As the second quarter of the year is nearing its end, the core development team is happy to announce that all the deliverables set for this quarter in the roadmap, which was also part of the OriginTrail Vision Paper, have already been completed, with all activities on track. This marks another successful milestone for OriginTrail, and the team is already working on further challenges and complex use cases, which will be described in this update.

Development Progress in Q2

The core development team has been working on implementing various improvements stemming from the implementations and tests performed in both the OriginTrail Decentralised Network (ODN) as well as the local environments set up for testing. These findings have shaped the development plans outlined earlier by validating the technology utilization against real world conditions of network operations, over a longer period of time and under different conditions with regards to data being published.

✅ W3C standards support

With previous releases, the protocol has enabled support for the Web of Things W3C recommended standard. W3C standards are designed for wide compatibility with IoT devices, which are important data carriers for numerous use cases and projects we are working on, such as the EU-wide Demeter project. The team has been working on enabling support for a multitude of other W3C standards by focusing on developing the improved Freedom Stage 1 data layer of the ODN. Expanding on the learnings from the use cases utilizing the network and clear indications of upcoming needs of projects, the team has reprioritized the development efforts, so that the improved version of the data layer can enable even easier implementations of additional standards as well as further optimization of the technical performance of the ODN.

✅ Houston application for node management update

✅ Additional OriginTrail development frameworks open sourced

In April, the team updated the Houston UI application for the mainnet node version. Furthermore, Houston was publicly released as an open source application available for the community to contribute under the Apache 2.0 license. This was one of the first planned efforts as the team is preparing to further engage the open source community with several activities, including open sourcing the protocol command execution library in the near future, providing tutorials and documentation on how to utilize the ODN as well as how it ties into the ecosystem complementary open source technologies. More information will be published in the coming period.

✅ Pilot project with live IoT data published on ODN

The IoT integration has recently been performed by the Kakaxi team (one of the open call winning teams, example data on ODN visible here). The team is tying in data from their IoT device for reporting weather conditions and camera feed to the ODN through the Network Operating System. This pilot project was already presented to a business audience at the IDC executive round table in Zagreb in May.

✅ Hyperledger Fabric support

Earlier this quarter, the team integrated the fingerprinting functionality on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain by building a fingerprinting plugin interacting with a fingerprinting contract on the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. This is part of the continuing effort of the team to enable support of the technology across different blockchains in order to be applicable in even more use cases and contexts.

Towards New Frontiers

At this stage of development, the tech team is closely observing and working on onboarding certain users to the ODN. In the last month, the team has started onboarding a complex supply chain tracking use case, which generates tens of thousands of supply chain GS1 events daily. This is the first case of such scope for the ODN and, to our knowledge, in the world of decentralized solutions in general.

During this process, the team has observed that certain nodes, mostly ones that are under the minimum hardware requirements published in the documentation, had issues handling such a large number of events and needed a restart. This provided valuable insight for an upcoming solution fixing the observed issue and enabling support for a larger number of events. With the upcoming optimisations, the goal is to also lower the hardware requirements for running a node on the ODN.

Through all the findings and limitations discovered, the team has therefore decided to take a two-stage approach to releasing the Freedom stage on the mainnet, as outlined in the recent AMA with the founders. The reorganization in two stages has largely been driven by the ongoing implementations and testing of the network, partially introducing features planned for later stages (Gemini) already into the Freedom development phase. Stage one of Freedom is expected on the ODN mainnet in Q3, and it will enable further data interoperability by implementing the new data layer version (briefly explained above), to additionally scale up the data implementation and introduce the first stage of the reputation mechanism based on litigation (the replacement success rate on testnet is currently at 97%). Stage two (initiated following the successful completion of stage one) will mean the abandonment of the node approval mechanism and the combination of litigation and reputation.

With all the developments in the pipeline, the core development team is expanding — check out the open positions! Also, don’t miss the regular upcoming monthly and quarterly reports, which cover broader aspects of the OriginTrail Ecosystem.

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