Hello Hivers, I’m Andrarchy the CEO and Co-Founder of OpenOrchard and in this post I’d like to update those interested in the progress we’re making on two of our products; the Koinos blockchain and ODESI microservices.
A couple of months ago we announced the formation of this company and the addition of 4 extremely talented blockchain engineers, thanks to their unparalleled experience working on the Steem and Bitshares blockchains.
But these people aren’t just great blockchain engineers, they’re great software engineers who can build all kinds of amazing systems, so we didn’t want to just assume that we knew what kind of blockchain we should build, or whether we should build a blockchain at all! After all, there are a number of functional blockchains to choose from.
That’s why the first step we took was evaluating the existing solutions. Through those examinations we discovered that all of them suffered from significant architectural flaws, whether due to technical debt or just old age. These are not small issues, but serious problems that we believe will inhibit the ability of those platforms to scale while meeting the needs of developers and users.
Developer & User Focused
What motivated us to work on Steem was not a shared love for social media. Steem was the first blockchain that was both accessible to mortal developers and capable of delivering a positive user experience at a relatively large scale. It is this focus on building something that is both developer-friendly and user-friendly, that serves as the “rudder” guiding our ship as we navigate the waters of blockchain architecture.
Totally New Blockchain
To avoid adopting solutions that would saddle us with unwanted technical debt, we decided to build our blockchain entirely from scratch. The goal was not necessarily tokeep everything we built, but even if we ultimately wound up adopting existing solutions, we would be doing so with full knowledge of the baggage we were taking on and a deeper understanding of what exactly we were building. It was this knowledge which we believed would pay dividends and we are happy to say it definitely did.
By building all of the components from scratch (taking advantage of modern C++ libraries that older blockchains didn’t have access to) we have been able to reconstruct the blockchain foundation with building blocks (no pun intended) that are lighter weight, simpler, more efficient, with code that is more maintainable and easier to update.
Producing Empty Blocks
We are excited to announce that we have these components functioning in a test environment and producing empty blocks. What is even more exciting is that as we were reconstructing the foundational components of the blockchain we were not only able to build them better, but we were able to rethink how the different parts of the blockchain should work together, and how those parts could make use of some of the next-generation blockchain technology we pioneered at Steem like MIRA (Multi Index Rocksdb Adapter) and Resource Credits.
While this is a major first milestone for us, the blockchain itself is neither decentralized or useful and, of course, we want it to be extremely decentralized and extremely useful. But it is a very important first step because it demonstrates that despite the novel foundational design, all of the changes and improvements we’ve made still work together functionally to produce a blockchain.
Smart Contracts
We are now confident we can build Koinos into a general purpose blockchain that is fast and free for users, and that is capable of running Smart Contracts while ensuring a consistent user experience. Because the blockchain will be so light weight, the cost of acquiring resource rights (through staking of KOIN) will be incredibly low and therefore accessible to more developers than ever.
To make Koinos even more developer-friendly, we’ve decided to support Smart Contracts written in any programming language that can be compiled using WASM (Java, PHP, Python, Go, Rust), which means that Koinos will be accessible to more developers than many other blockchain platforms which don’t have such support.
ODESI
As developer-friendly as Koinos will be, application developers should not be required to write Smart Contracts in order to take advantage of blockchain-powered features. Application developers should be able to focus on empowering their users. ODESI is the middleware that we’re developing which will give developers the components they need to bootstrap their applications and deliver amazing and empowering experiences for their users that will just so happen to take advantage of a general purpose blockchain.
That’s why ODESI is being architected as a suite of microservices, the first of which will be user authentication and encrypted messaging because these can be built while the blockchain is still in development. As more of the blockchain is completed, we will be able to add more blockchain specific microservices to ODESI.
Developer Feedback Wanted
As you can see, this project has become quite ambitious. We still have many decisions to make and much work to do. We are eager to continue getting feedback from developers about what features you’re looking for both from Koinos and ODESI, so if you are interested in influencing the design of these products, please stop on by our discord server , and if you’d like to receive updates on our progress, you can sign up for our e-mail newsletter by going to openorchard.io and following the @OpenOrchard account on Hive.
I don't understand what you try to accomplish here?
Most of the blockchains developed in the past were rushed into existence. As with anything that is rushed, you tend to have foresight after the fact (all of the stuff you forgot about). You realize that you were missing features that you didn't know you needed. This isnt just a blockchain issue, its a fact of life for engineers in general.
We now know that a blockchain is just one part of a decentralized network and in order to further a decentralized network, you'll need tools. It seems like ODESI can be described as a set of tools. @andarchy said it best in this case. The first set of prebuilt tools that ODESI will create is "authentication" and "encrypted messaging".
This means that when ODESI goes live, the first thing you'll be able to do is log in and chat. And anyone who wants to leverage ODESI will be able to use those same tools to create an app that you can log into and chat. Expect it will be able to seamlessly connect to a blockchain.
I could imagine creating an app where its a simple chat program that uses ODESI "auth" to allow users to log in, and "encrypmsg" to create a secure method of chating and have all the text posted to a blockchain and the only way to access it is to have a superuser key. You know its secure and you know that the contents will be forever secured no matter if you lose your device or not. Well lets mutate this a few time and let the dices roll to see where we can go from there.
Developers gonna develop.
Thank you for the clarification but the market is saturated with new blockchains. Maybe I am wrong but I don't see the potential and value on this solution.
There are a lot of blockchains but that doesnt quite mattter. A blockchain is only as good as the environment it runs in. Ethereum is a good example. The blockchain that ETH uses is nothing special by todays standards. But the whole of the ethereum network is quite massive.
There were many smartphones before the iPhone. People didn't see the need for the iPhone either when it was first released.
I don't judge your vision, it is just I don't see the value in the current stage. I wish you big success in your company to bring this baby to something the market will use.
Thanks, appreciate the positive wish.
I mean it would be good for hive if hive could be a layer ontop
It is something to follow and see the evolution of this project. Hive is young and will improve with new tools and projects that will pop in the ecosystem.
Couldn't have put it better myself
A great way to describe it ( a foresighted project ). It is just a side chain I would say for the main blockchain. But still building another blockchain to store all my encrypted messages sounds ridiculous. It's permanent and open for all kind of cyber attacks.. You don't really need blockchain just to store your chat. Or perhaps you guys can leave an option to permanently remove a particular data from blockchain?
All great.... wish you all the best .... although onboarding users and developers look like the hardest part of a project then just have a state of the art tech ...
That's where ODESI comes in. Thanks to ODESI users will be able to sign into Koinos-powered applications in seconds using a standard, customizable, username/password just like they would on any normal application. :)
what about creating new users for the hive?
ODESI accounts can be linked to any blockchain account. If some Hive developer wants to add Hive support to ODESI, they will be able to submit a PR for that. But ultimately the process through which Hive accounts are created, and the cost of creating them, is up to the Hive developers. ODESI will just be a second layer that makes it easier for users to interface with their blockchains. Obviously our focus will be on making it compatible with Koinos, but since it will be open source, any developer will be able to add support for any blockchain.
Seems that your blockchain engineers know a lot about what they are doing. I hope I can integrate it into my projects as it launches.
Will it launch in 2020?
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