March 2020 was definitely not a regular month for us or anyone else. With COVID-19 still aggressively spreading around the planet and sending billions of people into lockdown, businesses, big and small, are adapting to the new reality. At Trace Labs (OriginTrail Core Developers), we quickly switched to working remotely in March as the spread was nearing our region. The team is as effective and connected as ever and we are sticking to the development roadmap. At the same time, we are already thinking up additional solutions to enable companies’ resilience and agility — based on the blockchain and OriginTrail protocol as trust layers — in these times.

Technology Updates

Nodes are a key part of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN), which provides the value of the OriginTrail protocol to business users around the world. The development team released four updates to the OriginTrail node client in March, the latest being v4.0.10.

Here are key updates that happened in March:

Improvements to the litigations process;

Improved routing of messages through the peer-to-peer network;

Faster export process;

Faster display of results on the OriginTrail Network Explorer; and

Numerous under-the-hood improvements.

The latest update also removed the support for reading the node wallet from the environment configuration. It is a breaking change, but it did not affect most of the node runners since it mostly applied to some older testnet node configurations. You can check your nodes based on these short instructions.

Showcasing Food Data Market

After many intense months of development, we were proud to introduce Food Data Market (FDM), a decentralized marketplace that incentivizes data sharing with the goal of contributing to sustainable supply chains.

Food Data Market is an open-source software infrastructure, utilizing the OriginTrail protocol for trusted data exchange. This infrastructure can be applied to data exchange in any industry, not just in food supply chains. If you are interested in finding out more, read our blog post and check out the repository on GitHub.

FDM is currently in the pilot stage, We are exploring new possibilities for the project to further develop our technology stack and bring it closer to its users. For all interested in how it works, co-founder & CTO Branimir recorded a demo.

Interview with Crypto Gurus

At the start of the month, OriginTrail co-founders and managing directors Tomaž Levak and Žiga Drev gave an interview to Tom Heavey from the Crypto Gurus YouTube channel. Tom was already familiar with OriginTrail, so he was interested in the topics and the interview turned out great. Tomaž and Žiga also shared all the latest project updates and plans for the future.

The discussion gave a nice overview of the OriginTrail ecosystem. If you don’t have time to watch the video, you can read a quick blog post with all the key highlights.

New Project Kick-Off: PARSEC

In March, we presented another project based on the data marketplace prototype at the PARSEC kick-off boot camp. This business accelerator supports the creation of new products and services based on satellite Earth observation data. Our aim is to develop and launch a verifiable sustainability scheme for food supply chains based on Earth observation data and bring our current idea to life.

Key partners in the PARSEC accelerator are the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC), BioSense, the European Union Earth Observation Programme (Copernicus), Asociación Valenciana del Sector de la Energía (AVAESEN), and many others.

Communications & Events Highlights

In March, most events and activities moved online, which is where OriginTrail has thrived from its beginnings. So, we remained as active as ever. Here are some highlights:

OriginTrail co-founder and CTO Branimir explained graph databases for Supply Management magazine:

Trace Labs co-founders Žiga and Branimir presented FDM to the LEDGER project:

PARSEC kick-off boot camp presentation:

Our community member Bottomshorter revived an independent OriginTrail community website:

Founder’s Reddit update by Tomaž:

Co-founder and CTO Reddit tech update by Branimir:

Our team members working remotely:

Making Supply Chains Work. Together.

OriginTrail has been on a mission to develop an ecosystem dedicated to making supply chains work together since 2011. Built on the principles of neutrality, inclusiveness, and usability, it contributes to a more transparent, collaborative, fair, and trusted global supply chain.

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