Q4 2018
Dear Factom Community,
As the world welcomes 2019, it’s a fitting time to reflect on the year just passed and what’s been achieved with the Factom protocol. Having only been decentralized for seven to eight months, it’s truly amazing what the community has achieved so far.
Factom is starting to take shape in terms of governance; suffice to say it’s the product of the collective will of the community and we’re building one of the most decentralized protocols. We have no template to work from — only the shortcomings of other projects — and so in this sense, we should all be considered pioneers of the space and we have the opportunity to build superior and completely decentralized governance. The Factomize forum has played an integral part in facilitating discussions and decision making, it’s been amazing to see the evolution to specifically cater for the protocol’s needs. Implementation of identities and on-chain voting is an exciting prospect for 2019, it will set us apart from many other projects and solidify our position as a leading protocol.
In terms of partnerships, Factom caught the attention of the entire crypto space. Equator’s announcement to integrate Factom Inc.’s Factom® Harmony blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform received coverage across multiple channels. Shortly after, this was followed by an announcement of a Factom Inc. — Yooya China partnership, again giving validation to the Factom® Harmony platform. Trading volume soared following this news and we noticed visitors to our explorer increased by over 600%. Other partnerships included one from Sphereonand one from ANO DeFacto. In addition to this we saw even more validation from a Chinese internet court allowing Factomized proof to be used as evidence in a court of law, and then subsequently the Chinese supreme court upholding the ruling!
Factom also had a great year development-wise with the announcement of the FAT protocol, Factom’s first web-wallet — MyFactomWallet, FCT & EC support for the Ledger Nano S, file authentication tools, dashboards and more. Here is TFA’s Q3 report, detailing our development contributions for our third quarter.
Now, onto our last quarter of the year.
Financials
Fourth quarter average token price has improved significantly since the last quarter. At current prices, TFA receives the equivalent of roughly $150,000 annualized (gross) server revenue. However, those ANO’s hiring external developers will know that this barely covers 1 FTE blockchain developer. Having 5 team members contributing to the protocol in various ways, it should be evident that TFA is internalising significant costs.
As per our application, we pledged to review our server efficiency quarterly. TFA will not change efficiency at this stage, despite our demonstrable contribution to pledges. We’re seeing a trend where efficiency is being lowered all too easily. We would like to see maximum deferment to the pool, which is critical for the success of the protocol as such we’d like to take a stand and hope other ANOs follow.
Pledges
FactomSharp
We were pleased to release the Factom C#/.NET library on November 12. .NET is very popular language in business, especially for in-house processes ripe to be factomized! The public release of .NET DLL is instantly available to download within Visual Studio, and the source code and instructions are available at GitHub.
Factom DB
We have commenced work on FactomDB, however it’s completion is going to be dependent on where we are at with our IOT work (see below). If it becomes critical to the implementation of our main project, then it will be expedited.
Streamr Integration
This is also related to our IOT work, we are currently at planning stage.
Additional Contributions
IOT
Our main focus over the last couple of months has been in the IOT space. We’re currently working on a unique hardware implementation, which we will keep under wraps for now. Considering this has mainly been where our internal resources are allocated, we have considered making this a pledge. It’s an exciting new opportunity to show Factom’s versatility and fit for the IOT space. More on this in the coming weeks.
Ledger (Grant Work)
Factoid and EC support is now available on Ledger Nano S and can be used with the new MyFactomWallet web-wallet, hosted by Bedrock Solutions & TFA.
TFA & Bedrock Solutions were recently awarded a grant for Factom Identities on Ledger. Dennis has been busy on this and most of the firmware is completed, an update is available here.
Committee Work
Ben is an active member of the Exchange committee, and Tor is co-chair of the Core- & Code-committee.
Other
As mentioned above, we have taken on the co-hosting MyFactomWallet together with Bedrock Solutions. This website does not generate any revenue now (or in the foreseeable future), and is being hosted free by us free of cost to the community. When implemented the website will also provide a way to interact with the Factom On-Chain Voting protocol.
After encouragment from a journalist member of the community, we have recently started looking into the concept of factomizing Tweets from political persons and entities to provide an immutable and verified repository of this data. There are quite a few hurdles to tackle before this project can see the light of day; encompassing both technical and legal issues and topics. We have partnered with a few entities in our community to research the topic and will consider turning it into a pledge item going forward if suitable.
— Best
The Factoid Authority
tfa@factoid.org
