Dear Tracers, welcome to the February 2019 OriginTrail project monthly report. It was a busy month on all fronts. With the OriginTrail Decentralised Network (ODN) up and running, the team’s focus is on preparing the network for the upcoming updates and on presenting the protocol to hundreds of business movers and shakers at high-level industry events. A lot of our work now is focused on strengthening existing partnerships that have resulted in new integrations, like the one we have with EVRYTHNG. We also made some great headlines with Oracle this month.

OriginTrail at the GS1 Global Forum

The Global Forum is GS1’s largest annual event and is aimed at aligning the organization’s global strategy, inspiring innovation, and strengthening staff around the world. A total of 800 GS1 employees and partners from 95 countries gathered to discuss the future of international standards and interoperability there. OriginTrail had the honor of being featured at two sessions:

The Digital Identity and Bridging Blockchains Plenary : An expert panel on how GS1 will fit into the future of digital identification of things, products, places, and people. Žiga Drev, Co-founder of OriginTrail, was joined by Salim Hasham, Partner at McKinsey & Company, Renaud de Barbuat, CIO and Digital Transformation Leader at Carrefour, and Jeff Denton, Senior Director for Global Secure Supply Chain at AmerisourceBergen.

: An expert panel on how GS1 will fit into the future of digital identification of things, products, places, and people. Žiga Drev, Co-founder of OriginTrail, was joined by Salim Hasham, Partner at McKinsey & Company, Renaud de Barbuat, CIO and Digital Transformation Leader at Carrefour, and Jeff Denton, Senior Director for Global Secure Supply Chain at AmerisourceBergen. The GS1 Standards and Blockchain Session: Mark Kalin, Head of Innovation Office and New Technology at the BTC Company, presented a case study of how the BTC Company is using the OriginTrail protocol in its logistics center. They are building the BTC City — a smart city with an extremely rich ecosystem — and have successfully implemented OriginTrail’s blockchain technology solution, which connects vendors and retailers for data sharing, and are acting as a third-party logistics provider. BTC was one of three companies that were selected to present at this panel, a wonderful recognition for our joint use case from a very relevant audience.

Read more in this blog post: https://medium.com/origintrail/origintrail-takes-the-stage-at-the-gs1-global-forum-2019-d62320aa7268

OriginTrail Vostok Mainnet

The development team has been working full swing on several improvements with the OriginTrail node, most importantly focusing on the route to the next stage of the OriginTrail protocol called Freedom. Once Freedom is released, network litigation mechanisms will be introduced, which is a significant development for the ODN, and will be the first major update since the release of Vostok in December 2018. The team has been performing internal testing and fine tuning of the new node for several weeks already and is expecting an official release in March.

Several other important improvements are in progress as well: We have focused on the connection interface with Ethereum, working on backward compatibility, increasing code coverage and multiple bug fixes that have surfaced along the way. The observed issues in the bidding mechanism distribution and occasional offer finalization issues are under investigation and in the process of resolution. Otherwise, the network performance was good and the network has had steady growth.

Integration with EVRYTHNG

EVRYTHNG is an IoT platform that collects, manages, and applies real-time data from smart products and smart packaging to drive Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. We announced the partnership in May and our teams are regularly collaborating on developing solutions to bring blockchain-enabled solutions to global brands.

In February, EVRYTHNG added support for replicating events from their IoT product platform for brands to the OriginTrail blockchain connector. This allows EVRYTHNG’s customers to share supply chain data to the OriginTrail Decentralized Network in a decentralized manner in a few clicks. Check out the code.

The Open Call Project Continues

In February, we presented the 10 Open Call winning teams and shared more information about how the voting took place. It was based on the smart contract and we were delighted to see that the voting smart contract was recognized as a functional dapp by the Ethereum and general blockchain community. Winners of the voting raffle were notified as well.

The work with the teams continues. Right now, the teams are preparing the technical implementation papers, which will be the basis for their onboarding to the OriginTrail Decentralised Network.

Interest in the Open Call is rising outside our community. OriginTrail’s co-founder Žiga Drev was invited to present our Open Call and the 10 winning teams in a video call with the Food Integrity Blockchained Meetup in Amsterdam.

Communications Highlights

Oracle and BSI Partnerships Making Headlines

When it comes to communications, it has been an incredible month for the team. Our partnerships made important headlines, which is great for awareness. Oracle shared more information about their blockchain endeavours, including the partnership with OriginTrail. This release resulted in significant media traction, including the leading blockchain outlet — Coindesk.

Thought Leadership and Actionable Advice for the Industry

In the beginning of 2019, meat scandals shook the European public. OriginTrail can help to tackle recall, loss of customer confidence, and traceability challenges with our solution. We have already implemented it for an important European poultry producer Perutnina Ptuj

Since there is an increased interest in meat traceability, we received a visit from a national TV crew. Co-founder Tomaž Levak explained how OriginTrail can help tackle this challenge.

Tomaž Levak shared his thoughts on the benefits of blockchain technology for food manufacturers and their international supply chain management systems in the latest Global Food Safety Resource magazine (expert view).

March is already proving to be a strong month. Right now, we are at the SmartAgriHubs project kick-off conference in Prague. It is an incredible, EU-wide project with more than 100 partners, funded with 20 million EUR, focused on the digital transformation of the European countryside. OriginTrail is the only blockchain technology provider in the project.

You can follow interesting developments from there daily on our Twitter profile.

Stay tuned for more awesome updates in March!

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