OriginTrail Quarterly Report — Q4 2020
Tags: Polkadot, Report, Origintrail

The last quarterly report of 2020 covers the most significant events that happened and sheds light on the progress achieved by the OriginTrail Ecosystem. 2020 was a defining year for the adoption of the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph (a.k.a. #Google4SupplyChains). We witnessed the onboarding of global companies, increasing support from initiatives supported by the European Union (e.g., the Next Generation Internet and the Food Safety Market), and growing activity on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN).

The year 2020 was crowned with the Liftoff event, which attracted more than 500 live spectators who got to take a look at some of the most beyond-state-of-the-art solutions using OriginTrail and GS1 standards developed together with the British Standards Institution (BSI), Oracle, and the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). The paradigm-shifting next stage in the development of OriginTrail was introduced with multi-chain direction and knowledge economy tools positioned at the core of achieving efficiency gains and catalyzing the exchange of trusted knowledge through the network effect. We have indicated that we are seeking multiplication effects by working together with the most reputable builders in the industry, like Polkadot’s Parity Technologies.

All the Liftoff presentations are available on OriginTrail’s YouTube channel.

OriginTrail’s mission to radically improve trust and transparency in supply chains by enabling trusted knowledge exchange is followed by a growing number of diverse communities, and we look forward to seeing the adoption of the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph accelerate in 2021. Together.

Protocol adoption: Business development news

The last quarter of 2020 culminated in the expansion of projects of both institutional and commercial importance. Business development efforts yielded results that will significantly accelerate the adoption of the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph.

The Next Generation Internet

We live in a world full of data. An increasing amount of data is collected each day from the environment around us. In food supply chains, data is collected at multiple points and can provide in-depth insight into production, answering questions like “What were the production conditions?” and “What were the temperature, humidity, and sunlight levels?”.

Data gives the farmers — who are at the beginning of supply chains — the opportunity to stand out, highlight their good practices — like organic farming, for example — and get fairly compensated for their efforts. However, giving farmers the ability to monetize the value of their data and showcase the quality of their work has been challenging in the past. With that in mind, Food Data Market (FDM) was created.

FDM is a decentralized marketplace that incentivizes data sharing with the goal of contributing to sustainable supply chains. We are excited that Trace Labs, together with our partners Kakaxi Inc., is taking the next step for FDM with the support of the EU Commission’s NGI Atlantic initiative.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020

research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871582.

The first project partner is an Ireland-based distillery — Monasterevin. The founders of this company have repurposed an old mill into a new distillery that will carry the same name as the town it resides in — Monasterevin. Quality, sustainability, and transparency are key Monasterevin values and will help to form the cornerstone of their brand positioning and customer promise. Today’s consumers are increasingly cautious and skeptical about the sourcing of products and their ingredients and that is why Monasterevin is seeking new ways to support their claims with trust and integrity through certification, science, and technology.

As NGI Atlantic sees to the deployment of a data marketplace in operational environments, the benefits of sharing data will become even more apparent, driving future benefits for all organizations, big and small alike.

DEMO: Trace Labs driving radical transparency and trust in agri-food supply chains with OriginTrail and Oracle Blockchain Platform

Milk payment is a complex process and the price of milk paid to a farmer depends on multiple factors. The quality of milk, the quantity of a shipment, farm size, and negotiated margins all play a part in every single delivery that farmers make. Additionally, these deliveries are taken in and processed by different organizations, like farmers, agricultural cooperatives, dairies, and dairy laboratories. All of this means that the current way of handling payments towards the farmers still involves significant manual effort to verify all inputs and ensure the right process is respected.

The OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), together with the smart contract capabilities of Oracle Hyperledger Fabric, promises to improve this process end-to-end and provides a trusted compensation solution. The development of the solution was carried out as a part of the largest EU project focusing on digitizing the agrifood sector, the SmartAgriHubs (SAH project). As part of the Flagship Innovation Experiment #28 (FIE) “Decentralized Trust in Agri-Food Supply Chains,” the solution showcases how blockchain-based technologies can improve efficiency, safety, and trust in food supply chains without interrupting the existing business process. The aim of the SAH project is to unleash the innovation potential for the digital transformation of the European agri-food sector.

Trace Labs — the core OriginTrail team launched a demo of an automated dairy payments solution, harnessing the power of OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN), as a trusted oracle for milk data, and Oracle Blockchain Platform (OBP) Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts, as a secure store for contractual terms and payment calculations. Trace Labs’ Network Operating System (nOS) combines these components to deliver an efficient and trusted solution for the dairy industry.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 818182.

DEMO: OriginTrail powers a decentralized data repository run on GS1 global standards presented for the first time

Having a decentralized repository for data exchange among different companies within the transportation sector has long been a dream of many industry experts. Last November, Branimir Rakić, the CTO of Trace Labs, presented the first decentralized data repository enabled by the OriginTrail Decentralized Network and GS1 global standards. Using OriginTrail, Trace Labs is working with the railway sector on a high-system-interoperability tool with verifiable data integrity.

Currently, companies face low system and semantic data interoperability with no unified naming and slow integration of data standards. Consequently, the integrity of supply chains is dependent on the central provider of data. In his demo, Branimir showcased a solution bringing:

1. High system interoperability, with standardised API and query languages between vendors utilizing decentralized architecture (not requiring data integration and processing to be done by a single vendor) and standardized identities created by each participant;

2. High data interoperability by applying data standards (GS1 & W3C) and using ontologies and semantic technologies for knowledge-based querying, a.k.a. #Google4SupplyChains; and

3. 100% data security using blockchain verifiable integrity of data using trusted identity and cryptographic signatures.

Trusted COVID-19 Essential Supplies Repository data collection campaign completed successfully

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed weak points in the procurement of medical equipment. As the number of suppliers went up quickly, many that had no track record in the sector were attempting to profit at the expense of public budgets and national healthcare systems. No reliable system that would allow buyers of medical supplies to verify supplier profiles is available to date. Many manual verifications are needed, rendering the purchase processes highly prone to errors.

To tackle these issues, Trace Alliance is leveraging the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) to build a decentralized Trusted COVID-19 Essential Supplies Repository (TCESR) for global information about essential supplies for COVID-19 emergencies. With this single-source-of-truth repository built on the ODN, governments, businesses, and individuals will be able to seamlessly access relevant information about a particular product essential to fighting COVID-19 outbreaks.

Open data was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign and is being made available on the network to be accessed by any interested stakeholder. The Trusted COVID-19 Essential Supplies Repository data collection campaign was successfully completed in December and yielded a total of 124MB of valuable data, nearly 17,000 unique GTINs, and 320,391 total graph size by contributed datasets, showing that OriginTrail can be used to incentivize transformation of data into crucial knowledge.

Congratulations to all the community contributors on your successful contributions to the Trusted COVID-19 Essential Supplies Repository (tCESR)!

Cluster of Canadian firms joins Trace Alliance to advance EU-Canada collaboration on supply chain integrity

Technology providers are quickly recognizing that OriginTrail’s open-source protocol offers significant potential for advancing the rapid adoption of scalable and interoperable supply chain solutions while applying GS1 standards. We are delighted to welcome Canada-based InCube, Convergence.Tech, and NutriScope to Trace Alliance.

This partnership’s main objective is to advance collaboration and trade between the European Union (EU) and Canadian companies and to strengthen supply chain transparency, enhance trust, and ensure data integrity.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which is a free-trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, was put in place on October 30, 2016. CETA removed trade barriers and eliminated 98% of preexisting tariffs. With this agreement in place, the international trade in food and agricultural products has increased significantly. The need to provide enhanced product traceability, enable rapid recalls of unsafe goods, verify countries of origin, combat mislabelling, and eliminate fraudulent products has become ever more apparent.

Trace Alliance launches a working group on Food & Agriculture Technology with Grigoris Chatzikostas at the helm

In December, Trace Alliance announced the formation of a Food & Agriculture Technology working group focusing on digitalization and trusted data exchanges in the food and agriculture industry. The working group is chaired by Grigoris Chatzikostas — founder & CEO of Rainno, VP for Business Development at FoodScale Hub, and a central figure of a multitude of European-wide projects for the digital transformation of the agrifood sector and the establishment of a vibrant network of Digital Innovation Hubs.

“It is now more clear than ever that we need to urgently rebuild our food system on a more fair and sustainable basis. Thanks to the data revolution, there are so many powerful tools at our disposal, but technology alone is not enough. We have to connect the dots, mobilize innovators, and intensify co-operation to achieve what is possible, without leaving anyone behind. This is exactly what our ambition on the Trace Alliance working group on Food & Agriculture Technology is and we want you on board!” Grigoris Chatzikostas, CEO of Rainno, VP for Business Development at FoodScale Hub

Trace Labs team presented the first OpenPKG prototype

OpenPKG is an application that enables website visitors to discover which of their personal data organizations have. The app also enables users to request both access to that data and its deletion. OpenPKG runs on a decentralized knowledge graph for improved governance, portability, and privacy of personal data. An open-source infrastructural foundation is being created and used to design a system that organizations can use to automate their GDPR compliance and have a transparent way of handling personal data.

With its decentralized data provenance system, OpenPKG is introducing an efficient approach to tackling data transparency and portability challenges, while also advancing governance and control over personal data by users. The system introduces a middle ground between data subjects, data controllers, and data processors, which enables the transparency required for managing personal data.

The OpenPKG prototype gained traction within the Data Portability and Services Incubator (DAPSI), which was launched in November 2019 to empower top internet innovators to develop human-centric technology solutions addressing the challenge of personal data portability on the internet as foreseen under the GDPR. The DAPSI initiative is supported under the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. At the end of the year, Trace Labs presented the first OpenPKG prototype, which marks the first concrete step towards using the OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph for data portability.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020

research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498.

Protocol development: Technology

The last quarter of 2020 saw the release of highly significant documentation. For the first time, Starfleet details were unveiled in a Request for Comments (RFC) issued by the Starfleet Task Force operating within the scope of the Decentralization and Tokenomics Working Group in Trace Alliance. The document explains the rationale and the solution implementation steps required to achieve a multi-blockchain ODN for increased adoption potential and a more efficient ODN market. The solution introduces several new and supporting ecosystem components, including the Starfleet Blockchain and Starfleet Transporter Bridge. It also explains their interaction, development direction, governance structure, and future exploitation potential.

To achieve an even more efficient market behind the functioning of OriginTrail Decentralized Network, the Automated Price Adjustment RFC was published in OT-RFC-06. It introduces new tools in the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) codebase for the decentralized service marketplace. They are aimed at improving market conditions so as to encourage more data publication offers by the Data Creator (DC) nodes and improve the profitability of Data Holder (DH) nodes. It discusses an optional, configurable Automatic Adjustment Plugin (AAP) node plugin component that will automatically estimate the optimal λ on the network based on the node user configuration.

Another important milestone that ensures a more seamless path towards introducing Starfleet was achieved by Trace Labs when it was selected for Polkadot’s Substrate Builders Program. Trace Labs has joined the Chains track, which aims to provide additional strategic, technical, and media support by the Parity team for the OriginTrail blockchain-related initiatives.

Towards the end of the quarter, a crucial unveiling for the future of the OriginTrail technology stack happened at the Liftoff event when the team showcased how the stack will further develop in the next stages of OriginTrail, especially the Knowledge Economy phase. In addition to realizing the vision of a multichain OriginTrail in the consensus layer of the technology stack, we have seen an addition of a new layer called the Service Layer, where we will find new components supporting knowledge marketplaces, knowledge tenders, gateway services, liquidity services, and data to knowledge services. You can always re-watch the Liftoff presentation to get up to speed with all the novelties.

Not long after Liftoff, the team also released another key resource in form of the OT-RFC 08, which serves as a technical implementation guide for adapting the ot-node to communicate with multiple blockchains during runtime.