Draper Dragon — A sector agnostic early stage fund, looking for companies with innovative technologies and business models with market appeal in Silicon Valley and China. NEO Global Capital — We all know about NEO, and with a portfolio consisting of Ontology, Zilliqa, Bluezelle, Trinity, Switcheo, IoTeX, CertiK, Oasis Labs, NKN and others… NGC backing OPEN means this is something worth keeping an eye on. Danhua Capital DHVC — A fund that invests primarily in early stage and growth stage companies with disruptive technology/business models, a big market and an excellent team. Backed by top-notch institutional and strategic partners, DHVC aims to provide startup companies with a wide range of resources to achieve greater success on a global scale.

The Problem

One of the core roadblocks that is talked about in relation to large scale adoption of blockchain platforms, is their inability to make it easy for anyone to integrate with already present infrastructure.

Currently there are no simple solutions for application developers that want to integrate blockchain technologies into their core infrastructure. You can probably start to see where this is going…

At the end of the day, developers need to be able to easily integrate a decentralized payment gateway into their application’s payment scheme, so that they will be able to accept any cryptocurrency.

These transactions then need to be recorded and synchronized with their existing backend, to keep track of different user accounts, permissions etc.

OPEN is addressing current inefficiencies and shortfalls of centralized systems, not by replacing them, but by integrating parts of a decentralized stack… so that developers can get the best of both worlds.

Currently, in-app payment processing requires many steps and a significant amount of infrastructure, meaning that payments can be delayed, and costly. Blockchain technology allows for this process to be significantly streamlined and democratized, allowing for substantial time and monetary savings

Additionally, cryptocurrency wallets don’t communicate with applications like developers need them to, and in order to see broader-adoption, developers shouldn’t need to learn a new coding languages to implement crypto-wallets.

The Solution

OPEN have developed a modular and decentralized end-to-end application payment platform. Enabling applications to integrate distributed ledger technology, accept payments in cryptocurrency, and track payment states on the blockchain.

This makes it easy for a developer to switch out centralized functions,

like a payment gateway or a hosting environment, for functions that utilize OPEN’s decentralized application platform.

OPEN will unlock the potential within blockchain technology in order to fundamentally alter the way that applications are built, hosted, trusted and monetized.

Bottom-line: OPEN makes it easy for developers to adopt cryptocurrency technology into their applications.

Unpacking the ecosystem

There are a few different terms that are introduced in the OPEN whitepaper that are crucial for understanding the ecosystem and token usage.

OPENWallet & OPEN_States

The OPENWallet is just like a normal wallet, enabling storage of different currencies as well as something called an OPEN_State that a user has purchased through the platform.

An OPEN_State is essentially verification of payment from a user, which can be queried by a developer’s database through the platform.

Scaffolds

Template smart contracts that are created by a developer, and include information such as pricing for components within their application.

Scaffolds are instantiated by the developer, when tokens are paid into a, “Scaffold Creator”, and become active through staking tokens into it.

Scaffolds are one of the core features of this project and the ecosystem. They enable OPEN’s technology to work with any blockchain that supports smart contracts.

Scaffold Creator

The API that OPEN provides to create Scaffolds for developers through an API call.

DeveloperWallet

Address where a Scaffold will transfer funds to, after a user sends tokens to it for an OPEN_State. Any wallet can be used, although it is recommended to use OPENWallet because it leverages the OmiseGO SDK.

$OPEN Token

The OPEN token is a utility token which allows a developer to activate a Scaffold after it has been created.