Totem Tech Talks — November Development Updates
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 to our vision for the application. Totem Tech Talks covers development milestones on the path toward main-net. Tune in next month to catch up on our progress!
Totem.Live has been founder-funded and developed over the past few years. In September, we decided Totem.Live’s development and adoption would benefit from an initial crowdfunding series. The funds raised will be used to advance Totem.Live’s engineering efforts and grow community awareness about the project and application.
👉 We’ll be sharing more details about the Totem crowdfunding opportunity over the next couple of weeks.
🗞 How can you stay informed?
- Sign-up for the Totem newsletter
- Join the team on Discord
- Follow us on Twitter
Coming Soon — Totem Crowdsale!
Preparations for the Crowdsale (and ultimately Mainnet launch) has been a major focus over the past two months. Most notably, defining Totem’s overall token distribution structure and economic incentives for investors. Relevant to the Crowdsale, this has meant building the distribution mechanism, payment and settlement management and outlining the token migration to our future Totem Lego Testnet next year (2021) and the eventual Totem Mainnet expected in 2022.
Now live: Totem core accounting engine and incentivized task module
Two major milestones were reached this month with the launch of the core Accounting Engine and Task Module on the live network. The Task Module allows you to create and assign a Task to a Partner and associate a bounty. The bounty is an escrow payment to network pending the successful completion of the task. The relevant accounting ledgers are updated automatically at every step.
For example, you can create a ‘Task for a Freelancer’ and when the Task is marked as completed, the Freelancer’s Invoice is generated automatically, and delivered immediately to the Task Owner. Both the “Accounts Receivable” for the Freelancer and the “Accounts Payable” for the Task owner are updated — in what we believe is a first for Accounting Software anywhere. But it doesn’t end there…
When the Task owner approves the invoice, the bounty is automatically released from escrow, the Accounts Payable is settled, and the correct expense line is updated… whilst at the same time the Freelancer’s “Accounts Receivable” is credited and Revenue updated. Finally the receipt of Funds is debited on the Freelancer’s Balance. All of this happens in one transaction meaning that the accounts have been updated for all parties, all at once, with no accountant or book-keeper in sight.
OTC exchange
The Totem Task Module is also prerequisite for a Gitcoin-like Marketplace and the Trustless OTC Exchange that will arrive following the Crowdsale to allow participants to sell their Totem Transactions.
We recognized that participants in the Crowdsale will want to sell some of their coins soon after the Crowdsale is completed, so this will provide trustless way for investors to exchange the unlocked portion of their XTX for other cryptocurrencies.
Integrating External Datasets
A key part of building a global decentralized accounting ledger is an extensive index of companies and currencies, both fiat and crypto. These data feeds enable the Accounting Engine. This will make it easy for customers to book expenses to Business Partners that are not already using Totem.
This amount of data storage required to index companies in one country is 8.5Gib. It’s estimated that with the addition of other countries in Europe and the United States alone, the database capacity will exceed 350Gib. Obviously this wasn’t suitable for use with IPFS as off-chain data storage hence the development of BONSAI.
Substrate Official Address Type
Over the course of 2021, we will be recruiting Validators to take part in our next network the Totem Lego Network. This network will be the precursor to Mainnet, and in preparation for that a pull request was accepted into Parity’s code base to allow user to create Totem specific addresses via Polkadot-js and Subkey.
All users have to do is specify the `totem′ option when creating the address on the command line. For example if you run Parity’s Subkey from Docker you can create a Totem specific address format like this :
`docker run -rm parity/subkey:latest inspect <your-seed-phrase> -network totem′
All Polkadot and Substrate address formats are interchangeable so don’t worry if you have the wrong address format — you can still recover your funds!
In the coming months we will integrate the new Totem address format within the Substrate native identity module.
Incentivizing user feedback
The success of Totem relies on people using it and providing feedback on the application either via the chat interface in the app itself, or via discord (see below). A referral link is currently on Totem.Live’s staging environment and will be migrated to the live version shortly. To use it you just copy the link and share.
👉 Stay tuned for the launch of the Totem referral program leading up to the crowd sale.
Recent milestone updates
Follow Totem Live’s progress via our milestone tracker!
💎 Milestone: Live Meccano Canary Network
- Notification alerts — Users will now get notified directly of events in Totem.Live such as task requests from collaborators or partners.
- Location — A tool to store addresses (privately) that you can use for invoicing. You can select one of these locations to be used in the Crowdsale.
- Enhancements to the Transfer Module — exciting work-in-progress here!
💎 Milestone: Crowdfunding
- Tokenomics, Totem Transactions (XTX) distribution schedules, Crowdsale technical mechanisms , and documentation site. We will have more content and details on this topic leading up to the Crowdsale.
- Backup improvements: Totem users will need to have a local backup of their Totem account, we’ve made this easier and more straightforward when signing up for the Crowdsale.
💎 Milestone: Reporting and Enhancements
- Partner Module: Business Partner and Contacts are other identities you have relationships with, whether it is a client, your accountant or your teammate — we have made some enhancements to include Location data (so that it can be displayed on an invoice).
- Identity module — Associating a Location with an Identity so that you can share it (not mandatory by the way).
Follow Totem Live’s progress via our 💎 milestone tracker and join the Totem community by:
- Signing up for our mailing list
- Joining Discord
- Following us on Twitter
- Testing out Totem Live application
👏 Thank you to founders Chris D’Costa and Toufiq Chowdhury for content input and review.
