compliant multi-chain solution that supports sharding, on-chain and off-chain applications.
Based on the sharding design and cross-chain solution, the systematic solution can support complex token models, be customized, and can improve the performance of cross-chain homogeneous chains.
3. New Business Opportunities for Traditional Industries
Ontology’s blockchain solution for businesses enables developers to easily develop blockchain applications and transform traditional Internet applications into blockchain ones. The course will elaborate on new business opportunities that the transformation will bring, how to better capture them, and how Ontology’s blockchain technology can help rapidly transform and upgrade traditional industries.
Let’s now have a look at some of the core courses:
1. Ready for All Businesses
(a). Ontology blockchain solution for applications based on distributed data exchange protocol
(b). Blockchain solution for account system
(с). Blockchain solution for data value discovery and assetization
(d). Data recording, tracing, and interaction during transmission
(e). Data monetization
(f). Ontology solution for cross-chain asset exchange
(g). Ontology multi-layer scaling solution based on business development
(h). Create your own high-value applications
2. ONT ID — blockchain solution for self-sovereign account system
3. Value of Information — data asset and asset tokenization
4. DDXF — cross-system resource interaction, exchange, and transaction framework
5. ONTO — Your Only Wallet
6. Ontology Cross-Chain Solution — free exchange of assets between different chains
7. Ontology Sharding — ultra-large scalability for businesses
The workshops will first be held at universities in South Korea, Japan, Russia, the US, and Germany.
Social encounters
- CounterFactual p.2
In the last tech point article, the tech team looked at the definitions of CounterFactual state channel and concluded with some of its main features, including equivalence, fairness, and consistency. In this article, the team will continue to analyze the three criteria in its definition and talk about its application boundary.
Analyze the three criteria of CF state channel
The first criterion is equivalence. Since equivalence must be two-way, the smart contract execution environment in the state channel must be applicable to both the state channels and the blockchain, which requires:
1. All input information of operation X in the state channel can only come from operation X itself.
The smart contract can only rely on the state of the smart contract itself and not on any information from the blockchain (for example, block height and block time).
In addition, relevant information must be initialized when creating and initializing the CF state channel. Since the CF state channel is independent of the blockchain and the state of smart contract on the blockchain is subject to constant change, unlike on-chain transactions, the CF state channel cannot anchor and access any on-chain data and can only access the unchangeable data in the on-chain state.
2. The way operation X is carried out on the blockchain and in the CF state channel must be consistent.
This is particularly true for software engineering. Since smart contract platforms may have flaws and the history of blockchain software cannot be tampered with, blockchain platforms can only upgrade its software through forking, which will cause some trouble for the CF state channel. Great care must be taken during software upgrade on blockchain platforms or shutting down the CF state channel instantly to ensure the equivalence in the CF state channel and on the chain.
the second criterion is fairness. State update caused by each operation in the CF state channel must be viewable and verifiable to all participants. The participants in the CF state channel are fixed and the number is rather limited. Therefore, the CF state channel does not realize the trustless feature through the permissionless validation of a majority of nodes on the blockchain. Instead, it is achieved by each participant validating the state update of each operation itself.
This criterion requires all participants in the CF state channel to run state channel validation themselves, which is a higher demand than for participants on the blockchain. However, smart contracts in the state channel generally require very little computation and can be done through improving the blockchain client.
The third criterion is consistency and finality. All operations in the CF state channel must be consistent and instantly finalized. In the CF state channel design, any user behavior that violates the protocol can be penalized, so any state update in the state channel need to be co-signed by all participants to achieve instant finality. This requires all participants to remain online to maintain the operation of the state channel. This will not have much impact on simple applications or short-term applications, but for complex applications involving more participants or long-running applications, you will have to run in a similar way as proxy nodes or guardian nodes.
Although we only scratched the surface of the definition of the CF state channel, we can summarize the requirements for the smart contract it runs and its participants. Based on this, blockchain application developers can decide whether their applications are more suitable for the off-chain operation of the CF state channel.
What CF state channel can bring?
Not only that, although the CF state channel is an off-chain scaling solution, what we should really learn is its designing. First, from the CF state channel protocol, we can clearly see the crypto-economics system design elements. More importantly, CounterFactual allows us to see a new way of applying cryptography. To put it more broadly, each blockchain can be considered as a CF state channel in the real world. All participants on the blockchain lock up assets in the real world and participate in the construction and validation of the blockchain network. From a smaller perspective, how do you design blockchain applications to better integrate blockchain and business needs? and could there be even a new business model based on CounterFactual’s designing? Those are all the possibilities CF could offer.
Ontology held its MainNet launch 1st anniversary AMA at 11:00 on July 24, 2019 (UTC). Jun Li, Founder of Ontology, and Andy Ji, Co-Founder of Ontology, answered questions from the community during the live AMA. The questions from the community covered Ontology’s roadmap, dApp ecosystem, cross-chain solution, ONT ID, interoperability, etc. Below are the most interesting questions.
Q: Is Ontology’s development lagging behind the roadmap in its white paper?
Jun Li: Actually, we have achieved all the milestones following the roadmap in the white paper last year. As we reviewed the 2018 white paper, we found that Ontology is the only public chain project that has launched MainNet on schedule.
And in the development of some core technologies, such as sharding, cross-chain and multi-layer solutions, we are even ahead of the schedule and achieved much more beyond our white paper and roadmap.
This month, we released 3 new white papers, including the Ontology Framework White Paper, the Infrastructure White Paper, and the Trust Framework White Paper.
Q: When upcoming big events like LTC halving take place on August 6, 2019, or BTC halving takes place in 2020, miners’ reward blocks are cut in half, which will lead to rising coin prices as the demand increases. What does ONT have in mind for this issue? Is there any intention in the future for the value of the coins to be increased, as well as for the benefit of the holders?
Jun Li: Token economy is quite important for the whole ecosystem, not only for the usage (utility token) but also for the token’s long-term value to show your care for your investors. Ontology has its own dual-token model, including ONT and ONG, similar to NEO’s dual token model. ONT is used for governance (the supply is fixed) and ONG for utility (fixed supply also with recycling usage). All consumed ONG will be rewarded to ONT holders. ONG is the utility token of the network and is used for token transactions, network storage, deployment and execution of smart contracts, and use of other network resources. ALL spent ONG will be returned to ONT holders again under a recycling model. The incentives for ONT holders will increase when there are more dApps, asset exchange, and smart contracts.
ONT’s fixed supply will help keep its long-term value. ONG’s recycling process also helps keep its value stable and the gas fee low which will be beneficial to dApp developers and ecosystem partners.
Compared to other token economies, Ontology’s dual token model is one of the best models. I hope that more and more people can understand the value behind the token.
This model makes sense as the demand for ONG leads to higher demand for ONT, and the value of ONT will increase as it is being adopted by more and more businesses.
Q: Could you share more technical details about (not only the strategic cooperation you recently announced) your plan to work together with NEO? Any plans for NEO 3.0 and ONT? And in which aspect such as atomic swaps will NASH / NEX project be involved?
Jun Li: This is the new cross-chain protocol Ontology and NEO are working together to develop. Actually, the project is more than that. We call it the next-generation Internet (NGI). It will integrate with decentralized storage and the cross-chain protocols and also other asset management as a whole infrastructure.
For the technical part we just mentioned, the new protocols will support not only asset exchange but also all kinds of different cross-chain business processes. Unlike the other cross-chain solutions which require you to use a specific framework to build your protocols or blockchain, we can integrate with different existing blockchains without changing their protocols. They can integrate with existing protocols and even blockchain systems in the future.
We will release the first version of the white paper in Q3. And in Q4, we will launch the TestNet. Also, we will have more partners joining the ecosystem. We will build a larger ecosystem for the cross-chain platform far beyond Ontology and NEO. So we want to build an ecosystem using different cross-chain protocols. They can support DEX and other business scenarios. We believe that based on our technical prowess of both Ontology and NEO and other capabilities, the cooperation and ecosystem will be more successful in the next phase. We also welcome more partners to build the cross-chain platform together.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Explorer.ont.io):
At the live AMA of the first anniversary of Ontology’s MainNet launch on July 24, 2019, the Ontology core team announced that 37,500,000 ONT, 100% of the ONT amount unlocked for the core team in 2019 and 3.75% of the total ONT supply, will be staked into consensus nodes.
The total ONT supply is 1,000,000,000 and the current circulating supply is 655,000,000 ONT. Now that the staking of 37,500,000 ONT has completed, the circulating supply has been reduced to 617,500,000 ONT. What implications will this have for the supply and demand of ONT and ONG? In this article, Jesse LIU will explain it in plain-English economics by breaking down Ontology’s ONT/ONG dual-token model.
According to the demand curve in economics, we can infer that:
As is shown below, when the circulating supply is 655,000,000 ONT, the ONT price is P1.
Let’s first take a look at ONT’s demand curve:
The staking of 37,500,000 ONT means that the ONT circulating supply in the market is reduced by 37,500,000. When demand remains unchanged while the circulating supply is reduced to 617,500,000 ONT (see S2), the ONT price goes up to P2, and P2>P1;
When the ONT price is up, demand for ONT will grow and ONT transactions will increase, thus driving up the demand for ONG, the GAS in the Ontology network. We must add here that part of the rewards for the Ontology Triones nodes comes from the ONG GAS fee. As ONT transactions increase, so do the GAS fees distributed to Ontology Triones nodes. We can predict that as the rewards for staking increase, more investors will want to stake their ONT into the Ontology Triones nodes. When more ONT is staked, the ONT circulating supply in the market will be reduced further (see S3). As a result, the ONT price moves to P3 and P3>P2>P1, which means the ONT price is up again.
Now the implications of the 37,500,000 ONT staking by the core team for the ONT price are very clear. What about ONG? As mentioned before, as the ONT price increases, ONG GAS will be used more frequently, thus driving up the demand and in turn the ONG price. When the ONG price is up, we can infer that:
As is shown below, the initial ONG price is P1.
(D2 represents the growing demand, S2 represents the rising supply, and S3 represents the decreasing supply.)
Scenario 1: The demand for ONG is up while the supply remains unchanged. In this case, we will see the demand curve moving to D2. How can we assume the supply will remain unchanged? According to the Ontology dual-token model, the ONG amount generated in a given period is constant. So the ONG price moves to P2;
Scenario 2: The demand for ONG is up and the supply has increased slightly. Under this scenario, we will have D2 and S2. As it takes time for ONG to be unbound, chances are the speed at which the ONG supply increases is slower than that of the demand, so the ONG price moves to P3 and P3>P1;
Scenario 3: The demand for ONG is up whereas the supply is down. The reason for this is that as the ONT price rises, users who stake in the Ontology Triones nodes find that the rewards from staking are lower than trading ONT. As more users trade their ONT in the secondary market, fewer ONT is staked in the nodes. As a result, the ONG amount generated by staking or the unbound ONG amount decreases, so we will have P4 and S3, showing that the supply is down while the demand is up, therefore P4>P1.
As can be seen above, P4>P3>P2>P1. The ONG price moves upwards in all 3 scenarios.
When ONG appreciates, the first thing that comes to our mind is how can we get ONG? Besides staking in the Ontology Triones nodes, you can also get ONG on the Ontology dApp platform. dApps on Ontology offer a certain amount of ONG as incentives to new users. You can obtain a certain amount of ONG in these dApps and make transactions using ONG as GAS.
The more people use dApps, the higher the demand for ONG. As ONG is being used more frequently and keeps appreciating, investors will naturally turn their attention to what generates ONG — ONT. When investors are choosing which digital asset to invest in, they will also consider whether that digital asset has added value besides project development and the price trend. If you buy ONT, you can make a profit by trading it and also earn rewards from the ONG generated by the ONT you hold, which is the added value ONT offers and what makes Ontology’s dual-token model stand out. We have every reason to believe that the growing demand for ONT will undoubtedly drive up the prices of both ONT and ONG.
By breaking down the Ontology dual-token model, Jesse LIU has explained what positive implications the staking of 37,500,000 ONT will bring, we can certainly be sure that more good things will come out of this.
Partnerships and team members
NEO and Ontology announced a partnership to build an open cross-chain platform and establish the foundation for the next-gen Internet. As a new era of blockchain adoption approaches, the partnership will facilitate the industry’s accelerated growth by leveraging both parties’ strengths to introduce an efficient and inclusive interoperability protocol. Based on both parties’ leading positions, this partnership marks an industry-wide milestone.
To fully deploy the capabilities of interoperability protocols, NEO and Ontology will recalibrate their respective strategic focuses to fully utilize interoperability protocols. As such, NEO will focus on developing protocols and components to support a full spectrum of digital assets while Ontology will continue to build a future-proofed, decentralized identity framework.
This groundbreaking interoperability protocol includes key features such as:
- Eco-friendly approach to member chains: Specifically designed for cross-chain synchronization, the protocol will neither issue tokens nor include a dedicated smart contract system to protect member chains from cannibalization.
- Low barrier of entry: Built to facilitate seamless technical integration, no protocol layer development or modification is necessary for existing blockchain projects.
- Transactional atomicity: The protocol aims to achieve finality and atomicity in cross-chain transactions with a particular focus on cross-chain smart contract interactions to expand the scope of decentralized applications.
- Enhanced security: A sophisticated set of mechanisms built on the technical and operational level will be carefully implemented to optimize security for cross-chain transactions and interactions.
Speaking on this partnership, Da Hongfei, Founder of NEO and CEO and Founder of Onchain, remarked that, “This partnership represents the next step for not only NEO and Ontology but also the future of the blockchain industry as we pioneer a collaborative approach to solving tough problems. By building the foundation for a global cross-chain platform, we look forward to delivering real-life solutions and uses for blockchain by surmounting challenges and issues together. As we enter our next development phase, we hope to further accelerate industry growth by synergizing our strengths as China’s top two blockchain projects while also encouraging more projects and companies to join us in building the foundation for the next-gen Internet.”
Li Jun, Founder of Ontology, noted that “By building an open and global cross-chain system, NEO and Ontology will promote cross-chain value exchange as well as business collaboration to establish the foundational infrastructure for the next-gen Internet. By continuously bolstering our technology and community, we aim to accelerate the development of blockchain applications for various industries to deliver diverse real-use cases.”
As NEO and Ontology move to deepen their cooperation, both parties look to usher in a new era of blockchain development through their industry-first partnership. Moving forward, a white paper regarding the interoperability solution will be released in Q3 before the platform goes live in Q4. As the platform develops, both parties are pioneering a collaborative approach towards realizing next-gen Internet as part of their smart economy vision.
Ontology is pleased to announce its partnership with Tripio, a leading travel blockchain project, on customer payments with ONT token. Tripio will connect ONT to its payment system, enabling customers to book and pay at more than 450,000 hotels all over the world with ONT. Besides, Ontology and Tripio will strengthen cooperation in the cryptocurrency credit card and protocol development based on the Ontology network.
Blockchain technology creates new opportunities for the travel and accommodation sector. Based on its tamper-resistant blockchain technology and smart contract support, Ontology is helping Tripio move payment, transaction, rating, complaint, and dispute resolution process onto its smart contract platform. Thanks to the partnership, transactions recorded on blockchain can be tracked by anyone, which improves efficiency and reduces operational costs.
Wesley Shen, Tripio CEO & Former SVP of Elong (Leading OTA in china) said: “The cooperation with Ontology will greatly enhance the influence of Tripio in the global cryptocurrency market. We look forward to working with Ontology in cryptocurrency credit cards, dApp expansion, and large scale commercial use.”
Andy JI, Co-Founder of Ontology, said: “Ontology provides a general-purpose infrastructure platform for various industries and business scenarios. The partnership with Tripio is another big step towards that direction. We will continue to make people’s everyday life more convenient with our blockchain technology.”
About Tripio
Tripio is the first travel blockchain project in the world. Tripio has successfully integrated all processes of the lodging services such as listing, booking, payment and dispute resolution on-chain with smart contract, and achieved the excellent practice of decentralization in the trillion sized markets of travel and accommodation. Now, Tripio (token ticker: TRIO) has been listed on OKEx, Huobi Global, Bittrex, Bitfinex, Huobi Korea, Coinw, Hcoin, Ethfinex. Go to http://trip.io for further information.
Social media metrics
Social media dynamics
Social media metrics
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ontology Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
