September was an important month for OriginTrail. We finished the third quarter of this year with two important launches: the Open Call for 10 innovative supply chain projects, and the OriginTrail Network Explorer (ONE) — our decentralized network’s search engine, which will gain even more importance when the mainnet goes live.

Business Development: More Than 50 Members in the Trace Alliance

The Trace Alliance — a collaborative hub of companies, organizations, individuals, and institutions — was initiated by OriginTrail with the aim of facilitating the adoption of blockchain technologies in global supply chains. Since the public launch of activities in July, a stream of new membership applications has flooded in.

Our goal, outlined in our roadmap, was to pass the 50-member milestone by the end of Q3, and we did it in September! 💪 It is not just about numbers, however. Each member brings a new perspective and experience to the alliance, making it a truly versatile and collaborative hub. The Trace Alliance’s mission is to work to tackle supply chain challenges in various industries using the blockchain and the OriginTrail protocol. New Trace Alliance members come from the fashion, agriculture, medical, retail, fintech, and other industries. Wherever there are more partners that share data in the value chain, the use of the decentralized protocol enables integrity and trust.

There is a lot going on for members! In the past month, we hosted the first exclusive webinar for Trace Alliance members and held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) in the Trace Alliance LinkedIn Group with the Chairman John G. Keogh. Our development team has started onboarding developers to the Trace Alliance as well. We also created a members-only newsletter, opportunities for networking, and so much more.

Technology: OriginTrail Network Explorer and the Updated Roadmap

The tech team was busy with the development of the protocol. In September, we pushed 2 updates (latest being v1.3.42b) that brought optimized bidding mechanism and increased network resilience of the nodes. In addition to that, bug fixes, some refactoring and various enhancements commits contributed to overall testnet stability.

We released the first version of the OriginTrail Network Explorer, the first such interface for the OriginTrail network. It presents a “window” into the world of public data on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) and allows anyone to easily read the raw data on the network without the need to run their own node. It allows users to search identifiers on the network, access raw data attached to identifiers and validate the integrity of the data by checking its fingerprint on the blockchain.

The focus of next sprints will be an implementation of cheaper transaction costs as well as improved data and network layers. We are stressing the network more with every new release in order to discover bugs and improve stability.

In September, we updated the roadmap, which puts the launch of the ODN mainnet to Q1 2019. Read more about the reasons behind the move forward here.

OriginTrail at events in September

Communications: Open Call & Autumn Roadshow

We are very proud that we launched the Open Call in September. It is an important project that will help 10 promising and innovative supply chain project start using the OriginTrail protocol. We prepared USD 135,000 worth of TRAC tokens, as well as expert mentorship, for that purpose. The call is open until November 9th. We prepared a special webpage with all relevant information at https://origintrail.io/opencall.

September was also the start of a new heavy season of professional events and gatherings. This month alone, OriginTrail’s founders and team members presented at 6 major events in 4 countries. This includes important GS1 events and the 2050 China Food Tech Summit in Shanghai, China, which was the first influencer gathering devoted to food innovation investment for the Chinese market. The Autumn Roadshow also continues in the following months.

Co-Founder & CEO Tomaž Levak presenting at the 2050 China Food Tech Summit in Shanghai

Our communication with the community was as strong as ever. We continued to present our team members, published a wrap-up of the latest AMA, and regularly engaged on all community channels. The next AMA will be announced soon and it will be focused on the open call: you can already contribute with your questions! Recently, we also opened an important additional channel for directly updating our community — Signal on the popular Blockfolio app.

We want to especially highlight the interview our CEO Tomaz gave to Euronews, explaining blockchain technology. It was translated for the Russian edition, as well.

OriginTrail was mentioned amongst highly innovative blockchain companies in an industry report by ABI research.

Alicia Noel, founder and executive director at Cultivati (which also happens to be a Trace Alliance member) used an example from OriginTrail in her LinkedIn Pulse article “Six Ways Blockchain is Being Used in Food and Agriculture Supply Chains”.