Here’s a quick update on what our Development Team has been up to the past few months since we released our Whitepaper and the more detailed System Architecture and Scientific Protocols papers.

On the tech side…

Regen Ledger is our blockchain specifically designed to support ecological applications. As described in the System Architecture paper, smart contracts on Regen Ledger will be written in the Ceres language. Our team has been busy mapping out the design for Ceres and the associated Ecological State Protocol and Ecological Contract data models. We have also started work on the implementation of Ceres.

Initially, development started in Haskell, using Megaparsec as our parser backend. After exploring the requirements for state protocols and contracts a bit further, we have been re-assessing the decision to use Haskell. Although Haskell is a very safe language for writing code, its ecosystem of libraries is not the most well-developed. For our specific use cases, a strong ecosystem of data science and geospatial libraries is important. Additionally, we are intending to leverage the RDF data model extensively in the Ecological State Protocols and Ecological Contracts so that those frameworks can take advantage of semantically rich data from heterogeneous data sources.

These design considerations have led us to consider the Java Virtual Machine as an alternative platform for Regen Ledger. With a JVM-based approach, we could also take advantage of Eclipse Xtext, “a framework for development of programming languages and domain-specific languages.” This is an option that looks really attractive and an alternate JVM implementation using Xtext has been started. One of our top priorities right now is having a clear specification document for Ceres and the smart contract frameworks available that we can share with the community. Stay tuned for this in the coming weeks.

On the science side…

Our team is working to identify pilot project sites and prepare GIS datasets by digitizing field boundaries, getting historical data from landowners, identifying current and past land use practices, and preparing different satellite products to create a series of high-resolution maps for land use purposes. Additionally, we are preparing the foundation for our land conversion development model by identifying the best algorithms to assess changes in the surface and distribution of main land uses on a year-to-year basis. We are evaluating and validating spectral indices for till/no-till sites in the USA and Europe.

As you can see, we are still at quite an early stage with all of this. We’re working hard, but there is a lot to be done! We welcome community engagement in our process, and if you’re interested in getting involved you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and of course, our Riot Room. We look forward to hearing from you.