The second quarter of 2019 marked an important period for the OriginTrail project. The core development team followed the technical roadmap and made tangible steps towards global adoption. We even announced the successful completion of all the roadmap deliverables before the end of the quarter. Amongst the many milestones that have been met, Q2 was marked by new use cases, the expanded notion of the knowledge graph, and explosive growth of OriginTrail’s reach, influence, and impact.

Protocol Adoption: Business Development News

In March, at the start of the quarter, OriginTrail’s core technology builder was repositioned as Trace Labs and has broadened its offering for businesses. This includes the Network Operating System (nOS) and related applications for provenance, track-and-trace, consensus check, etc. In Q2, this development was closely connected with prominent new use cases.

OneAgrix and Halal Certifications

Halal producers and certification bodies can now use a blockchain-enabled system to build trust with consumers. OneAgrix, a Singapore-based online marketplace for halal products, has implemented a system powered by the OriginTrail protocol that enables consumers to check the provenance of any product, including its halal certifications.

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EVRYTHNG and the Fashion Industry

Using a combination of IoT and blockchain technologies, consumers can now get full insight into the supply chain and provenance of the clothing they buy. EVRYTHNG, the IoT platform that activates every consumer product to make it intelligent, interactive and trackable on the web, and OriginTrail have continued their already successful partnership aimed at bringing a new generation of internet technologies to innovative global brands. Most recently, the two companies partnered with Avery Dennison and the fashion brand 1017 ALYX 9SM (founded by Matthew Williams, Lady Gaga’s ex-creative director and a collaborator of Kanye West) to create clothing that is born digital — allowing brands to connect with their customers directly via a QR code. After this initial PoC on OriginTrail’s test network, the EVRYTHNG team is looking forward to larger deployments of supply chain data sharing on the ODN mainnet.

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Ledger Program and Other EU Projects

Trace Labs has been admitted into the EU’s initiative with the Food Data Market project. The Ledger initiative, funded by the European Commission, selected 16 projects working on decentralized technologies to enter its Venture Builder program. We are building a decentralized data marketplace, based on the ODN, which preserves digital sovereignty and is improving data governance practices. Almost 300 organizations applied and Trace Labs is in the top 5% that got accepted.

We also continued to work within the SmartAgriHubs project where we are digitizing the European countryside with our Flagship Innovation Experiment.

New Leadership Structure

In April, we unveiled the new leadership structure of Trace Labs, OriginTrail’s core technology builder. The leadership team got a strong addition in Jurij Škornik who was previously a senior consultant at the DHL Deutsche Post Group, one of the world’s largest logistics providers, and has excellent insight into global supply chains. Vladimir Lelićanin, who was with the team before, has joined the C-suite and taken charge of product development as a Chief Product Officer (CPO).

Protocol Development: Technology

All development activities were on track throughout the quarter. OriginTrail’s core development team has completed all roadmap deliverables for Q2 2019. You can read more about them in a separate tech update that was published before the end of June, but here is a short wrap-up:

✅ W3C standards support

The OriginTrail protocol now enables 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.

✅ Houston application for node management update

The Houston user interface for OriginTrail nodes has now been refreshed and adapted with a new release that works with the latest version of nodes on the OriginTrail Vostok Mainnet.

✅ Additional OriginTrail development frameworks open sourced

Houston’s code has been publicly released as an open-source application available for the community to contribute under the Apache 2.0 license.

✅ Pilot project with live IoT data published on ODN

In May, we hosted one of the winners of the Open Call project — Kakaxi from San Francisco — at a week-long in-person workshop at our dev HQ in Belgrade and integrated their IoT solution with the ODN (example data viewable here).

✅ Hyperledger Fabric support

The team has integrated the fingerprinting functionality on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain by building a fingerprinting plugin that interacts with a fingerprinting contract on the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service.

Insights into the Knowledge Graph in the Binance Hack Case

Whether we are tracing poultry or coins, making better use of interconnected data is a key mission for OriginTrail. That is why we used data layer capabilities of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network to help track and trace $40 million worth of bitcoin stolen from the Binance exchange.

This is an excellent showcase of the power of OriginTrail’s knowledge graph, which provides a great overview of complex and interconnected data that can be further enriched with information from multiple sources leveraging the self-governed ODN based on Ethereum. Read more.

Join the OriginTrail Team or Contribute to the Development Community!

OriginTrail is an open-source protocol and the core development team is always happy to get feedback and proposals through GitHub. The official documentation is available at https://docs.origintrail.io/.

We are happy to see how the tech community on Discord — the go-to channel for discussing everything node-related — is developing into an engaged, knowledgeable, and helpful open-source community. At the end of Q2 2019, the Discord server had 1,449 members.

There are great examples of community-based resources, including the OT Hub and befranz.net. Everyone is encouraged to join, engage, spread the word, and contribute to growing the OriginTrail ecosystem.

With all the developments in the pipeline, the core development team is expanding, too — check out the open positions!

Financials

Following the pattern established in previous quarters, spending is approaching the set targets. There has been an increase in development costs, especially focusing on improvements on the mainnet and creating the foundation for knowledge graphs, as described above. With an aggressive roadmap set out, it is expected that the same trend will continue. There have also been slightly larger business development costs, as these activities are of vital importance for the longevity of the OriginTrail ecosystem.

The organization remains in a good state financially, with enough funding to sustain further development efforts. The envisioned financial structure, according to the execution plan of the OriginTrail team, was presented at the TGE and can be seen in the values showing target share (at the end of 2020) below. Next to the target share, you can find the current share of costs based on the actual funds spent in a particular segment up to the date of the report. The assets’ value on June 30th was 8,430 ETH.