Monthly Highlights —June 2018
Dear SENCommunity,
It’s been a phenomenal month for Sentinel Chain. We kicked off the month with a roaring start as we tagged the first cow in Myanmar — our first unbanked market. To revolutionise our Sentinel Chain ecosystem for real world use case, our development team built key features which will increase automation and agility. In timely fashion, the World Economic Forum recognised our blockchain project as an “exciting and practical” use case for “livestock-backed financial services for (the) unbanked”. Our Founder and CEO was invited to the United Nations to share our unique solution for global financial inclusion. We were a Financial Inclusion sponsor for the Blockchain for Finance Conference — a gathering of financial heavyweights and blockchain experts. We wrapped up the month with an announcement from our Foundation of a significant milestone — On 29 June, SENC was listed on CoinBene, one of the top 5 exchanges in terms of trading volume.
Project Progress
Joint Pilot Project with the Myanmar Government
June 6 was a symbolic milestone for Sentinel Chain as we kicked off our Joint Pilot Project with the Myanmar government in NayPyiTaw, Myanmar and tagged the first livestock (and yes, it was a cow).
Our team together with participants from Myanma Insurance (MI) — representing the Ministry of Planning and Finance (MoPF), and veterinarians from the Livestock, Breeding and Veterinary Department (LBVD) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MoALI) in Myanmar tagged 30 cows on the first day with our tamper-proof livestock tags.
Technical development
Sentinel Chain
We achieved significant progress in Sentinel Chain development. We added key features in Sentinel Chain that will revolutionise the use of blockchain in real world use cases.
(1) We set up the Sentinel Chain ecosystem to support “bridge” nodes to connect different blockchains using various technologies like Rust and NodeJS. i.e., we tested and completed the token-to-token transfer between Ethereum homestead and Sentinel Chain.
(2) To facilitate and increase the participation of various IT teams on Sentinel Chain ecosystem so they can easily deploy the chain agents that strengthen the network, we are building new tools for Sentinel Chain. We are creating “Docker images” for Sentinel Chain components like miners (a.k.a validators) and regular nodes.
Docker is the single most important tool when developing blockchain applications.
When developing blockchain applications,
- we are creating a distributed application, locally.
- we need automation to reduce the time spent on error-prone steps involved in deploying and testing.
- we want to test our application with real users as soon as possible!
These are just a few of the many factors that make Docker an invaluable tool in our developer toolkit. Docker is a tool which will ease our development as well as enable and encourage a different way of working — one that lowers technical debt and increases agility (the reaction speed to changing environments).
(3) One of the key implementations is integrating our newly created RPC server to MetaMask and MyEtherWallet. We have successfully connected one of our nodes with both the projects and performed SENC to SENI (Sentinel Internal currency) transfers between them.
(4) We have also implemented our “Operations Contract” — a new type of smart contract to plan and inform about possible Fork conditions that is synced with our validator which is set to vote, inform and execute chain forks.
CrossPay Mobile App
(1) We presented a live demonstration of both our CrossPay Mobile and CrossPay Business app version 1.11 to the Myanmar Director General of Ministry of LBVD (Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Department) and the Managing Director of Myanma Insurance, Yangon, Myanmar. During the presentation, we demonstrated use of the following features: livestock ownership, livestock owner identity verification, livestock identity, livestock identity verification by Attester in CrossPay.
(2) For a smooth user experience for the local users (Myanmar government officials, local farmers), CrossPay app supports local Burmese languages Zawgyi and Unicode, in addition to English. We are also testing CrossPay in real time farm conditions in areas with fluctuating internet connectivity to upgrade the usability of the app.
Argentina
(1) InfoCorp LATAM hosted our first Latin America meetup in Rosario in partnership with agro-education offices. Country Manager Bernardo Corti together with Founder and CEO Roy Lai welcomed more than 50 participants at the event to share Sentinel Chain’s pilot project implementation in Asia and how blockchain can be applied to livestock to bring about financial inclusion for rural communities in Latin America.
(2) Our team attended Rosgan, the largest and only televised auction market in Argentina, Rosgan allows for distance buying and selling of animals from across the country.
(3) InfoCorp LATAM sponsored the Smart Contract Conference in Rosario where Maxi Canellas, our Blockchain Development Lead, shared about setting up the proper environment to enable development of smart contract on EVM based blockchains.
Exchange
In line with our plans to list on the second exchange by the Q2 2018, SENC was listed on CoinBene on 29 June 2018. CoinBene is among the top 5 exchanges in terms of trading volume.
PR, Marketing, Community Engagement
While on the ground, Sentinel Chain is running smoothly according to our project roadmap, our project has been receiving international recognition by World Economic Forum and United Nations.
(1) We received a strong validation of our blockchain use case — the World Economic Forum has cited Sentinel Chain as an “exciting and practical” use case that provides “livestock-backed financial services for (the) unbanked” in their May 2018 report, “The Global Financial and Monetary System in 2030”.
Appearing in the section devoted to blockchain and crypto, the report states that,
“Ultimately, the end game for blockchain technology would be to use it as a basis to create one single record for everyone to use (all assets would be housed on the internet), creating a genuine “internet of assets”. Whilst still in the early days, the use cases are exciting and practical.
Applicability is across a huge range of existing asset classes and enables the development of new ones (e.g., crypto- currencies). The range is becoming enormous; e.g., fine art (Maecenas), livestock-backed financial services for unbanked (Sentinel Chain), identity verification and attestation (Bloom and Civic) to name but a few.”
The Global Financial and Monetary System in 2030, World Economic Forum
(2) The United Nations invited our founder and CEO Roy Lai to present Sentinel Chain as a real solution to the global problem of financial inclusion — igniting curiosity, interest and questions from members and partners of United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and USAID who were in attendance.
(3) Sentinel Chain was the financial inclusion sponsor for the 2nd Asia Pacific Blockchain for Finance Conference (BFCAPAC) held in Singapore — a gathering of global thought leaders and decision makers. Roy, in his keynote speech, shared the Sentinel Chain solution on the mainstage — raising eyebrows and sparking interest among the financial heavyweights and blockchain experts in the audience.
“I think that Roy’s talk was very inspirational and showed the amazing benefits that blockchain technology could have to improve the lives of the poorest people. A number of people commented to me that they were very impressed by the Sentinel project.”
Dean Murphy, Co-Founder & Head of Blockchain, FinTech Network
Listen to Roy Lai’s keynote at the BFCAPAC Conference:
(4) InfoCorp Foundation conducted their first Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on Telegram and shared with the community their plans going forward, how the demand for SENC will increase, the current trend in SENC price as well as liquidity management, exchange listing, etc. Missed the AMA? Read it on Medium here: https://medium.com/sentinelchain/12-june-2018-ama-questions-and-answers-42f63b99ebb5
Team
To drive Sentinel Chain — our blockchain engine for financial inclusion, we announced two key appointments Mr Ng Ling Soon, a dynamic leader with more than 20 years of experience in finance and technology (Chief Operating Officer) and Ms Chan Sue Meng who brings on board more than 20 years of aptitude and experience in developing programmes and communications strategies (Director, Strategic Communications).
Driven to join our mission of empowering the unbanked through disruptive technology (read: blockchain), we also welcome several new additions to our team: Choon Pien, Blockchain Developer, Yang Gexi, Community Manager, China, and our young, bright interns who are full of big ideas — Andrew Tsui (Singapore), Preston Sledge (Dallas, Texas), Clayton McDonald (Berkeley, California).
Conclusion
Amid the crowded crypto hype surrounding blockchain projects, Sentinel Chain has stood out from the rest. And on that note, we shall leave you with this quote shared during our CEO’s presentation at the BFCAPAC Conference.
“Disruptors don’t have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.”
Jay Samit
Sentinel Chain is a blockchain-based international marketplace for cross-border financial services and the world’s first platform to accept the use of livestock as collateral. Taking a unique approach to the last mile problem of financial inclusion, the Sentinel Chain model establishes livestock provenance through the creation of livestock insurance on blockchain — the registration of livestock provenance on blockchain provides the unbanked with a new opportunity: the real possibility of accepting livestock as ‘collateral’ for loans. Sentinel Chain is a project by InfoCorp Technologies
Website: https://sentinel-chain.org
Medium: https://medium.com/sentinelchain
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