For the past few months we’ve been quietly working on building a blockchain that suits the needs of established consumer brands which have millions of existing users. We’ve gotten a lot of attention (maybe due to the Kin post mentioning us) which is unusual for a company still in stealth mode.

With the attention comes a community and with a community comes a responsibility to share what we are doing even though we’re in what is now semi-stealth mode. This post is a short introduction to Orbs and an update as to what we are currently working on.

Our story

Let’s start at the beginning before getting into the details of what we’re doing today. We started out as Hexa Labs (Orbs’ sister company), helping companies to launch new decentralized applications.

We kept running into the same problem during the course of our work — there just wasn’t a blockchain infrastructure available that could meet all of the business, legal and technological requirements that large scale applications with millions of users need.

Of all the great projects out there, none had been purpose-built for large scale consumer apps. As a result, each blockchain solution lead to one or more major limitations for our clients.

We needed to find a way to bypass those limitations since we were helping companies launch projects that could change their industry. We analyzed many blockchain platforms and technologies and realized what was missing, an infrastructure optimized for this market that will enable consumer brands to build bigger, faster, reliable and more empowering decentralized applications.

We decided to create a blockchain infrastructure that can enable large scale consumer applications to build beyond the current technological limitations. Luckily for us, we were already working with several companies that would help us gain deep insight into the needs of our target market. And this is how Orbs was born.

Our underlying technology

The Orbs platform supports blockchain virtualization which provides the look and feel of a dedicated blockchain while running on top of a public and shared network of nodes and enjoying security and full decentralization. The separation of the virtual resources from the underlying physical ones provide the Virtual Chains with isolation, quality of service, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and elastic resource capacity.

Orbs utilizes an innovative custom consensus algorithm purpose-built for the needs of consumer applications. It provides extreme scalability based on sharding on virtual instances, random committees and separation of ordering and validation. Transactions are encrypted by end-users and only decrypted after consensus, ensuring fairness and censorship resistance.

The Orbs compute layer supports polyglot smart contracts and enables access to other blockchains, like Ethereum, enabling cross-chain smart contracts.

Our mission

Our mission is to help established consumer brands create their own decentralized economies which are fairer, more stable and offer a more empowering user experience than current business models allow.

To achieve this, Orbs will make it possible for large scale centralized apps to transition their millions of users to decentralized apps. This means creating an infrastructure and ecosystem for consumer brands that provides solutions to their engineering, business and legal requirements.

We have four product pillars that will help us achieve this goal:

Consumer scale — Large scale applications need fast transactions, a fee model that fits their volumes and an adaptable configuration. Service Level Agreements (SLA) — Serious businesses with millions of users and dollars (or tokens) on the line expect a predefined level of service, so an SLA is a necessity. Evolving compliance — When you have a global audience and millions of users, you face a dizzying array of regulations, so a configurable regulatory model needs to be built into the platform. Modern deployment paradigms — It’s important to us that Orbs provides the capabilities our customers are accustomed to, such versioning, migration tools and gradual rollouts.

Lastly, we believe that intellectual property should belong to everyone so our code will be open source and our experience will be shared.

Announcements Schedule

We’re hard at work on new features and partnerships. Our website is just the first of many updates we hope to have in the coming months.

What you can expect from us in the near future:

The Orbs Position Paper

The roadmap

Announcement of the Genesis Block date

The Orbs consensus whitepaper

As we go: Insights from our R&D and business team

Join the Orbs community: