OriginTrail Monthly Report #10: October 2018

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OriginTrail

6 min readNov 7, 2018

In October, a lot went on on all fronts. We strengthened our cooperation with GS1, improved network layer scalability, released an extension for integrating the OriginTrail protocol with the Evrythng IoT smart products platform, launched new channels for interacting with the community, and were invited to present at major industry events around the globe. Read on!

Business Development: Important Developments in Our Partnership with GS1

It is official — OriginTrail’s collaboration with GS1 organizations reaches far beyond a photo of a handshake and a contract. Let’s refresh our memories a little (source: Roadmap). In January, we joined GS1 Slovenia as a member. From March to June, significant technology improvements were made to fully integrate and support the GS1 EPCIS standards to the protocol. In July, we announced a technical partnership with GS1 Slovenia, and in Q3, our work was recognized by the GS1 global office and more national offices. After OriginTrail’s co-founder Žiga Drev presented at the global GS1 Industry & Standards Event’s Blockchain session in Dublin, GS1 featured OriginTrail in their Bridging Blockchains: Interoperability is essential to the future of data sharing solution position paper. It is an official document in which this important global organization presents its vision and recommendations on how to leverage blockchain-based technologies to bring more transparency and sustainability in global value chains.

In October, OriginTrail presented at the GS1 European Regional Forum in Ljubljana, Slovenia. We opened the Traceability and Visibility session and took part in the discussion, together with Timothy Marsh, Senior Director for Traceability, Provenance, Sustainability and Blockchain at the GS1 Global Office, Francois Deprey, Chairman of GS1 Europe, and, Lena Coulibaly, GS1 Sweden. OriginTrail was the only blockchain-focused solution provider that presented there. We continue to evolve our partnership and relationship with GS1. Stay tuned for updates.

Business Development: Workshop for the Largest Australian Organic Beef Producer

OriginTrail’s co-founder Tomaž Levak held a workshop for the largest organic beef producer in Australia, OBE Organic. They began as a group of pastoral families in the 1990s as Australia’s first and only premium meat exporter 100% dedicated to the production of organic, grass-fed beef. The scale of OBE Organic’s free-range production operation is staggering: together, the families own over 7 million hectares of grazing land. That’s almost 17 million acres, which is roughly the size of Tasmania, or 1.5 times the area of Taiwan, or the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Tomaž Levak said: “Thanks for the kind welcome, OBE Organic, and for the opportunity to share our experience. I’m certain your team has what it takes to make OBE Organic one of the brightest examples in the industry. The workshop was very successful and we are looking forward to seeing OBE Organic progress in its effort to put an emphasis on the superiority and authenticity of their high-quality products.”

Technology: Testnet Improvements & EVRYTHNG Integration Extension

October was very productive for the development team at OriginTrail on several fronts. Our efforts to bring down the system usage costs and improve the network performance are in the final stages.

As outlined in the testnet progress report the inefficiencies identified with transaction costs on Ethereum regarding the bidding mechanism (which is an integral part of the protocol handling the incentives regarding data replication) were the focus of the team in the previous period. Furthermore, there have been plenty of improvements coming from the findings of the beta program which have further improved on the operational resilience of the OT nodes and their communication within the network layer. The results of our work will be published in the coming weeks, along with updated documentation following the next major release of the OriginTrail node. We invite all the interested developers and potential node runners to enroll in our ongoing beta program and join our Discord group to participate in the development and testing of the network, as well as get in direct touch with our developers.

Last but not least, our development team has also been in close cooperation with our partners Evrythng to deliver on the integration between the Evrythng platform and OriginTrail nodes, which has been successfully released in mid October.

Communication: Blockfolio Signal Updates and New Ways to Interact with the Community

October was filled with interesting B2B events where OriginTrail was presented to a business audience. We also engaged in innovative ways to make sure that our community is well informed about all key aspects of our business. We published a Q3 report, which is a standardized form of reporting, but we had a bit of a different take on a monthly AMA. Our CMO and Head of Business development devoted an AMA to our Open Call, which is an important program not just for the teams who are applying, but also for the entire community and ecosystem since token holders will select the winning teams. Here is a recording if the live-streamed AMA:

Last month, OriginTrail’s founders also held a business-oriented webinar at BrightTALK, on their Blockchain Channel, where professionals from around the world gather to gain insights into new knowledge and technologies. You can watch the recording for free.

What else is new? In October, we joined the Blockfolio Signal program. All token holders who use the Blockfolio app can now get the latest hot news via push notifications and app on their phone. We send out updates at least 2 times a week.

Trace Alliance chairman, John G. Keogh, was on fire with updates and great content creation in the Expert View series:

We published an introductory presentation “Blockchain-Driven Value Chain Transparency & Trust” in which John explains how trust is created and challenged in the value chain and moreover, how blockchain can empower us to fight this.
In case you are still not entirely sure what GS1 is and why it greatly matters, you can watch this Expert View (John G. Keogh is also an ex-exec of the GS1 global office). TL;DR: Here is a hint — GS1 is the only issuer of barcodes and 5 billion barcode scans happen every day.
John also sent us a fantastic photo from Vietnam, where he met the leaders of TMA Solutions (2200+ engineers) and Source Certain, a forensic laboratory solution from Australia. Great projects ahead. Very exciting.

We Presented OriginTrail at Six Important Industry Events

Digital Supply Chain Executive Leadership Forum — Co-founder & CTO Branimir Rakić presented at a panel discussion at the SAP’s headquarters.

FMCG marketing conference in Slovenia — Head of Business Development Nino Pirtovšek presented in front of more than 150 managers and executives gathered to hear about cutting-edge trends in retail.

MakeIT 2018 — Co-founder & CTO Branimir Rakić opened the blockchain track as the keynote speaker at the software solutions conference. Other presenters were from companies like Oracle, IBM, and Red Hat.

Foro Global Agrolimentario — Co-founder & CEO Tomaž Levak was invited to present about blockchain-based integrity at the leading agtech summit with more than 40,000 visitors to the fair and over 7,000 registered participants for the conference.

GS1 European Regional Forum — As mentioned in the Business Development part of this report, OriginTrail was invited to open the Traceability and Visibility session and took part in the discussion together with senior GS1 officials.

DLD Salon — Branimir shared the stage with Prof. Isabell Welpe at the innovation, digital media, science and culture conference, also addressed by the Serbian Prime Minister.

A lot is going on at OriginTrail. We started November with a strong new partnership: SmartAgriHubs is an amazing, EUR 20 million worth project EUR 20 m for digital transformation of the European agri-food sector. We are regularly updating our community on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, and other channels. Stay tuned for even more updates from OriginTrail in November, too!

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