The decade is almost over! Can you imagine? We are delighted to see you in our last biweekly update on Orbs for the year 2019! The Orbs network launched on March 28th, and now there are already 19 registered Guardians, 16 Validators running in production, and over 1700 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem! This year was remarkably fruitful both in terms of development and social activity. Despite all the difficulties that are being faced, Orbs successfully finishes the year of hard work and improvement. Over the past two weeks, the team was mostly focused on the social side. Recently, they published a quick breakdown of what the Orbs core team has been up to the past month and reflected on all the events they have been through: San Francisco Events, partnership with Calpine Group in India, and Yes24, World Economic Forum & KAIST workshop.
Moreover, Orbs has proposed a blockchain-driven system to trim unnecessary government spending while also cutting down on food stamp fraud. You can also listen to Tal Kol speaking about the blockchain case for trust, transparency, and digital ownership with Brave New Coin. Learn why Tal says public blockchains for Dapps like Ethereum, Tezos, EOS, and Cosmos will not succeed and nor will private, permissioned blockchains such as Corda and Hyperledger. Instead, Tal thinks that public blockchains that help enterprise businesses are the only model that makes sense, and that is the niche that Orbs owns. Besides, at the end of December 2019, the 3rd round of rewards distribution will occur. Check the recent post by Andrey Dulkin to revise how rewards are calculated in Orbs Ecosystem. The community keeps discussing the projects’ state in chats — do not hesitate to join them! The number of subscribers fluctuated; however, it tends to grow in the long term. Stay with us! See you in 2020.
Development
Social encounters
- “By 2023, up to 30% of world news & video content will be authenticated as real by blockchain, countering deepfake technology.” This is exactly the kind of immediate future Orbs is working towards. Gartner’s Avivah and Kasey Panetta nail it in the article.
- Listen to Tal Kol on the blockchain case for trust, transparency and digital ownership with Brave New Coin. The full episode is accessible via the link. Tal says the 8200 unit is a tech incubator and it’s one of the reasons why Israel is a global technology innovator. Learn why Tal says public blockchains for Dapps like Ethereum, Tezos, EOS, and Cosmos will not succeed and nor will private, permissioned blockchains such as Corda and Hyperledger. Instead, Tal thinks that public blockchains that help enterprise businesses are the only model that makes sense, and that is the niche that Orbs owns.
- Great World Economic Forum & KAIST workshop on reimagining blockchain regulation, with new and exciting insights on the way forward! See post.
- “I think what Jack is doing is a little bit preempting with trying to find open source solutions that may mitigate the liability of not being able to control the content.” — Danny Brown Wolf — watch the full video on BlockTV here.
- A blockchain solution to government welfare fraud — Orbs has proposed a blockchain-driven system to trim unnecessary government spending while also cutting down on food stamp fraud.
The Orbs report cites a SNAP State Activity Report, noting that $592.7 million was listed as “Fraud Dollars” for the 2016 fiscal year, or 0.8% of the total amount of benefits provided for that year. SNAP fraud is often a talking point for politicians and pundits criticizing government spending and assistance, and in July, the Trump Administration proposed an overhaul to the program that would revise eligibility rules and potentially remove millions of people. In her report, Orbs co-founder Netta Korin proposes a framework based on a single digital identity that can be securely shared across multiple welfare programs, eliminating the need to apply separately to each.
- Orbs Update December 2019 — learn what happened in December!
You can also check our recent biweekly update.
{Orbs Around the World}
- San Francisco Events
- Partnership with Calpine Group in India
- World Economic Forum & KAIST workshop
- Orbs Team Speaks to Congress
- Sey Chain: Yes24 Partnership
{Expansion Highlights}
The Open Rights app allows photographers to register their Instagram photos to an external and independent registry on the Orbs blockchain. Users connect their Instagram account to the app and all photos are automatically registered. The app enables users to prove they are the source of the photo in case of copyright infringement, and in the near future, it could help them earn royalties when their photos are used on social media. The app proved a great success, and they’ve had more than 100,000 transactions (photos registered) on the app within less than a week, and currently approaching 1 million transactions with thousands of users.
{State of the Network}
In November, 1 Validator was voted out of the network by the Guardians due to unsatisfactory performance.
{In case you missed it}
Top posts from Orbs core team:
- Sey Chain: Partnership between YES24 & Orbs | Ran Melamed
- Blockchain-based Solution against SNAP Fraud | Netta Korin
- Developer Feedback: Interview with UN Hackathon Winners | Nate Simantov
- Evangelizing Blockchain to the US Congress | Danny Brown Wolf
- The Sweet Spot | SFBW Blog | Gili Ovadia
Upcoming events:
- Next month @gogogili is going to speak about the Orbs network at the Edge Computing Conference taking place in Silicon Valley and at Elevc8con taking place in Vegas.
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)
Tools for Guardians: We launched specific delegation template for Guardians, so they can present themselves by deploying their own web-site using our instructions. Later, we are going to create other tools for the comfortable use.
This is how we use the Template to introduce ourselves: orbs.paradigmcitadel.io
Our GitHub with Template: https://github.com/paradigmcitadel/orbs_guardian_delegation
You can delegate your Orbs tokens via link. After the end of the closest voting period, you can check your rewards here.
Finance
- Getting Ready for Round III of Orbs Rewards Distribution — There are 19 currently registered Guardians and 16 Validators running in production. There are now over 1700 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem. At the end of December 2019, the 3rd round of rewards distribution will occur. This post describes the various rewards, how they are calculated and the distribution process.
Roadmap
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 building 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
No updates.
About Orbs
Orbs Architecture
Orbs Speed
Orbs Reliability
Orbs Virtual Chains
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.
