This proposal is expected to appear on Snapshot for voting on 2021-08-02T12:00:00Z. Make sure to stake your vBNT for voting before this date and time to participate in the DAO decision.
Proposal: Whitelist OriginTrail (TRAC) + 100k Co-Invest
TL;DR
- Proposal to whitelist TRAC.
- Proposed co-investment is 100,000 BNT.
- There are no apparent security concerns that would prohibit whitelist status.
- There is no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the OriginTrail project. The team has been together since 2011 and the TRAC token has existed since 2018.
- The benefit to Bancor is clear and a significant amount of volume could move to Bancor quickly.
TRAC token address: 0xaa7a9ca87d3694b5755f213b5d04094b8d0f0a6f
Project Website: https://origintrail.io/
Token Security
TRAC does not have an elastic supply, or rebase mechanism. The TRAC contract does not have permissions that grant administrators unrestricted mint/burn capabilities. The TRAC token supply is non-inflationary and fixed at 500,000,000, of which 358,600,000 are in current circulation. The contracts and addresses with the highest concentration of TRAC tokens include two team development fund wallets, a staking contract, the xDai Omnibridge contract, and exchange wallets for Kucoin, Bittrex, and IDEX. The token distribution can be seen at the bottom of the Q1 2020 Quarterly Report.
Project
OriginTrail is a neutral protocol enabling trusted data exchange between companies, organizations, and blockchains. End-to-end information is shared and secured in a fully decentralized knowledge graph network, monitored with AI and oracles. This knowledge graph network utilizes decentralized nodes and an off-chain technology stack to interface with legacy enterprise systems as well as other blockchains. Connecting and searching vast amounts of linked data between organizations (such as in supply chains) in a verified way has not previously been possible.
The project’s decentralized network has been on mainnet since December 2018. To improve interoperability, the network interacts with a number of blockchains including Ethereum, xDai, Hyperledger Fabric, and [soon] Polkadot. Adoption is catalyzed by building on globally recognized standards for sharing information and data, such as GS1 EPCIS/CBV and W3C.
OriginTrail is working with several top-tier organizations. Together with GS1 (the global barcode registration body), they are developing the next generation EPCIS/CBV 2.0 supply chain standard. The British Standards Institute (BSI) is currently using the OriginTrail protocol to verify audits for 18,000 factories servicing retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot, Walt Disney, and Levi’s. Parity (Polkadot developers) joined the OriginTrail Trace Alliance in late 2020, and the OriginTrail developers were one of just six project talks selected to speak on the main stage at the recent Polkadot Decoded conference.
Tokenomics
OriginTrail’s native token, TRAC (ERC-20), is the glue between all entities and is used as both a stake (to keep data holders/creators honest and data immutable) and a payment (to compensate data holders for their time and resources). Sensitive data can be set to expire and is protected using zero-knowledge methods in a privacy-by-design approach.
TRAC is integral to utilizing the protocol and is used in at least 6 different ways:
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Engaging in the OriginTrail ecosystem. Data creators and data holders must have TRAC staked in their nodes to take part in the network. More TRAC staked in nodes means more data jobs can be published or held.
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Publishing data to the network. Data creators publish data jobs on the network using TRAC to compensate 3+ data holding nodes for their time and resources. The exact value of TRAC for each data job is dependent on market forces, but parameters like job length and data size affect it. This TRAC is locked in a smart contract until the job’s completion.
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Collateralization by Data Holders. To prevent data tampering and as a promise to hold data for a set period of time, TRAC from a data holder’s stake is also locked via smart contract for the length of the data job. Failure to provide data on-demand leads to loss of this staked TRAC to the data creator. Upon completion of the terms of the job, the data holder earns back their original stake AND the TRAC staked by the data creator.
Additional TRAC Utility is Catalyzed via TRAC Usage on the StarFleet Chain
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sTRAC Usage as StarFleet Chain Native Token. StarFleet Chain (SFC) is an upcoming connected blockchain developed by the team to enable cheaper data job transactions on the network. It launches in Q3 2021 and will be a Polkadot parachain. The native token is sTRAC, which is like a “wrapped” form of TRAC for use on Polkadot. No new TRAC tokens are ever created, keeping the supply constant (i.e. the total number of sTRAC + TRAC = 500 million). A bridge will exist to allow easy movement between chains.
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Staking sTRAC. Individuals can stake their TRAC on the StarFleet Chain network (in the form of sTRAC) to individual node runners and businesses. Stakers are then able to get a share in the profits of the data job. This locks TRAC into the network for months and years, constricting supply. More info on staking available at staking.origintrail.io.
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Knowledge Incentivization. The final use-case for TRAC is through a data ecosystem that allows data creators to sell their data on the open market. For example, the recently announced EU-sponsored Food Safety Market aims to develop an industrial data platform for food certification in Europe by 2023. There are also Data Markets being built for both pharmaceuticals and satellite imagery; this has the potential to unlock valuable proprietary siloed data previously thought unsellable.
A tremendous explainer on the protocol, tokenomics, and usecases can be found at OriginTrailExplained.info.
Community and Communication
OriginTrail is active on Medium (blog), Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, and Discord. OriginTrail also has 101 and 102 protocol development courses in the Ivan on Tech Academy, created in collaboration with community member Amos Thomas. Activity on GitHub is frequent, with new updates appearing almost daily. The founders and advisors are presented on the About Us tab on the OriginTrail website. Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and Metcalfe’s Law, recently signed on as an advisor. Co-founder Ziga Drev, is the project’s main spokesperson and is quite active on Twitter, as is CTO Branimir Rakic. Since the team is global, the OriginTrail website includes mailing addresses in Slovenia, Serbia, and Hong Kong. There are also multiple contact e-mail addresses:
- Mailing Address, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Dunajska 156, 1000 Ljubljana
- Mailing Address, Belgrade, Serbia, Kosovska 10, 11000 Belgrade
- Mailing Address, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Winning Centre, 46–48 Wyndham St, Central
- General Inquiries, [email protected]
- Business Development, [email protected]
- Public Relations, [email protected]
Available Audits
OriginTrail has been audited for their core ERC-20 protocol contract as well as the Starfleet boarding contract (for connections to Polkadot/Substrate networks):
Market and Trading Data
- OriginTrail’s price at the time of writing is $0.22
- All-time high: $0.90 (March 17th, 2021)
- All-time low: $0.00385 (March 13th, 2020)
- Price 90 days ago: $0.58
- 358,600,000 tokens in circulation
- 500,000,000 maximum supply.
- The current market capitalization is $79,786,863
- The TRAC token is available on Uniswap, KuCoin, and Bitforex
- The 24-hour spot volumes range from $28K (Bitforex) to $121K (KuCoin).
Benefits for Bancor:
Whitelisting TRAC would bring the deepest TRAC liquidity pool to Bancor. Uniswap is currently the largest LP for TRAC at a value of ~$681K. A trade of 10 ETH causes price slippage of ~5% on the current TRAC/ETH Uniswap pool. Because OriginTrail works with large multinational corporations, it is feasible to assume TRAC may have a higher frequency of large trades.
Exchanges have been a huge pain point for the TRAC community and we would welcome any additional sources of liquidity. Even when considering centralized exchanges, KuCoin is the most common exchange for TRAC, which many users do not like due to some trust issues with a previous hack. The community would celebrate a highly respected exchange like Bancor and be a proud partner; a significant amount of exchange volume could move to Bancor overnight. Fireblocks, a token provider for larger investors and business entities, has bought TRAC off open markets before and would probably appreciate another liquidity source as well.
TRAC trading volume should also substantially increase in Q3/Q4 2021. The highly anticipated Starfleet Chain will go live as a parachain (via Polkadot) which should be a catalyst for a large increase in network activity. If Bancor were to whitelist TRAC now, they would likely become the go-to exchange for trading and generate substantial fees for those in the LP.
