Hello Hivers, I’m Andrarchy, the CEO of OpenOrchardTM. A few months back I began collaborating with @bflanagin on a project he named OpenSeed. We agreed that OpenSeed should be a platform for Steem app developers that offers turnkey, cross platform features like a shared user database and encrypted messaging to Steem applications.
We created a Steem proposal, in which we promised to return all funds received back to the community, and were delighted to receive the Steem community’s support. We were also lucky to have @midlet get involved in the project and contribute value in the form of community leadership and creative input for which we rewarded him with 1000 SBD.
A lot has changed since then, including the Hive fork and the formation of a new company named OpenOrchard. Due to the size and scope of these changes, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should return all of the funds we have received from the DHF, back to the DHF.
Adding Value to Hivers
I still think that OpenOrchard is going to deliver massive value to the Hive community of end-users and developers, but the addition of four amazing blockchain developers to our effort has fundamentally changed things in ways that still have not been fully worked out.
Changing Goals
One thing that has become clear is that we need to redesign OpenSeed. The original plan was to deliver a shared user database (user authentication) and encrypted messaging system that Steem apps could leverage to add the features to their applications that ordinary users have come to expect from their applications.
It was going to be a second layer solution designed to interface with an existing blockchain that was fast, fee-less, and reliable. Our goal was to build something fast that worked. And we basically got there. OpenSeed was working and we had developers testing it.
But few could have imagined the series of events that would follow and undermine this approach. Steem is no longer reliable or trustworthy, and we now have the very team that was responsible for making Steem what it was as founding members of OpenOrchard.
Over the past couple of months that team has developed some amazing ideas that we look forward to sharing with you in the near future. The second layer we now envision ticks all the same boxes we highlighted for OpenSeed. But we are now more confident than ever that the blockchain we will be delivering to the public deserves a more deliberate and scalable approach. We now believe that it is more important to build it right than it is to build it fast.
Microservices: Building it Right
Building it right means refactoring OpenSeed into a suite of microservices each of which can be leveraged and scaled independently by developers. There is no reason that a developer who just wants to leverage the user authentication system should be bottlenecked by the encrypted messaging system or any other microservice.
These microservices will be available to the developers of any application, whether blockchain-powered or not, whether Hive or Steem, EOS or Ethereum. In that sense we are living up to our promise of blockchain agnosticism.
Returning the Funds
These are a lot of changes and the Hive community should not bear the costs of the uncertainty and risk associated with implementing them. That’s why we’re returning the remaining funds to the DHF. That’s also why we’re renaming our second layer solution from OpenSeed to ODESITM which stands for Open Database of Encrypted Social Information and is a more accurate reflection of what the product has become. Fortunately, because much of the work was already done for OpenSeed, it should not take long to reorganize those features into a microservice architecture.
ODESITM
As the name implies, ODESITM (pronounced "odyssey") will still be open source which means that any developer who would like to add support for a given decentralized (or centralized) solution will be free to do so by submitting a pull request.
The Blockchain
At the same time we would not be working on our own blockchain solution if we did not believe that we could deliver something to the market that adds tremendous value. Something that is more developer and user friendly. Something more scalable and lower cost. Something that is more flexible because it is more upgradeable. And something that is more secure, because it is more decentralized.
KoinosTM
These are important features that we want to make as accessible to developers as possible which is why the ODESI microservices will be tightly coupled with KoinosTM. This will enable developers to integrate Koinos into their application without having to learn about, or even know about, the blockchain itself.
We do not believe that any blockchain is THE solution to every problem. We view blockchains as precision tools that when properly integrated into other software solutions can unlock new value. By building Koinos with this philosophy, we believe we can dramatically improve upon existing blockchain platforms and provide to developers a powerful new tool in their efforts to deliver value to their users.
Stay Tuned
We’ve made a lot of progress in a relatively short period. I look forward to sharing more information about that progress and how it could positively impact the Hive community, so be sure to follow this account, the @openorchard account, and if you prefer other social media channels, you’ll find links to those below.