Release 3: Alpha Centauri B
At Transmute, we charge ourselves and the greater blockchain community to focus on building evolved applications that challenge the status quo. That means taking time to reflect and change course as we gather new data points. That is just what we did in the month of August with new focus on product development in addition to adding to the platform.
This month, the Transmute team has focused on a number of technical initiatives, and most importantly, we’ve been actively seeking validation and product market fit in discussions with CTOs, CSO’s and enterprise leaders who are starting to adopt DLT for narrow use cases that can drive real value for their businesses.
Are you a CSO, CTO, CIO, or someone who works closely with enterprise identity and security questions? If yes, we would love to hear your perspective. Click here to connect with our product team.
We’ll summarize a bit of our tech progress, and then dive into some of the product development work we are conducting.
Transmute CLI
We’ve made some key updates to our CLI, in particular focusing on modularizing the process of managing kubernetes clusters and adding microservices for dapp development. We’ve added ansible as a dependency, and its helping us migrate away from raw BASH towards a modular architecture for defining out local and remote development environments.
Network Smart Contracts
We’ve made progress testing our delegated proof of stake contracts, and preparing to support the decentralized compute side of our network. This work is taking longer than expected, but we have found ways to add lots of confidence to the process with rigorous tests and modeling of the system behavior. This month we’ve been focused on modeling inflation, slashing and burning, token distribution, and token allocation after various rounds of DPOS activity.
Transmute API
The Transmute API is a meant to be the single source of centralization within our platform. It’s a standard REST API with support for swagger. This month, we’ve worked to dockerize the API and prepare it for compatibility with rapid application development technologies to improve our prototyping velocity. The API remains closed source, and we’re evaluating strategies for managing proprietary integrations without disrupting our ability to deliver an excellent decentralized application development experience that is open source.
Decentralized Identity
We’re excited to officially join the W3C, and expand our work on implementing the emerging DID spec. This is an area of active development, but we’ve been having excellent conversations with large enterprises and smaller startups around the challenges and opportunities of working with a standard for decentralized identity that is compatible with blockchain, but does not require it. We will share more progress on this next month.
Product and Roadmap
We’ve learned a lot from conversations following Google Cloud Next 2018 with many key decision makes and and small and large business that are adopting DLT. We also made our first product hire and are focusing extensively on customer development and user research. One thing we kept hearing over and over again is that while our platform is really exciting, businesses are looking for a simpler and more tangible way of getting started today. While these organizations want to explore incorporation of DLT, they have to first prioritize solving key pain points without compromising security or speed. This is a design challenge that Transmute is taking on by experimenting with an identity-focused application to both show the core value of the underlying platform and solve real business challenges. We are developing a revised product roadmap to ship usable modules along the way to our platform release.
Transmute ID
As new member of the W3C working group, we’re excited to contribute an open source reference implementation of the emerging DID spec. This is a core component of of platform, and we have some excellent research that is ongoing to evaluate the best ways to integrate with legacy and centralized identity solutions. One thing is certain, Transmute ID will need to bridge the concept of centralized and decentralized identity, and we’ll be making tradeoffs in all directions of the security, usability and scalability triangle of sadness aka the blockchain trilemma. Some of the key features we’ve been working on are: integrating DIDs with directories, signature based authentication flows for JWTs, and support for major identity providers.
Transmute Compliance
Identity by itself is not very useful. The main application we’ve see of DLT in enterprises has been support compliance and audit logging. We’re excited to research the integrations user experience around this application of DLT, in order to have a valuable app use case to validate the rest of our platform work.
We’re excited to approach out product development in this new way. We think that DApp traction with enterprises will help optimize and drive platform development in a way that better aligns interests.
We’re seeking partnerships and connection opportunities with businesses that are eager adopt DLT for managing identity and compliance. If you are interested in participating in some research and validation work, please fill out this survey.
Find us on GitHub, Twitter, Telegram or Reddit and check out our whitepaper.
