Community Update — July 2018

Technical Update

Plasma Research
On the research front, we’ve been working to optimize our smart contracts, improve overall user experience, and make Plasma more accessible.

We recently published a draft contract for Simple Fast Withdrawals, a mechanism that allows users to pay a small fee to withdraw their funds more quickly. We also published a contract for Merkle Mountain Range Storage. This contract utilizes a cool storage method that allows us to repeatedly reuse storage space and save gas. The optimization cuts the cost to publish Plasma blocks by about 50%. It also ensures that we’re prepared in the event that Ethereum implements storage rent.

Some community members may have noticed that plasma-mvp has been going through changes. We’ve spent some time cleaning up the repository and preparing to convert it into a “hackathon-ready” Plasma MVP implementation. Basically, this means that `plasma-mvp` will be used as a learning tool to make Plasma more accessible. Our priority here will be making the root chain contracts as readable as possible (instead of optimizing gas costs). We think this will be extremely important in continuing to convert developers to the “dark side” (aka Plasma research) and improve overall Plasma understanding. This is a fundamentally community-driven effort, so we would love your feedback here!

Meanwhile, we’re moving the production Plasma root chain contracts to a new repository, plasma-contracts. The focus of that repository will be optimization and security in preparation for real-world deployment. This separation of concerns will allow us to iterate more quickly on our smart contracts. Expect a majority of updates in the near future to happen in this repository. Although the “plasma-contracts” repository will primarily track our production priorities, we’ll also be building upon that work for research contracts. This includes our new research implementation of More Viable Plasma. The MoreVP contracts will be published after some minor cleanup. We’ve been working on this implementation for a while and we’re very excited to get public review.

Research into Plasma Cash is still ongoing but has been slowed as we’ve focused more of our efforts on shipping our initial iterations of the exchange. At this point in time, we think Plasma MVP is more suited for our immediate needs. Plasma Cash works particularly well for non-fungible assets, but we don’t (currently) believe it to be the correct solution for general exchange. Because this may change in the future, we’re being very careful to ensure that our contracts are upgradeable.

As always, please feel free to ask questions about anything research or technical. The easiest way to get in touch on research/tech questions is to tag us on Reddit (/u/kelvinfichter) or open an issue in the relevant repository on Github. We’ll try to answer as quickly as possible.

eWallet SDK 1.0.0-pre0 Version Release
As covered in the most recent update posted to Reddit, we have released the 1.0.0-pre0 version of the free, open source eWallet SDK.

This release is ready for production so long as no unexpected bugs emerge during testing. We plan to continue fixing and improving components, but not experience breaking changes going forward. The 1.0.0-pre0 will be a stable version capable of minting and transacting tokens within a closed ledger.

1.0.0-pre0 establishes the framework to which we will now begin adding features and making continuous improvements. We’re now able to move forward on several fronts:

• Enterprise wallet providers will now be able to test a stable version of the wallet in preparation for the addition of blockchain connectivity — both businesses that want to have eWallet services built out for them and businesses that want to integrate their existing eWallet with the blockchain.
• OmiseGO will be able to get concrete feedback from partners and potential implementers as we support them in customizing the SDK to their own needs, which will allow us to better prioritize improvements and additions going forward
• Independent developers can familiarize themselves with the stable SDK and start exploring ways to build out working products.

As we focus on future development, our team’s top priority is to create tools that will be useful and enforce security in the long run, to make decentralized networks and open source platforms that are truly ready to be deployed into the real world. Ultimately, the SDK will allow anyone — enterprise, startup, small business, or sovereign user — who needs online asset exchange to connect seamlessly to the OMG Network.

If you’d like to know more:

• Check out the demos of the eWallet admin panel and front end.
• For more technical details and to follow along on the progress, visit our Github.
• Watch Reddit for weekly mini-updates on SDK progress

Business Development Update

In addition to working closely with those looking to build on OMG, positioning ourselves within the wider world by building relationships both within the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond is critical to our success. We look to our partners and allies for mindshare, feedback, collaboration and inspiration. Some highlights from recent months include:

OmiseGO and Status Partnership
We recently announced our partnership with Status, which we couldn’t be more excited about. Status combines a messenger, wallet and browser that allows smartphone users to run decentralized applications, also known as dApps, which puts the power of the entire Ethereum network right in the hands of its users. The partnership will consist of Status leveraging the OMG Decentralized Exchange (DEX) by integrating the OMG Software Development Kit (SDK) into their native wallet, allowing us to test out early implementations of the SDK and DEX on a powerful decentralized platform. Read more about the collaboration here.

Support for Stanford’s Center for Blockchain Research (CBR)
OmiseGO, along with the Ethereum Foundation, the Interchain Foundation, DFINITY, Protocol Labs, and Polychain Capital, will be supporting the Center for Blockchain Research (CBR) in a 5-year program researching and furthering the field of cryptocurrency. Led by Dan Boneh and David Mazières, both professors of computer science at Stanford, the center will connect university students, faculty, and industry leaders to build best practices, create on-campus courses, and lead workshops and conferences to explore a technology that will change the way people and organizations build relationships and transact with each other over the internet.

MoU with Shinhan Card
This agreement with Shinhan Card confirmed mutual interest and closer collaboration between the parties to further advance Shinhan Card’s digital offerings across its portfolio of payment services and mobile application in today’s growing mobile payments market. The MoU outlines several areas of collaboration including leveraging Omise’s broad portfolio of payment technology and solutions; exploring potential joint projects and new business models; and identifying cross-border use cases and key application opportunities based on the OMG technology.

Neutrino Japan and Singapore Launch
In June we officially opened the doors to Neutrino in Tokyo and Singapore. The coworking and community space will serve as a blockchain focused hub for various companies to collaborate and foster relationships in Southeast Asia and around the world. We hosted many community building events in Neutrino offices such as the opening parties for Neutrino sponsors and members in both Japan and Singapore as well as a Plasma research event in Tokyo. In July, we will be hosting a Dapps meetup, a global project showcase, Blockchain for SDGs and OmiseGO workshop. This is only the beginning as we have branches planned in Shanghai, Beijing, and Bangkok in the coming year.