May 2018

The month of May has been very exciting and productive for DBGrow. Following our election to the Mainnet Authority Set on April 27th, our team has been going full tilt laying the foundation for DBGrow as an ANO and development team, beginning with our first roadmap goals outlined in our 2018 Development Roadmap.

Much of our administrative and development work this month focused on establishing a solid technological and legal base for DBGrow. We’ve successfully deployed and tested our Factom Monitoring + Alert Service, Proof of Support server and Android App, Finalized our relationship with our legal counsel, and more.

May Roadmap Goals:

Governance & Legal:

Finalize Counsel Relationship Done (5/25)

Complete Financial and Compliance plans Done (5/25)

Authority Node:

Successful ANO onboarding & promotion Done (5/17)

Set Efficiency and coinbase payout address (50% Efficiency) Done (5/25)

Development:

We are proud to announce that we’ve not only met all of our major established goals for May, but we have far exceeded our original stated goals.

Additional Goals Pursued or Completed:

Successfully elected as a Guide for the Factom Protocol.

Helped spearhead the push toward legal review and refinement of the Factom Governance model.

Groundwork, research, and planning on Factom Smart Contracts:

We’re preparing to release our Open Letter on Smart Contracts, a living document which will serve as a broad overview of information, challenges, and potential solutions for achieving smart contracts on Factom for the community.

Created public Trello boards for the Community to track our progress in real time (Factom Project Development Board, Authority Node Board)

Meeting in person with Factom community members:

Julian(@JulianFT) and Devon(@drkatz) had a chance to meet with 3 members of team RewardChain (@FactomKiwi, @schalk, @reid) in San Francisco! We had a great conversation about Factom. We highly recommend meeting up with these guys if you get the chance, they’re a group of highly focused and motivated Authority Node Operators working on pushing Factom to the next level!

Changes to Our Roadmap:

We will be replacing our June goal of releasing an Alpha version of our Factom Dapps Project with several goals spearheading the development of Smart Contracts!

Our Factom Dapps Repository currently contains a proof of concept/preliminary design for a trustless frontend code execution and distribution framework for Factom. While we love the direction of this project, DBGrow believes it’s prudent to hold off on further development until smart contracts are implemented for Factom, as much of the strength of DApps stems from the interaction between the two.

DBGrow will be taking a strong orientation toward achieving smart contracts on Factom, and will be adding goals to our June roadmap to this effect. These will include:

Publication and collaboration on our Open Letter on Smart Contracts and Smart Contracts Repository.

Organization of community resources including #smart-contracts discord channel

Adding additional, not previously planned features to our Factom ObjectDB Project to facilitate its use as a storage backing for smart contracts. This will not replace or delay our June goal of releasing an alpha version of the project!

Alpha release of our Factomd Cache Project which can sync and poll for new chain entries. This library will enable higher performance for many factom based applications, including smart contracts.

In addition, DBGrow will be deprecating it’s AWS Testnet Cloud Guide and will not move forward on our Mainnet version in favor of official installation instructions from Factom. However, DBGrow will still be maintaining point in time snapshots of Mainnet and Testnet databases for community members to jumpstart their nodes on any platform.

What is in store for June?: