Totem Tech Talks — July recap
Are you interested in changing the status quo of accounting? Totem Live is being built to do just that. Totem Live is an open-source peer-to-peer accounting app built on Parity’s Substrate stack.
Totem Live is now at a stage for early technical adopters to build, test and contribute our vision for the application. In the coming weeks we will have a major update so it’s a great time to try running your accounting and project operations on Totem Live. We will also be announcing a Mainnet cryptocurrency incentive scheme that will be based on the value you generate in the current test environment.
The application is being designed for mainstream users, however its alpha-stage is targeted more at developers, freelancers and builders. To help you get started, the team is working on community initiatives, videos and documentation and development structures to make it easier to get plugged-in.
Totem Tech Talks is a monthly development and engineering update on what the team has been working on and what to keep an eye on. 📹 Watch the video discussion
In July, the team associated remaining development work with twelve high-level milestones — the final being Totem Live Mainnet. Each milestone includes a list of development work related to the completion of the milestone. Note: Milestones are not necessarily dependent on one another and are being worked on in parallel.
- Milestone One: Live Meccano Canary Network
- Milestone Two: Live Lego Testnet Network
- Milestone Three: Internal Functionality
- Milestone Four: Products and Enhancements
- Milestone Five: Developer API
- Milestone Six: Reporting and Enhancements
- Milestone Seven: Accounting Engine
- Milestone Eight: Marketplace
- Milestone Nine: External Datasets
- Milestone Ten: Oracle
- Milestone Eleven: Privacy
- Milestone Twelve: Totem Mainnet
- Spreadsheet with the milestones and development breakdown
Other major developments made in the past month:
- Task Module: This is a new module which aims to fill the gap between activities and timekeeping, but has turned out to be a significant development with regards the underlying accounting core functionality as a task is basically a purchase order and therefore implies multiple use cases. An example is that users can assign tasks, but can also leave them open so that they are posted to a marketplace similar to Gitcoin, Fiverr or Upwork. Because Totem is an accounting system, everything can be executed in the application itself. 👉 A high-level blog post on how the task module originated.
- Chat functionality: Peer-to-peer communications inside Totem Live means users can socialize, but more importantly conduct all operational discussions relative to their business in the application itself. If you are using Totem for business logistics, activity tracking, project management, team collaboration, accounting, invoicing, reconciliation and other business operations, having a system that allows you to communicate with all the different parties makes sense. Now, we have not only the Totem system chat, but private and group chat functionality. The next step is adding end-to-end encryption for safe and secure in-app messaging.
- Currency conversion mechanism: Totem Transactions (aka XTX, the network’s currency) is the de-facto functional currency for accounting purposes. As the value of any functional currency moves relative to all other currencies it is used by businesses to align accounting postings prior to reporting. This use case is particularly interesting given accounting regulations that allow you to choose any currency in the world as your functional currency, so why not choose the one that is intrinsic to the system?
- Ongoing BONSAI implementation: BONSAI is a ground-breaking authentication mechanism for decentralized databases, which doesn’t require information about the user in order to store data. You don’t need a user ID to authenticate and use the database as long as the data that you wish to store has a corresponding hash on the blockchain. The mechanism means the chain will only accept pre-validated data based on the submitted data hash. 👉 For more information on BONSAI
