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The Orchid Vision

Orchid Labs’ mission is to build open source software that keeps the Internet open and accessible — a natural resource for everyone, everywhere.

Our first step to fulfill that mission is to create a protocol that governs a decentralized marketplace with a commodity specification for bandwidth. One key element of the marketplace is a second layer payment solution, “Probabilistic Micropayments”, which adds transaction throughput and privacy to Ethereum. Another is a Medallion system for bandwidth providers that grants the network Sybil resistance and hardens it to other classes of attacks. More detail is laid out in our whitepaper.

The first application that buys bandwidth on our marketplace will be the Orchid App (coming soon to iOS and Android!). The Orchid App is an open source VPN client with added security features, such as multi-hop routing. The goal with the software is to provide secure access to the open Internet, right in line with our mission. We also hope to play a part in driving the VPN market towards more transparency, privacy and fairer pricing.

Other applications can be built that harness the power of our protocol and bandwidth marketplace. The Orchid App will serve as a first example and we are excited to discuss potential integrations. Email our team at partners@orchid.com to talk to us.

As we have been building over the past year, we continue to see concerning developments across the globe as the Internet splinters and new forms of communication control are put into place. We believe that our contribution can help the world become openly connected.

Progress in 2019

The year is flying by at Orchid and we’ve made considerable headway towards our goals. Here are some of the highlights:

Funding

Orchid Labs announced that the company successfully raised $43 million in its latest private offering to accredited investors. In total, Orchid Labs has raised $48 million to keep the Internet open and accessible. We are currently focusing all effort on our upcoming Beta.

Probabilistic Micropayments

The Orchid team originally laid out how Probabilistic Micropayments could work on Ethereum in 2017, both in our whitepaper and in a blog post. We are happy to report that we have an Etheruem smart contract implementation of Probabilistic Micropayments and we are currently integrating these into our client and nodes for Beta.

We are also happy to see that other Ethereum projects are using our ideas as fuel and building their own implementations. Second layer payment solutions for specific marketplaces can help scale the entire ecosystem and create products that bring in more users.

The Orchid App

The Orchid App Alpha Prototype

The Orchid App, our VPN client, is functioning on iOS and we have been testing the application internally as well as demonstrating the mobile app in person during conferences. The client is able to send packets to our nodes over multiple hops, demonstrating a key feature that increases security and privacy.

Orchid Node

We have an implementation functioning on Mac OS and Linux, relaying client traffic over WebRTC and encrypted tunnels.

New Website Launch

Orchid.com

We updated our brand and company narrative in February to something we believe frames what we are building in the correct light — a protected natural resource for everyone, everywhere.

Upcoming Beta Release

To get access to our upcoming Beta, sign up here to be the first to know when we go live.