August was marked by setting strong foundations for development in the autumn and future months. Adoption and protocol development remained the key goals for the development team. August was crucial for thought leadership and setting the discussion for important directions for the OriginTrail ecosystem, both in terms of private versus public data sharing and the next steps for the Trace Alliance.

nOS is Designed to Accelerate ODN Adoption

How can we transition enterprises from private data silos into collaborative data sharing? That was the question we posed in August as we dove deep into exploring private versus public data exchange in the global enterprise environment. This relates to data privacy control in nOS, which was designed to easily connect legacy systems with the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) and create interoperability for data exchanges between them.

The business world is very rarely black and white and some companies face obstacles when it comes to publicly sharing their data. However, there are types of data that require the highest possible integrity in a business context and nOS helps companies share it with the public on the ODN.

Tomaž shared more of the reasoning behind different privacy settings in nOS in a blog post, which gained significant traction last month and sparked a discussion in the general blockchain community, with John Wolpert joining in.

Trace Alliance: A Year of Experience Sharing and Growth

Trace Alliance now boasts almost 100 members committed to collaboration in implementing novel, blockchain-based solutions to supply chains. Each member brings a new perspective and experience to the alliance, making it a truly diverse and collaborative hub. In the past year, a lot has been achieved and Trace Alliance is firmly established as one of the leading organizations in the field. In August, we looked back at the inaugural year and John Keogh’s chairmanship. We are currently exploring ways to better involve members of the Alliance in the future governance model and will soon be ready to reveal more details.

Tech Update

In August, the focus of the core development team was on improving the data layer of the protocol code as we gear up for Freedom, the next major release on the mainnet. In the OriginTrail solution stack, the data layer consists of a highly performant, decentralized, graph database that connects data sets across supply chains and ensures interoperability based on global standards. The team is currently improving the data layer to support a greater variety of use cases. You can explore the GitHub repository for further insights. As a part of these endeavors, we are also running tests by uploading different data sizes with different longevity parameters to the ODN mainnet.

August also brought some trouble for the popular community-led website OThub, which is currently down. We are aware that OThub is missed and have reached out to its author. The OriginTrail core development team will try to help with bringing this valuable community resource back online.

For more insights into recent development, stay tuned for the tech-focused AMA coming up next week. You can submit your questions on Reddit.

Also, OriginTrail is hiring! Check out the open positions on the careers page.

The Open Call Project Update

We were closely working with teams on the implementations of their projects. At least one team is close to launching on the ODN mainnet within a month! We are excited to share more updates as soon as they are ready.

Communications & Events Highlights

Summer is not the season for major events, so the team’s core focus was on planning presence for the future. In the autumn months, we plan to spread quite some time on the road and spread the word about the OriginTrail protocol to industry events worldwide.

Some highlights from August:

Tomaž’s opinion piece on private versus public networks was re-published by Hong Kong-based Forkast News:

OriginTrail’s halal use case was presented in Food Navigator Asia.

OriginTrail was highlighted as an example of how blockchain is transforming the retail supply chain:

OriginTrail’s co-founder Žiga Drev was invited to speak at World Crypto Con in Las Vega 2019. It is a major crypto event in the USA, part of Vegas Blockchain Week.