FLO Blockchain Contract @ Ranchi Mall — Introduction

Ranchi Mall is a Blockchain Contract only enterprise.

“Everything in Ranchi Mall is henceforth a Blockchain Contract. The incorporation is on blockchain as a Blockchain Contract. All products are Blockchain Contracts. Every Blockchain Contract has an opening valuation and a running valuation as the contract grows. Every contract has an administrator who is responsible for the contract.”

— Rohit Tripathy, Founder Ranchi Mall

I am Vivek, the administrator for the FLO Blockchain Contract. This article is to give you an understanding of what a Blockchain Contract is and what the FLO Blockchain Contract is comprised of.

What is a Blockchain Contract?

A Blockchain Contract is a tradable agreement recorded on a blockchain. Its valuation changes as per its performance. Its aim is to ensure successful execution of projects being tracked on the blockchain. It is a contract between the executioner and the internet community. Each Blockchain Contract consists of projects, objectives and milestones to be met, an opening valuation, a running valuation, an administrator and a team working on the project. Contracts recorded on the blockchain cannot be tampered with.

Ranchi Mall uses the FLO blockchain for recording Blockchain Contracts. Ranchi Mall is the executioner of all Ranchi Mall Blockchain Contracts. Ranchi Mall is itself incorporated as a Blockchain Contract. The FLO Blockchain Contract involves all of Ranchi Mall’s FLO related projects.

Elements of the Blockchain Contract:

• The Projects of a Blockchain Contract are its actionable assignments.
• The Milestones and Objectives of a Blockchain Contract are the checklist for its projects.
• The Administrator is the person responsible for managing the Blockchain Contract by making sure all milestones are met. The running valuation of the Contract depends, to a large extent, on the abilities of the administrator.
• The Opening valuation is the initial value of the contract denominated in a cryptocurrency. For Ranchi Mall, all contracts will be denominated in RMTs (Ranchi Mall Tokens). In all, 21 million RMTs will be released as part of a 14 phase ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Two phases have already been concluded at the time of writing on January 8th, 2018. The ownership of all released tokens is public and full details are available on the Ranchi Mall Exchange.
• The Running Valuation is the current valuation of the Blockchain Contract denominated in RMTs. If the contract meets its objectives and milestones, its value increases. If the contract fails to meet its objectives, the running valuation of the contract decreases. The running valuation of the contract will be decided by the market over the long term. However, in the short term, the running valuation is decided as per a pre-agreed set formula based on meeting milestones and objectives.

FLO Blockchain Contract — Element 1: Projects

The FLO Blockchain Contract currently has four projects :

1. RMTs on the FLO blockchain
2. Develop an Electrum wallet for FLO
3. Extend the Electrum wallet to ‘understand’ RMT and Blockchain Contracts
4. Support SegWit version of FLO

Project 1: Ranchi Mall Tokens (RMTs) on the FLO blockchain

Currently all Ranchi Mall Tokens are traded on our exchange system with owners and trades publicly disclosed. This project will enable the anonymous exchange of tokens on the FLO blockchain.

The FLO blockchain is a clone of the Bitcoin blockchain. It has all the powers of Bitcoin blockchain security with an additional comment feature. RMTs make use of the comment feature of FLO.

This project is 80% finished. Currently, users can download FLO’s full node wallet and transfer their tokens to anyone anonymously. However FLO’s full node wallet needs more than 3 GB of blockchain . The size of this will keep on growing, hence is not very practical in its current form. Once the FLO Blockchain Contract finishes the Electrum based thin wallet, all the scripts developed in this project will become totally usable.

RMTs can be transferred anonymously by doing transactions which adhere to the following:

1. Transactions have to be executed using the coin control feature. The input UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) to a transaction should always be the UTXO which holds some tokens. The output UTXOs should be the address of the receiver and, if applicable, the transaction change. The change should come back to the input UTXO address.
2. The transaction’s comment should be added in the format specified by Ranchi Mall, eg. “ranchimall#NumberOfTokens”.

Once the transactions are embedded in a block they cannot be altered. Anyone in the world can map out the transfer of RMTs from their inception — using two scripts which we have developed — and end up with the same information. The first script (run only once) creates a local SQLite database and starts scanning all the transactions from the block where the 21 million RMTs are initialised, looking for Ranchi Mall’s transaction comments. When it finds the transaction comment, it checks if the input address of the transaction has any RMTs on it and makes changes in the database. It also stores the last scanned block number so that when the second script is run, the scanning starts from there.

Project 2: Develop an Electrum-FLO wallet

We are currently developing an Electrum wallet for FLO. This will ‘understand’ FLO comments and will need downloads of less than 5MB.

Electrum is a lightweight wallet which doesn't need to download the whole blockchain to verify transactions. Electrum wallets trust an ElectrumX server which provides blockchain information. ElectrumX does this by talking to a full FLO node which maintains its own copy of the blockchain. Hence, it acts as a mediator between the full node and the Electrum client.

High level view of how the Electrum wallet works

In FLO blockchain every transaction has an additional comment parameter in addition to the regular metadata. ElectrumX is currently not able to talk to the full FLO node as it doesn’t understand what the extra parameter is. This results in an error. The Ranchi Mall interns and I are working on fixing this issue by making changes for the comment parameter in the whole dataflow of ElectrumX. Once the server is up we’ll make the IP public so the FLO community can use it.

The final step for this project is the development of an Electrum wallet for FLO. FLO is a direct fork of Litecoin with an extra comment parameter and an Electrum client already exists for Litecoin. We’ll modify Electrum-LTC to develop Electrum-FLO.

Project 3: Extend Electrum-FLO wallet to Ranchi Mall wallet

The Electrum-FLO wallet will be able to understand transaction comments on the FLO blockchain but it won’t be able to understand products of Ranchi Mall, which have to be parsed from the transaction comments. Hence it will be modified into Ranchi Mall wallet which can understand RMTs and Ranchi Mall Blockchain Contracts. It will automate the coin control steps required for the transfer of RMTs and enable the investors of the contracts to transfer their investments in Blockchain Contracts via the transaction comments.

Project 4: Support SegWit version of FLO

FLO’s SegWit version is being developed by their core team here. Our development team and some of Ranchi Mall Internship Blockchain Contract interns will support its development.

SegWit is the process by which the block size limit on a blockchain is increased by removing signature data from transactions. When certain parts of a transaction are removed this frees up space or capacity to add more transactions per block to the chain.

Element 2: Milestones and Objectives

Project 1: Ranchi Mall Tokens (RMTs) on the FLO blockchain

• Develop python scripts to parse the trade of Ranchi Mall Tokens. The scripts find the balance of every address currently holding RMTs by querying the FLO blockchain.
  Status: COMPLETED.
• Develop an Electrum-FLO wallet.
  Status: ONGOING.
• Create a centralised website where people can check which addresses currently own RMTs and information regarding all the Blockchain Contracts. This will act as a block explorer for Ranchi Mall Tokens and Blockchain Contracts.
  Status: NOT COMPLETED.

Project 2: Develop an Electrum wallet for FLO

• Connect ElectrumX to FLO full node. Twenty percent of the work is complete. An error is showing up due to ElectrumX not being able to understand the comment parameter. To solve this FLO source code in C++ has to be understood to find out how the comments are being handled and appropriate changes have to be made in ElectrumX.
  Status: ONGOING.
• Finish Electrum client. The source code for Electrum client has to be modified to develop Electrum-FLO wallet.
  Status: NOT COMPLETED.

Project 3: Extend Electrum wallet to Ranchi Mall wallet

• Modify Electrum-FLO to understand RMTs.
  Status: NOT COMPLETED.
• Modify Electrum-FLO to understand Ranchi Mall Blockchain Contracts.
  Status: NOT COMPLETED.

Project 4: Support SegWit version of FLO

• Talk to the core FLO team regarding what support can be extended from our side and implement it.
  Status: NOT COMPLETED.

Element 3: Administrator

I, Vivek Teegalapally, am the administrator for the Ranchi Mall FLO Blockchain Contract. I completed my graduation in Computer Science and Engineering from SKN Sinhagad Institute of Technology, Lonavala. I briefly worked on neural networks during an internship with Ranchi Mall in 2016 and have been working on the company’s FLO blockchain related projects since joining the company full time in June 2017.

Element 4: Starting Valuation

Project 1: RMT on FLO blockchain — 16 RMT

Project 2: Development of Electrum-FLO — 12 RMT

Project 3: Development of Ranchi Mall wallet — 10 RMT

Project 4: Support FLO’s Segwit development — 4 RMT

Element 5: Running Valuation

There will be a 100% increase in the value of each of the projects once all the milestones are met. The running valuation will be updated periodically.

References

• Rohit Tripathy’s Medium post Redesigning Ranchi Mall as a Blockchain Contracts only enterprise.
• Investopedia on SegWit.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Leave a comment here or email me at vivek.teega@gmail.com. I work as a developer with Ranchi Mall.