In July, OriginTrail’s core team kickstarted a project within New Generation Internet’s Ledger program for human-oriented decentralized solutions. OriginTrail also left an important mark on one of the most influential supply chain summits in Australia. At the same time, the development team worked hard through the summer heat to deliver continuous updates to the open-source protocol and support further use cases for trusted, blockchain-based data exchange.

Ledger Project Kick-Off

We already announced that the OriginTrail protocol will power the food data marketplace for the internet of the future. Trace Labs, the core development company for the OriginTrail protocol, has been admitted into the EU’s initiative with the Food Data Market program, an inclusive data marketplace for sustainable food production, equitable distribution of gains and digital sovereignty of citizens and farmers. Almost 300 organizations applied and Trace Labs is in the top 5% that got accepted. In July, the real work started!

At the beginning of the month, OriginTrail team members attended the kick-off “Welcome Camp” in Amsterdam. We met with the project partners and agreed on the methodologies for the development sprint. A few weeks later, members from the tech and design teams attended the Inception Bootcamp to further craft the project.

The Ledger program is funded by the EU and is a part of the New Generation Internet initiative. It empowers people to solve problems using decentralized technologies like the blockchain, peer-to-peer or DLT.

OriginTrail team at the Inception Bootcamp in Amsterdam

Supply Chain Innovation Summit in Sydney

OriginTrail’s co-founder and managing director Žiga Drev was invited to take part in the Supply Chain Innovation Summit in Sydney, Australia. On the first day of the event, he discussed blockchain interoperability and supply chain applications with representatives from Blockchain RMIT, Beefledger, AgriDigital and Everledger. A day later, he held a keynote address where he outlined the OriginTrail Ecosystem to the audience.

Co-founder & managing director Žiga Drev at the Supply Chain Innovation Summit

Tech: Optimization of Interactions with Ethereum

The OriginTrail Vostok Mainnet utilizes Ethereum in its blockchain layer for establishing a trusted environment for game theoretical mechanisms and dataset fingerprinting. This requires each OriginTrail node to have access to the Ethereum network, which can be established in a couple of ways: by running an Ethereum node that can then be the interface towards the Ethereum mainnet, or by using the services — like Infura — provided by the Ethereum community developers. So far, the easier and preferred way for ODN node holders to use the Ethereum network has been the Infura service.

In July, Infura updated its terms of service, limiting the number of requests to 100,000 per day for the free tier. The OriginTrail core development team was expecting this update, as we explained already in March, and has been preparing for the change since then. All nodes on the mainnet were already operating under the limit of 100,000 requests to Infura per day, but the developers have been working on further lowering the amount of read requests the node needs to perform to Ethereum blockchain (hence, requests to Infura) to enable that everyone can continue using Infura’s free package under the new business model offering.

The current average number of blockchain synchronization calls by an ODN node (be it Infura or other such Ethereum RPC services) is around 14,000 daily, following the v2.0.58 update that was published in July. Read more.

Additionally, the team has been working on the Freedom update focusing on the implementations in the new data layer of the ODN nodes and extensive testing of the updated infrastructure with various dataset types. Inspired by several upcoming standards in the industry, most notably the Verifiable Credentials Data Model by W3C, the team has structured a protocol native communication format in the form of a generic, verifiable graph JSON structure to enable further flexibility and easier extensibility with new data standards. More information on the developments will be published in the documentation and technical update to come.

The Open Call Project Update

Following previous webinars, the winning teams received further detailed instructions for the deployment of their projects. Now, it’s all up to their skills. Most of them are currently in the testnet implementation phase.

Communications & Events Highlights

OriginTrail made an impact in July through a wide scope of events and publications. Here are some highlights:

We had a community meetup in Amsterdam! It was awesome to meet and hang out with the community members there.

The OriginTrail protocol was featured in a professional article on leveraging the Internet of Things and blockchain technology in supply chain management.

Žiga shared his experience with the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center’s innovation pipeline.

FoodNavigator Asia, one of the leading publications on food safety, wrote favorably about our project with OneAgrix and dubbed it a supply chain “gamechanger.”

Salaam Gateway, and a lot of other Islamic/halal-focused media, continued to cover the tracking of halal certifications using the OriginTrail Decentralized Network, too.

And, finally, we discovered that the TRAC token had a cameo in a Hollywood movie!