It is a great pleasure to announce the final release of the alpha stage of the OriginTrail network, and the release candidate (RC) for the test network, the Lunar Orbiter v1.0b-RC. This means we have wrapped up the initial feature set of the protocol and will be — 11 days from now — launching our first beta release.

A Quick Look Back

Ever since we completed the token sale in January, the development team has been iterating rapidly, releasing a new version of the alpha stage every two weeks. Each of the releases has made major steps in different feature sets. We pushed out features at a great pace, but, more importantly, we learned a lot along the way. The motivation behind such rapid development was to make sure we get the latest implementations out to future users and integrators of the protocol, and to quickly try out a multitude of technical solutions in order to run into potential bottlenecks as soon as possible.

All of the main protocol components have been iterated upon in at least two major versions: the bidding mechanism has been completely revamped from the first implementation; the compensation mechanism has been vastly extended; the network layer, based on Kademlia, has received a full overhaul; and, the data layer has seen major standardization improvements, both in terms of GS1 and Web of Things standards.

The Beta Release Candidate: Lunar Orbiter

Lunar Orbiter takes the alpha phase to the finish line nicely by implementing two final important improvements: the latest version of the payment mechanism, and version two of the zero-knowledge privacy layer logic. The payment mechanism is now extended to support the ability to perform trustless, monetized data reading from the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN). In this way, the data creator (DC) and data holder (DH) nodes will be able to charge a fee from data viewer (DV) nodes, which would read data from them in order to provide them with the requested data. The payment mechanism enables many different operations to be built and we are looking forward to seeing it being used in the testnet phase, as it is still a novel concept and will surely provide interesting insights, valuable to future business case development. The details of the mechanism will be documented on our GitHub wiki to explain the specifics of how the system works.

When it comes to the zero-knowledge implementation in the ODN, the Lunar Orbiter now supports quantity validation across several events in the observed supply chain, with the ability to have them be reported in arbitrary stages of their execution, across multiple XML files. This is an important improvement from the previous version and presents the first full implementation of the zero-knowledge quantity balance mechanism. To utilize the feature, the GS1 XML creation needs to be updated to support it, and will also be explained in detail in our documentation.

Eleven Days Until the Testnet Release

Following an ambitious timeline continues to be the motto for the coming months. The testnet launch on June 29th will bring the most stable and rounded up version of the protocol so far. Having said that, it is absolutely expected (and welcome) to detect problems and encounter bugs during the testnet phase. That is why the team will be announcing a bounty program to involve the community in bulletproofing the code and helping with testing to reach a stable, production-ready version of the ODN mainnet in Q3.

In the next stage, we are expecting a larger scale deployment of the network, with more Tracers joining the system and enabling the observation on market mechanisms to take place. We are looking forward to testing out the assumptions and beginning to iterate further in this aspect of development.