Blockchain Innovation Foundation (BIF) is happy to report progress on the Factom protocol development.
Grants
During the second round of grant applications we entered 4 projects for consideration and were awarded grants for 3 projects: Core Protocol Development, an Alfresco Integration module and Decentralized Identities specification.
Core Protocol Development
We received a grant to recruit two developers to learn and partake in the core development for the Factom protocol. Having multiple parties working on the protocol is an important step in the decentralization of the protocol.
We have now one developer onboard and are in talks with a second developer. We are also talking to Factom Inc., to arrange training and onboarding the new developers.
Alfresco Integration module
We have a good relationship with Alfresco who are eager to promote blockchain as a great added value for their Records Management and Compliance functions. As BIF, we’ve tasked Sphereon with the development of an Open Source module that can be added to both their Community- and Enterprise versions and will provide standard integration with Factom for their customers.
Development has started and will continue during January and February.
Decentralized Identities specification
This grant will bring Decentralized Identifiers, an open standard for digital identities, to the Factom ecosystem. The implementation will consist of:
- A driver for the DID Universal Resolver;
- An open-source API, together with a web UI, for creating DID Documents on the Factom blockchain.
We believe this project is very importance for the Factom community. Bringing DIDs to Factom will unlock a whole suite of new use cases for the protocol, while at the same time strengthening its core value proposition: DIDs will be central for a host of applications in the banking, insurance, aviation and pharmaceutical industries, to name a few.
Currently, the DID specs are being implemented by several blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Sovrin, Ontology), as well as companies like Microsoft are involved in DIDs.
The DID method spec will be provisionally listed in W3C-CCC DID Method registry, providing great exposure to Factom for anyone looking for an on-chain DID implementation
The development projects of DIDs for Factom has started and will continue during January and February. We expect the first public updates to be published by the end of January, early February.
Promotions
In our last report we announced the launch of our website blockchain-innovation.org. Besides basic information on what we do, who we are, about Blockchain and Factom in specific, we also have a section on Advisors and Speakers with industry experts we are associated with and that are available for presentations, workshops, masterclasses, etc.
This section has created interest and traffic and resulted to several invitation to talk about blockchain in general and Factom specifically.
Austin
It already seems a long time ago, but at the end of October all of BIF travelled to Austin and participated in the first Factom ANO meeting. Kudo’s for the organizers and all participants to come together and share some much valuable insights and ideas.
In the days after that we participated and talked at the Texas Bitcoin conference about the projects we implemented and some of the new technologies coming to the Factom protocol.
Singapore
We were invited to participate with a technical trade mission to Singapore in November. Sebastian had a full week of meetings with local authorities and organizations to explain the benefits of Blockchain and Factom. The highlight was winning the pitch competition for Interpol on Chain of custody for digital evidence using the Factom Blockchain.
Microsoft Switzerland
Niels was invited to speak at the Microsoft offices in Bern, Switzerland, on the Factom protocol and our integrations with MS Azure. With about 120 attendees we educated 119 of them about Factom’s unique characteristics.
Besides these obvious highlights we did a dozen other talks during local events and meetups.
Financial status
In November we saw a spectacular rise of the FCT exchange rate. Although the exchange rates slumped since the high on December 6th, it is still double the rate of the months before.
We have planned and budgeted for the coming months and can guarantee to keep the operations and support for the Authority Nodes running at a high level of performance. Any excess funds will be used for promotion and additional development.
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