Introduction
“Privacy is Our Right”, that was the motto of Origo network’s marketing campaign when they first started back in Apr’18. Origo network is an up-coming platform that preserves privacy for decentralized applications. They are planning to introduce decentralise smart contract with privacy, and also offer zero knowledge proof for privacy preserving application platform. In simple terms, if you want to send tokens to your friend, he cannot find out how much you still have in your wallet but he will know you send it.
What are they trying to solve :
- Blockchains’ unprecedented transparency has made all transaction details (like Bitcoin) and smart contract details (like Ethereum) totally public and vulnerable to the whole network, resulting in potential data/info and financial losses.
- Current Smart contracts’ lack of privacy protection limits broader blockchain usage by many real-world companies and individuals, because they have concerns about sensitive data and financial information on contracts.
- Despite projects like Monero and ZCash have been working on privacy for transactions, very few have improved privacy for smart contracts.
Imagine if you pay your workers’ wages on the ethereum blockchain, your employees can query your ethereum address and will know who else you paid with that account, how much is in your account, and etc.
Think about how you use your conventional bank account currently, you login to your bank to transfer money to your friend, family or whomever you choose, they will receive the money but they won’t know how much is left in your account, who else you transfer the money to and etc. Now instead of the bank, you are now using a decentralise privacy platform which can do the same function.
Features of origo network :
- off chain computation, secure offline computation via trusted hardware ensure that the input and result is kept in private. Using penalty policy to ensure executors runs the smart contract securely and within the timeframe.
- scalable architecture – enhanced consensus protocol, sharding, stateless client
- improvement from privacy coins like monero, zcash which only transfer value through confidential transactions
- preserve input / output data for confidential transaction in smart contracts
Compared with ethereum smart contract, which is completely public, everything can be seen by the public, input / output and contract parameters.
Hype :
Telegram group with almost 50K users due to the recent airdrop, which requires users to join TG group and retweets. Their target is to give airdrops to the first 100K users.
No github yet.
Use Case
The application for their application is huge and permeates all industry.
Finance – private exchange, credit scoring, online lending, insurance, private banking
Enterprise – salary / bonus payment, supply chain contracts, corporate compliance
Health care – medical records, diagnostics data
Voting, auction, gambling
Privacy Preserving Application Platform (PPAP – not the Japanese song pen pineapple apple pen) : is a platform where contract/DAPP developers can write smart contracts/DAPP in the original way and Origo compiles and executes smart contracts privately.
Privacy smart contract – Say you want to participate in an ICO, you will need to send your tokens to the smart contract. On the ethereum network, anyone can query the smart contract address and find all the address that transacted on it. Your account is essentially naked for everyone to see. With privacy smart contract, user input, transaction amount and contract execution details are kept private but both sender and recipient could still verify that the contract is correctly executed.
Baron Gong (Member of the Origo Team) tweeted “Origo is the world’s first fully GDPR compliant platform.”
https://twitter.com/GongBaron/status/1001290553634377728
- GongBaron
What this essentially means is that Origo network offers the users to securely access, review, and if they so choose, delete their information. The deletion of your data on the Origo platform can be witnessed and reach consensus by everyone on the blockchain. It also offers a way to interact with others without storing and revealing your personal data. It does this generating a cryptographic proof for a computation of your data and you can use that proof to demonstrate in any application or contract of who you are, what you have.
3 major phase in privacy smart contract
Technology :
Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to be apply using trusted setup for private transaction verification. A zero-knowledge proof is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that she knows a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that she knows the value x. In lay man’s term, I can proof to you that I transfer money to your account, but you won’t know how much balance is in my account.
Consensus protocol – hybrid consensus with identity chain using PoW or PoS. Identity chain has list of nodes which are use for transaction chain validators. The transaction chain records all transaction activities using pBFT consensus.
Sharding – increase throughput by dividing the processing of all transactions. Origo will initially explore computation sharding to split the nodes into multiple groups to process a subset of the transaction. This means the network is linearly scalable with the increase nodes. It will also research into the usage of state sharding to increase performance in the future.
Origo virtual machine – based on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) but enhanced to support ZKP prove. Minimal effort is required to port Ethereum smart contract to Origo. The runtime environment is based webassembly (WASM) which is an open standard that is portable, size and load time efficient. It could be compiled from a larger variety of programming language like c++, python or java.
Tokenomics
origo token use as a method or “gas fee” to run smart contracts
Tokens are use for voting, eg voting for the charges of transaction fee
Token required as security deposit for the participants. Executor will loose their deposit if they fail to completely execute the contract
Serve as reward for good participants or good decision making responsibility
NO information on softcap, hardcap or circulation quantity yet.
Team
comprises computer scientist, mathematician and cryptographic expert with great experience in cryptography and works previously in top internet company like Google/Amazon/Pinterest.
The ICO has excellent advisors: Vincent Zhou from FBG Capital and Howard Wu, a cryptographic expert that has contributed to cryptographic libraries used in Ethereum and Zcash shall provide the experience needed in the running and setup of the privacy based ICO platform.
Timeline :
Q3 2019 for mainnet, no MVP yet.
Backers
notable backers like Polychain, FBG, Kenetic, 1kx, ZhenFund.
NEO Global Capital (NGC) invested in @OrigoNetwork! NGC is a strategic financial investment platform initiated by key members of the NEO community and international capital market veteran.Polychain Capital is the leading global institutional investor. Polychain’s backers include top VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and leads investment in projects.
70% of The Top 10 Funds Backed Origo Network – WorldNews
https://article.wn.com/view/2018/06/25/70_of_The_Top_10_Funds_Backed_Origo_Network/
Competition :
Zcash, Zcoin, Monero, Dash, Verge are among the bigger marketcap privacy related coins but they only provide privacy in the coins transfer and has no smart contract function. The combine market cap of these 5 privacy coins is around 5 billion as of July18
Another viable competitor is the Enigma coin (~USD100K marketcap) , which also offers privacy based smart contract. The testnet is only recently launched and mainnet is coming up in 2019.
Conclusion :
This is a promising project which fulfills the needs of the current crypto scene, which is to provide decentralisation while maintaining privacy. The team has extensive work experience and the project is backed by serious backers. We will keep an eye on the progress of the project when it launches it’s github and MVP.
2nd round of their ICO whitelist is still on going from 4th July- 21th July 2018
read the FAQ here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tY0x__bWqIUQqVbLTxNzDvQ69_Qi-835uKOi1Kd9ndg/edit
Website : https://origo.network/
Blog : https://medium.com/@origonetwork/
Twitter : https://twitter.com/OrigoNetwork
Telegram : https://t.me/origoofficialgroup
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