December featured the grand finale of a year of heavy development. Right after Christmas, we launched our biggest release yet: Freedom-Gemini, v4.0 of the OriginTrail protocol, which brought numerous long-awaited new features to the mainnet, making the technology even more fit for enterprise use here and now. With that, the core development team delivered on the tech roadmap for 2019.

The Freedom-Gemini Release

Freedom-Gemini, update v4.0 of the OriginTrail node client, was released on the mainnet of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) on December 26th. This update brought numerous new functionalities to the network, which significantly improve the state-of-the-art for decentralized networks when it comes to scalable data integrity, powerful data connectivity, and flexible data interoperability.

The Freedom-Gemini release:

✅ Introduces litigation and reputation;

✅ Removes the registration mechanism;

✅ Offers flexibility for more use cases with support for larger data sets; and

✅ Gives users more control over pricing for jobs.

Read more about the release here.

At the beginning of January, we hosted a community AMA where key questions related to the release were answered. Replay it here.

Completely New Houston

Houston — the “remote control” application for the OriginTrail node — became more powerful than ever just in time for the Freedom-Gemini release. Houston now includes functionalities previously available in the “Node Profile” web interface and additional new functionalities, such as parametric pricing, which enables more control over your node’s ROI.

Parametric pricing allows everyone to set their node services pricing according to a simple parameter, the Lambda factor. Houston additionally helps users estimate how a specific Lambda setting would reflect compensation by presenting “live” examples that can be used to more effectively set the node’s Lambda factor.

Read more.

“Hello Trail” Tutorial: Get Started with the New Node

“Hello, World!” is a familiar program to every developer having their first learning experience with a new technology. However, since we are talking about OriginTrail, the more appropriate name is “Hello Trail.”

With the launch of the Freedom-Gemini release, the core development team prepared a tutorial that helps you learn how to import data to your node, publish a dataset on the network and get the referenced object’s history via your OriginTrail Node.

Get started.

Important Partnership for Oracle Users in the Middle East

Trace Labs, OriginTrail’s core development company, announced a powerful new partnership in December. AppsPro, an Oracle Platinum Partner with a strong presence in the Middle East region, will bring solutions based on the OriginTrail protocol closer to enterprise and government users. Read more.

Continuous Work with BSI

In December, we had our partners from BSI (British Standards Institution) visit our Ljubljana office to join us on a project. Less than a year since we announced a partnership with this important standards organization, which has 90 offices and more than 4000 employees globally, great stuff is coming to fruition and you will hear more about it soon.

Communications & Events Highlights

Freedom-Gemini wrapped up a year full of development. On Twitter, we celebrated wins from 2019 — and there were a lot of them! Among the most surprising ones was when the TRAC token starred in a Hollywood movie. Have you heard about TRAC?

Some other highlights from December:

It’s been one year since the OriginTrail Vostok Mainnet was launched. For this special occasion, we hosted a AMA with Co-Founder & CTO Branimir Rakic, which also served as a sneak peek into Freedom-Gemini.

Co-Founder & Managing Director Tomaž Levak shared some thoughts on how Ethereum 1.0, in combination with purpose-built protocols, is already scalable enough for enterprise use (thread 👇).

And Co-Founder & Managing Director Žiga Drev continued with the initiative to bring short interim updates directly from the founders to Reddit.