6 years ago
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In this update: Mainnet and token launch events ⁂ PRISM IS HERE! The Orbs block-explorer goes live ⁂ the launch of our Community Discourse ⁂ Five EXCEPTIONAL posts explaining our PoS Universe, Orbs PoS design, Prism detailing, and our business strategy and philosophy ⁂ ORBS joins the TechStars family as a technical partner for the first blockchain accelerator in NY ⁂ Media coverage & event highlights ⁂ The State of the Orbs Universe: A detailed overview.
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Welcome back to our monthly recap everyone! April was an interesting month. On one hand, we were all in a bit of euphoria after the successful launch of our production layer, while at the same time productivity really kicked into overdrive. In this post, I want to involve our followers with happenings at Orbs on all fronts from events to tech. First things first:
After a year of activity in Korea, Orbs team has hit some important and impressive milestones of brand awareness, a strong community, and engagement with major enterprises:
The event on April 3rd targeted Korean enterprises in several industries: More than 30 corporate representatives attended the private event to hear Orbs Co-founder Uriel Peled's talk. Following the event, Orbs team has held a number of 1:1 meetings with those who’ve requested it, including:
April 4th: Orbs’ booth and VIP room were incredibly busy, and Uriel Peled’s keynote speech was very well received. Check out the slides from the event here:
Orbs team has been exploring use-cases and tech with key members of the industry. Gili has a lot of follow-ups to take care of! Some of the highlights from the Korea meetup: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2htLz\_st78\[/embedyt\]
Later, Uriel gave an excellent interview to TokenPost, the full version of which you can watch below: [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxJ-sL0AtZY\[/embedyt\] Our Korean readers may want to check out the full TokenPost article. Overall, this was arguably our greatest Korean event, with enormous lines and lots of fruitful meetings. Thank you, everyone, and especially our AMAZING Korean community and team!
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After months of meeting and working with everyone in the universe, we finally needed some “us” time. So, a week after the launch of our network, we held a private party here at our HQ office in Tel Aviv on April 3rd. Speeches, toasts, food drinks and dancing with family and friends were just what the doctor ordered for us to come back to work at full blast.
The European NOAH conference came to Tel Aviv, and Orbs was a key speaker in the field of enterprise blockchain technology. The event hosted 2,000 technology CEOs, executives and investors seeking to establish new business relationships and gain early insights into the latest proven tech concepts. Orbs was represented on the big stage by our technological Co-founder Tal Kol, who presented a crystal-clear vision of blockchain's competitive, open-source future. The short 10-minute speech can be viewed in the embedded video below. If you’re a latecomer and want to understand the full scope of what we are working on, without too much technical jargon -- THIS is the speech to listen to: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4btt3F4o70\[/embedyt\]
In last month’s update, I've mentioned Orbs being a featured partner at the Israel Dealmakers Summit in San Francisco. For those who are wondering what it was like presenting to representatives from the likes of Nasdaq, Microsoft and other high-caliber industry leaders, you can now watch Orbs Head of Partnerships Danny Brown Wolf predict the future of enterprise blockchain in the video released last week: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diuVDVBhVq8\[/embedyt\]
We also took part in a panel discussing trends in fintech and held a great conversation about the role of blockchain in the future of the financial world. In addition to Gili Ovadia, Orbs also hosted the following panelists:
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Ladies and gents, we have officially opened the Orbs community discussion board! There has been a lot of internal conversations about the best way to enable project related dialogue to the general public. It is important to us that everyone feels welcome to contribute to this community-driven mission and thank all those participating in the board right now. Ultimately, we found that the open-source Discourse platform was the best way to go about it. Come say hello at community.orbs.network (and don’t forget to bookmark☆).
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As fans and regular readers of Hackernoon, we were delighted to discover that the highly influential dev magazine chose to publish Tal Kol’s piece, Blockchain as the Next Evolutionary Step of the Open Source Movement, on its front page! 
At the end of the month, Tal was featured AGAIN on the front page of Hackernoon with another article, The Blockchain Dichotomy and an Architecture to Overcome It. We are so thrilled to see that a magazine we follow express such interest in this project.
If that wasn’t neat enough, the Hackernoon post was then retweeted by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to its some 35k followers. We are die-hard fans of the work done by OSI, so needless to say that getting noticed by this wonderful organization is very flattering.
The motivation is clear. #opensource is good for humanity. It is making technology more accessible and open — anyone can build anything." by @koltal @hackernoon https://t.co/XsHPtFs5sB — OpenSourceInitiative (@OpenSourceOrg) April 22, 2019
A bit about the Open Source Initiative, from their website: For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. Considering that Orbs has gone fully open-source only a month ago, having already garnered the attention of a firebrand organization like OSI is something everyone here is extremely proud of. We are excited about the possibility of collaborating with a corporation like this, whose work has been a major inspiration to the Orbs project.
Orbs has been singled out by The Chamber of Digital Commerce and the U.S. Department of Commerce Commercial Service as an example of what blockchain innovation in Israel is all about! The purpose of the mission was to promote greater collaboration and business activity between the United States and Israel’s blockchain communities.
Check out the full press release: Blockchain Trade Mission to Israel.
This past month, the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) chose to highlight Orbs in its newsletter that goes out to GBBC members, board, founding advisors, government officials and business leaders from around the world. The GBBC is the leading industry association for the blockchain technology ecosystem, which brings together innovative organizations and founding thought-leaders from over 40 countries to advance understanding of blockchain technology amongst global regulators and business leaders. 
This month is Tal’s month, apparently! The daily Hebrew business newspaper TheMarker (by Haaretz) interviewed our Co-founder for a monthly special publication on all things blockchain. Israel has been at the forefront of blockchain development for a couple of years now, so being chosen by one of its leading magazines to represent the booming industry is no small feat. Kudos, Tal :) 
Click here for the complete article (in Hebrew).
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A contract has been officially been signed with Yes24 and Orbs: Yes24 has partnered with Orbs with the plan to develop an improved marketplace for digital goods and services, by implementing the technology into its online bookstore. The now finalized deal puts Korea’s largest online bookstore a step closer to transforming it into a blockchain-based ecosystem after the MOU signed in December.
We are proud to announce that Orbs has become a technical partner to Techstar’s inaugural Alchemist Blockchain Accelerator! Techstars is one of the top accelerators in the world, having helped in more than 1,200 companies. Their portfolio includes big successes like SendGrid, DigitalOcean, Everledger, and Chainalysis. Techstars is helping to make killer blockchain use cases become reality by launching the accelerator. 
All startups resulting from the accelerator receive investment, mentoring and other useful resources including lifetime support from the Techstars network of 1,200 alumni, 10,000 mentors, 2,700 investors, and 180 staff members. Orbs team will take an active role in the mentoring of these blockchain app developers, and we couldn’t be more excited about sharing this valuable knowledge.
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This segment was contributed by Assaf Bielski
Orbs has been exploring use cases with an industry consortium within the global telecom space, with the aim of developing a shared future blockchain infrastructure onto which multiple blockchain applications would be deployed. Their primary challenge, right now, is guaranteeing trust in the platform even when the consortium grows to hundreds and even thousands of members, not all of whom partake as nodes in the system. Orbs can solve this challenge through its hybrid consensus model, which offers a new trust model for consortia by separating block production from validation offering entirely.
Whenever we see opportunities where Orbs is a great fit, it’s important to educate and familiarize these businesses with the project in hopes of them becoming active members of the ecosystem. There’s also lots of work being done on a detailed proposition for a digital identity solution architected on top of Orbs, an area blockchain is widely expected to revolutionize. For the first time, people will be able to control their identity which can be verified through a decentralized network, without any organization holding their data.
A major global consumer electronics manufacturer and several IT companies are involved in defining the requirements for such a solution on top of Orbs, and closing in on the first markets to test it. Most production blockchain identity solutions used by enterprises today rely on private blockchains. We see significant value in introducing a public blockchain solution, which addresses additional problems like identity theft.
Along with those long-term projects in the community, it’s important to identify “quick wins”; areas in which public blockchain can be used by businesses today, so the project can start engaging with the market and showcase the value of blockchain. One such area of interest is “document notarization” - a simple way for companies to register documents on the blockchain so that their authenticity can be verified at any time. This SDK is currently in the definition phase. The exciting part about it is how easy it will be to integrate: Most blockchain integration projects for enterprises require a dedicated systems integrator, and are usually both costly ($100K plus) and lengthy (months). This SDK, however, can drop this cost to nil and the time to just several days.
We are preparing for Consensus 2019, where Orbs team members will attend and meet companies from different industries to discuss the Orbs project, as well as an educational roadshow in India during which we are scheduled to meet blockchain experts from global technology service providers to discuss potential partnerships within the Orbs ecosystem.
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Due to the crazy pace at which the Orbs infrastructure is currently being developed, as well as the already large size of this post, we have decided to release a separate R&D update in the upcoming days.
The upcoming post will include details of the latest Orbs elections, results of performance and load tests that we've conducted, and other news such as the latest fixes and improvements.
You can also expect these tech updates to be published more frequently from here on end as separate posts.
This segment was contributed by Andrey Dulkin
In the upcoming days, I am going to publish a detailed report on the state of the Orbs network - how many Delegators are participating, how much is staked, and so forth. Meanwhile, I’d like to share with everyone some preliminary data points from our participation analysis as of 02.05.19: There are 16 active Guardians currently registered and 14 Validators running in production, with a list of over a dozen more Validators ready to join and preparing the relevant infrastructure. Even though the Orbs network was only just launched, I’m happy to announce that over 1000 Delegators are actively participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem and have chosen a Guardian. There have been 8 election rounds so far and no Validators have been voted out by the Guardians.
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Orbs team is going to have a heavy presence throughout NY blockchain week. We’ll be meeting with many of the industry’s biggest stakeholders, including well-known corporations and leading funds.
Some of the events Orbs will have a presence at in May:
Synchronize Techstars demo day + CIO summit Ethereal Summit Consensus Token Summit Tokenfest
Orbs' team will also speak at Ethereal and several other events including Atomic Swap. If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to come say hello to Orbs reps at our Consensys or Ethereal booths!
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That's it from me today! Be sure to follow Orbs on Twitter and stop by the community board on discourse. If you're a developer, check out Orbs Github with over 60 repos!
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