Growth acceleration with the #multichain OriginTrail and establishing institutional support
Tags: Development, Projects, Origintrail, Report, Community

This H1 2021 report covers the most significant evolutionary aspects of the OriginTrail ecosystem thus far. In the first six months of the year, OriginTrail transformed into a multichain network. There will be additional blockchain integrations to follow (Polkadot and other EVM-compatible chains). This development makes way for faster global adoption of the first Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) that for the first time ever delivers an alternative to the way knowledge graph technology is being used by conglomerates like Google and Facebook. Achieving economies of scale and scope, the OriginTrail DKG was introduced into use within several industries, championed by the largest global associations and companies. The pioneering work done in using the OriginTrail technology in healthcare received recognition by the World Economic Forum, further expanding awareness of DKG capabilities for tackling the most dire societal challenges.

Concluding the challenging 2020, the OriginTrail Ecosystem faced staggering Ethereum network fees and growing interest in the adoption of the OriginTrail DKG by enterprises, governments, and users. All of these factors combined created a growing urgency to expedite OriginTrail’s multi-chain, blockchain-agnostic vision, which was initially outlined in the original white paper. The proposal to accelerate the Starfleet phase was put in motion through the Trace Alliance Working Group on Decentralization and Tokenomics, which is composed of visible representatives of the community, OriginTrail node runners and Trace Labs — core developers of OriginTrail.

Strong support for the proposal was confirmed by a very successful TRAC staking process (100MM TRAC contributed), paving the way for the first multi-chain deployment using the EVM-compatible xDai. Achieving this unlocked an unimpeded growth trajectory, resulting in the Total Graph Size (TGS) tripling in size in less than three months. This is up from the linked data size, which took three years to accrue starting with the launch of OriginTrail mainnet. Simply put, TGS went up from 8MM TGS at the end of Q1 2021 to 30MM TGS at the end of Q2.

With the Starfleet phase continuing, several further blockchain integrations are in the works, including the Substrate-based blockchain, which will aim to become a parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem. With that, OriginTrail’s DKG infrastructure will become widely accessible for use in the creation of Web3 solutions, providing fundamentally different ways of connecting and maintaining knowledge assets based on the principles of inclusiveness, neutrality and usability. OriginTrail’s technology, which has been solving problems in supply chains, is now showing its potential to revolutionise the way humanity creates, shares, and consumes data and knowledge assets.

The Internet is currently in a state of strikingly apparent power asymmetry favoring tech conglomerates. In moving away from this, OriginTrail developers and the community have garnered support from both internet and Web3 pioneers like Bob Metcalfe (inventor or Ethernet, and the author of the Metcalfe’s Law) and other builders of the next generation internet. This report is the result of wide efforts by all sides of the OriginTraill ecosystem. We wish you a pleasant read.

Decentralized Knowledge Graph adoption update

British Standards Institution (BSI)

The suite of DKG-based solutions developed in partnership with BSI was extended in both number and scope in the first half of 2021. In April, Jurij released an exhaustive piece on the relevance and importance of OriginTrail technology as the backbone of the life sciences and healthcare industry. Diving into the specifics of the pharmaceutical sector, he elaborated on how the DKG can be used to achieve greater transparency and safety in pharmaceutical supply chains by enabling unit-level traceability, product diversion indicators, and anti-counterfeit mechanisms. This sparked a lot of interest from stakeholders globally, culminating in an exciting update from BSI. In their whitepaper on solutions offered to increase transparency in the pharmaceutical industry, they introduced the DKG as the foundation of their data management and analytics hub. Furthermore, the whitepaper expanded on how BSI and Trace Labs have implemented this solution for a global donor organization (starting with deployment in India), allowing them to authenticate products, track patient utilization, and be alerted about any diversion issues. This successful expansion into pharmaceuticals marks a significant milestone, revealing the ability of the DKG to uniquely address a multitude of challenges plaguing the sector. Several follow-up activities are already in the works, promising further expansion in the second half of the year.

The first half of 2021 also saw the kick-off of the Innovate UK funded Trusted Bytes project. Trusted Bytes aims to use innovative digital technology to facilitate the flow of goods across the UK border, increasing efficiency, transparency, and security of the UK food sector. This will help to create proof of food provenance by digitizing critical border transfer processes while also providing seamless real-time digital connectivity to supply chain operators. It will also enable a trusted data exchange that connects the supply chain with central government and other critical partners, enhancing cross border transition, compliance, and security. Furthermore, BSI — the Trusted Bytes consortium partner — will also explore how to streamline and facilitate the adoption of the Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) program, ultimately increasing security and expediting shipments across the UK border. This will be done by leveraging various open international best practice frameworks around supply chain data management, trust, and interoperability within the initiative. These include the open source OriginTrail DKG, GS1 EPCIS, W3C DIDs and verifiable credentials, and ISO 44001 Collaborative Business Relationships.

Aside from the two major new DKG implementations introduced above, several enhancements to existing solutions developed in collaboration with BSI have been introduced. Continuing the successful implementation of the SCAN Trusted Factory solution, which has received a lot of attention within the supply chain industry, several feature enhancements are being introduced this year, as mentioned in the SCAN Q2 newsletter.

Source: SCAN Q2 newsletter

The existing BSI Training Certificates solution (BSI issues over 200,000 training and qualification certificates per year) was built on the OriginTrail DKG. It has been extended with new features and is being moved to the next stage in the following months.

Last but not least, the joint implementation with BSI in the innovative Monasterevin distillery is continually progressing with new features, additional data sources and piloting additional capabilities using the OriginTrail data marketplace technology.

GS1

Since its inception, the Decentralized Knowledge Graph has been heavily utilized in conjunction with the widely adopted GS1 standards, particularly EPCIS. In the first half of 2021, OriginTrail’s core developers have been continously engaged in the development of the new EPCIS 2.0 standard version through the GS1 EPCIS Working Group. There have been several other productive achievements, as well.

Together with partners from the European rail industry, OriginTrail Core Developers have been expanding the implementations to track more rail parts and events, in accordance with GS1 and towards the upcoming EPCIS 2.0 implementation (improving upon the original solution showcased on the Liftoff event at the end of 2020). The network of companies exchanging EPCIS-structured information on their rail supply chain activities has increased and showcased that, when based on GS1 and the DKG, integrations are performed with very low friction.

Following these successful productive implementations of the DKG, team Trace Labs was invited to showcase them at two dedicated presentations on the GS1 2021 Global Forum together with GS1 Switzerland (the blockchain session and the GS1 rail session). Frequent supporting activities on introducing GS1 standards have also been discussed and piloted with partners from TheFSM project, together with data marketplace capabilities.

EU projects

In H1, we also saw significant developments in the EU-supported projects leveraging the OriginTrail DKG. The remarkable improvements in the cost-effectiveness of the OriginTrail decentralised network allowed a much wider scope of OriginTrail use, making the DKG a more ubiquitous component for different EU-supported projects. Important work has been done within The Food Safety Market project, defining how the decentralized knowledge graph will be used to enable digital certification processes for farmers in Europe. With the implementation pending in the next phase of the project, partners are aligning the last details of the system design. Another important food industry project (with over 160 partners), Smart Agri Hubs, has seen more communications activities in the first six months of 2021. These activities happened on a range of fronts, including newer platforms like TikTok.

Trace Labs, the core developer of OriginTrail, has also been very active in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, developing and testing new components based on the OriginTrail DKG that ensure core values of human-centred internet are a part of its future. Furthering the concept of data marketplace and how it can help monetising upstream supply-chain data, Kakaxi devices have been deployed on multiple sites across the globe in the scope of the NGI Atlantic initiative.

As the data gets collected on the field, the next steps include setting a monetary value for that data and using a decentralised marketplace to facilitate its procurement. In the beginning of the year, we also saw how the OriginTrail DKG was included in a framework for managing personal information in a GDPR-compliant way in the scope of the NGI-funded OpenPKG project. It was also presented by Trace Labs’ General Manager, Jurij Skornik, at a series of events organised by the NGI initiative.

To wrap-up the plethora of adoption updates on EU-funded projects where the OriginTrail DKG is being used, there has been a steady development towards creating a national traceability system for organic food within the Ekopakt project. The first implementation phase should be finalised by the end of the year.

Education and Trace Alliance

To support further growth of the OriginTrail DKG, the first half of 2021 saw an increase in the number of alliances made, research volumes delivered (by the world’s most renowned academics), and engaging educational resources published. The core OriginTrail development team took an active part in influential global events, sharing digital stages with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Uber.

Trace Labs made the first strides into the healthcare industry with an open-source project aimed at collecting information on essential supplies to help fight the COVID-19 virus. The initiative soon outgrew its original parameters as it received support from the World Economic Forum and its Uplink program for innovative and sustainability-oriented projects. The World Economic Forum is continuing its support for OriginTrail and we are excited to see the results in the following period.

Announced in March, another Trace Alliance initiative was launched under the title the Working Group on Supply Chain Data Interoperability and Semantic Web. This working group brings together global companies, technology providers, government agencies, and academics to collaborate on creating a commons-based (open source) framework and recommendations that will contribute to seamless communication between disparate information technology systems in the public and private sectors. In its first few months of operation, the working group already yielded a research paper on the current state of data interoperability and semantic web initiatives globally and attracted the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to join its first public meeting, which was held in June.

In its presentation, the representative of the FDA, Mr Andrew Kennedy, shared details of the FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety Challenge.

In collaboration with Amos Thomas — an IT specialist and one of the most active members of the Trace Alliance Working Group on Decentralization and Tokenomics — and the Ivan on Tech Academy, OriginTrail launched an educational and engaging online course. The course is available to anyone that wants to learn how to run an OriginTrail node. The course also covers running a node on different blockchains that the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) is connected to. Also, one can get to know how to configure a node, best practices, publishing and viewing datasets, and more.

Giving developers more insights into OriginTrail, the CTO and founder of Trace Labs was interviewed by Ivan Liljeqvist of the Ivan On Tech Blockchain Academy to explain the significance of the decentralized knowledge graph technology and its use cases. During the interview, Branimir showcased how easy it is to build any application using the OriginTrail technology.

The OriginTrail ecosystem’s footprint was largely increased through important opinion leadership at some of the most important global technological conferences. Branimir Rakic took several digital stages with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Uber at the Knowledge Graph Conference.

As the Starfleet development phase progressed, OriginTrail was selected from over hundred projects to present at the Polkadot Decoded summit — the biggest Polkadot event. In May, Žiga Drev, a founder of Trace Labs, showcased OriginTrail Decentralized Network capabilities and how it is currently used by leading global organisations. Žiga also unveiled the next steps towards securing the parachain on the Polkadot Network.

OriginTrail was continuously part of the most important Polkadot Ecosystem events in the first half of 2021. The Trace Labs team hosted a joint Polkadot + OriginTrail meetup in June with Branimir Rakic and Dieter Fishbein as its main speakers. Branimir Rakic from OriginTrail and Dieter Fishbein from Web3 Foundation shared their insights into the mult-ichain Polkadot and OriginTrail ecosystems, speaking about Kusama and Polkadot parachain auctions, the OriginTrail parachain and Decentralized Knowledge Graph, and how OriginTrail and Polkadot will work together to link trusted data across different systems to bring a new kind of knowledge economy to life.

To expand awareness in the enterprise community, the GM of Trace Labs, Jurij Skornik got interviewed by the WOF Expo, aninnovative supply chain event organising company. Jurij spent five years solving supply chain management challenges for one of the world’s largest logistics providers, Deutsche Post DHL, before joining Trace Labs. As the General Manager, he now leads important projects in collaboration with international partners and part of his responsibilities is to develop relationships with key clients for Trace Labs. His long-term goal is to make trusted data exchange available to supply chains worldwide. The full interview is available here.

Trace Labs, the core development company of OriginTrail is now expanding its team and its advisory board. Joining as an advisor is one of the earliest Internet pioneers, Professor Dr. Bob Metcalfe. Dr. Metcalfe invented Ethernet and is famous for Metcalfe’s Law. As the OriginTrail Knowledge Graph gains traction among users worldwide, Trace Labs welcomes Dr. Metcalfe to help apply Metcalfe’s Law to predict the value of linked data based on the network effect.

Protocol development: Technology

The main goals for technical development in the first half of 2021 were to support the needs of the growing OriginTrail ecosystem and to further extend the applicability of the Decentralized Knowledge Graph. These efforts brought vast scalability improvements with OriginTrail becoming a multichain protocol. We also saw numerous performance updates and the development of new tools to improve the developer experience and an extension of blockchain utility through the OriginTrail dedicated blockchain.

The OriginTrail DKG has seen a total of nine releases, the most significant being the major version release of v5 in March, which extended the protocol to a multichain implementation, initially supporting xDAI and Ethereum blockchains. Prior to launching on mainnet, the core development team introduced the first multichain canary testnet — “Warp” — which has been used to perform initial testing and provides a fast moving environment to introduce new features. The v5 release of the DKG has successfully implemented the first stage of the envisioned blockchain-agnostic OriginTrail, initially supporting two blockchains, yet aiming to support a multitude of different chains through a simple DKG extension framework. The integration with Polygon has been in preparation since early summer (coming up in August). In the near future, the DKG will extend support with the OriginTrail parachain.

Several important features and improvements have been introduced to the ot-node, such as extensions to the API for better usability, improvements with data handling, dataset pruning, and several bug fixes. Additional tools have been created, the most notable being the DKG client for easier Dapp development, which was showcased in an episode of Ivan on Tech. A number of DKG tools are being prototyped and incubated through the The Food Safety Market project, where the DKG will support the platform data marketplace features, implemented using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and the extended FairSwap marketplace protocol implementation. Finally, the learnings from implementations and mentioned research have fueled the team to create a new updated version of developer documentation, which was published recently as well.

The core development team has also been active in the standardization process of the GS1 EPCIS 2.0 standard for some time and actively re-engineering DKG components to support the new and improved version of the standard, tested and piloted with rail industry partner applications.

In parallel, together with the Trace Alliance Working Group on Decentralization and Tokenomics, the core development team has been working on project Starfleet, performing research and building a Substrate-based TRAC native blockchain. The Starfleet alpha version was successfully piloted with Warp in February and soon after launched on the Starfleet beta testnet. Initially aimed to be integrated with Polkadot as a separate, bridged chain, the development efforts have accelerated towards a fully-fledged OriginTrail Parachain. Together with team Parity and through the Substrate builders program, the Trace Labs team has performed a successful integration of the OriginTrail Parachain with the Rococo testnet in June, soon after which a staging testnet was launched. The Parachain staging testnet is the final phase towards the launch of the productive OriginTrail Parachain on Polkadot, used for testing and ultimately reaching the necessary, highest level of technological readiness prior to integration with ODN.

A total of three new RFCs were reviewed and accepted in the first half of the year and several new RFC drafts are in the works and about to be published. Most notably, research has been carried out on the novel protocol updates for the DKG, expanding support for multiple implementations in it’s discovery, publishing, and exchange protocols, which are expected to land in v6 of OriginTrail later in the year.

Financials

In the first half of 2021, the ecosystem remains in a good financial state. Optimising the use of funds, all activities carried out in 2021, including bounty awards for xDAI chain, were covered by last year’s token allocation. This means that the future development fund has remained in the same amount as defined last year as well, at 132,500,000 TRAC. As already described in the roadmap, a framework for deploying the future development fund will be presented at the release of the new whitepaper towards the end of Q3.

The total size of the treasury therefore stands at 16,480 ETH on June 30th.

Key ODN adoption metrics

H1 2021 was a special period for the ODN. The multiple advancement of the network, especially achieving the multichain stage, were crucial in unleashing the adoption of the technology. We have seen a booming growth of all KPIs, especially the most important one — the Total Graph Size (TGS). As further advancements are planned for the second half of 2021, we are looking forward to the upcoming growth, excited to see the impact OriginTrail will make globally.

Total graph size (TGS)

Total graph size (TGS) is the core metric of the OriginTrail ecosystem. It is a measurement of the size of knowledge supported by the decentralised knowledge graph. This is done by combining two key elements of a knowledge graph — data objects and connections between data objects. In more precise terms, it combines the total number of graph vertices (also known as graph cardinality or the order of the graph) and the total number of graph edges (known in graph theory as graph size) of a decentralized graph. The term vertices represents all the different objects that have been added to the graph (such as identifiers or specific information for supply chain events, products, attestations, locations, and certificates) while the edges represent the connections between these objects.