It has been a whirlwind of a month. On April 28th we were selected along with 20 other entities to be part of the first cohort of Authority Node Operators (ANOs) tasked with running the Factom protocol and contributing to and creating value in the ecosystem. This was the result of several months of campaigning, soul-searching, analysis, and finally putting forth our value proposition to the community for evaluation. We are incredibly honored and grateful to be chosen for this monumental, yet rewarding role.

This is the first of what will be monthly updates to apprise the community of our progress on the projects we will be working on and to give insight in how we are pushing forward the Factom protocol and helping to grow the community.

Authority Node Operators

One of the brilliant design aspects of the Factom protocol is the incentive structure set up between the Authority Node Operators and the health of the network and ecosystem. By being rewarded with Factoids the ANOs are incentivized to work to grow the ecosystem to create a healthy Factoid price. This is a fairly common incentive structure in public blockchains. However, when combined with the genius of Factom’s two-token system, it rises to another level. The two-token system creates a fundamental value of the Factoid token by linking it to actual usage of the blockchain. ANOs, therefore, benefit by bringing actual real-world usage to the Factom protocol and when combined with the public accountability created by the Factom Governance process, creates what we believe to be an unstoppable incentive structure.

The long term goal has 65 unique entities running the 33 Federated and 32 Audit Servers creating a robust and highly decentralized system. The current cohort of 21 entities is the first step towards that process. We have been impressed by every ANO we have interacted with so far. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a stellar group of entities spinning up to start bringing value to Factom and we will all start to see the fruits of that in the coming months.

Canonical Ledgers Progress

On-boarding Preparation

This first month we have been focused on standing up our company, setting up our server architecture and finishing up some outstanding projects. We are currently slated to be on-boarded to the Factom blockchain sometime in August and will begin officially running our Authority Servers on the protocol at that point. In the meantime, we have set up our server architecture and modified it to ensure compatibility with the initial approach being taken by the Factom Core Dev team. We are running two follower nodes on mainnet as we wait to be on-boarded and are also running an authority and follower server on the testnet. We have contributed a few small bug fix pull requests to the Factom codebase and are participating in both technical development and community organization and governance.

Tipbot!

We started a Factoid Discord tipbot project several months ago as a way to get more familiar with the Factom codebase and as a fun, small, value-add to the community. We moved it to the backburner while we focused on our campaign and then getting set up in preparation for mainnet on-boarding. Now that we are ready for on-boarding we have resumed development and have the MVP running on the Factom testnet. Unfortunately, we’re working through some potential legal issues associated with running a tipbot for a cryptocurrency but we hope to be able to release the tipbot on the Factom Discord soon. Feel free to check out the project and let us know if you’re in a more favorable legal jurisdiction and are willing to run the code on a server.

Intern

We hired an intern! Ryan Stonebraker has come on board this summer to help with coding projects and server monitoring and maintenance. He’s an extremely talented developer who is pursuing a BS/MS in Computer Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We look forward to getting him up-to-speed on the Factom ecosystem and contributing to our on-going projects.

That’s all we have for this month. You can look forward to much more coming this summer as we ramp up our efforts so that we are going full steam once we’re officially onboarded and receiving revenue this fall.