Summary

In September, ArcBlock’s cornerstone team continued to optimize OCAP services. We released new iterations of OCAP Playground, as well as TokenFlow, a data analysis tool. On September 15, ArcBlock’s third internal beta hackathon took place in Beijing. We discovered many possibilities for app development using OCAP and took in some suggestions to improve the service. The hackathons, together with the tech blog series launched in August and tech lecture series launched this month, constitute the three pillars of our technology communication, laying a solid foundation for cultivating the ArcBlock developer community and expanding the global consensus.

In September, ArcBlock’s team, led by founder-CEO Robert Mao, attended important events in IT, blockchain and government in the United States, and made efforts to promote global community consensus-building in the United States. Mao said that in a bear market, blockchain technology can get more attention from mature enterprises and government agencies. ArcBlock is making positive progress in the ideation and implementation of blockchain application scenario in both business and government.

Product

Since June, ArcBlock has released a weekly engineering digest (https://github.com/ArcBlock/weekly-digest), for your reference. There is also a monthly digest. Here is September’s: (https://ocap.arcblock.io/playbooks/ea281ee4-1c79-46f6-ac12-f2fc2092430c)

In the past month, 358 commits were pushed to all code repositories, 193 pull request submissions were committed (190 were merged), 204 issues were resolved, and 101 internal releases were crafted and deployed. The engineering team did a lot of preparation and follow-up work before and after the hackathon in September.

Front end: OCAP Playground continues to develop and improve

Per our server-side data agreement, comprehensive statistical data is compiled in the process of using OCAP Playground, so as to facilitate subsequent product improvement. For example, there are corresponding statistical events for operations such as page opening, query launching, view switching, and Playbook creation. The Analytics JS SDK that is common across projects has been released. @arcblock/analytics-js。

Front end: The OCAP Javascript SDK is constantly updated

To provide a more rapid and convenient OCAP experience for developers, the OCAP Javascript SDK has undergone several improvements. These include improving the Chinese version of the SDK, pagination in query results, increased support of new query types, increased support of new data types, improvements to the handling of SDK errors, and many more. The release history is as follows (this is the SDK used most in the Beijing hackathon):

Front-end: TokenFlow, a data analysis tool, is used for continuous development

OCAP’s architecture allows for cash flow analysis, just like any data analysis tool. TokenFlow, a blockchain data analysis tool, is exiting the closed beta version, and will soon be open to the general public. Below is TokenFlow, representing x229b5c097f9b35009ca1321ad2034d4b3d5070f6’s Ethereum account activity. One can see from this visual the traditional rhythm of a bear market.

Back-end: Authentication support

As the auth solution for the entire platform, OCAP authentication supports:

1.Access to different auth providers, such as email, public, GitHub, Facebook, etc. 2.Multi-step validation (MFA) 3.Validation of Ethernet-compatible addresses

Data: ERC20 metrics

We have now constructed the entire data pipeline from block-listener to Kinesis, Kinesis Data Firehose, S3, Glue, S3, Athena, Zeppelin, and the main product metrics of ERC20 tokens, such as DAU/MAU/new users/token holder growth/token price. See below:

Operations

ArcBlock China's first internal beta hackathon was successfully held in Beijing

ArcBlock’s third hackathon (the first one held in China) took place on September 15. A total of nearly 80 participants were in attendance, from companies such as Tencent, Meituan, Drops, Nokia, Around, and Cheetah Mobile, as well as many other science and technology enterprises, which sent teams of data engineers. This is ArcBlock’s first hackathon with teams of developers. The 6-hour hacker contest produced 11 high-quality applications, all using the OCAP service. Some used OCAP for real-time data query, some as a data crawling source, and some as a layer agent to transform it into an interface for small programs. This event not only generated a lot of imaginative applications, but also enabled us to collect some valuable comments from developers, which is very important to the optimization of our products.

Beijing hackathon details can be found here: https://www.arcblock.io/post/2018/09/15/arcblock-holds-hackathon-event-in-beijing-china-on-september-15/

A review and notes from the hackathon can be found on our blog here: https://www.arcblock.io/ch/post/2018/09/30/hackathon-beijing/

ArcBlock offers a technology training lecture series

Beginning on July 30, to help users understand OCAP’s technical details, ArcBlock’s team of engineers have written technology blogs on a regular basis to pull back the curtain on the development and implementation of OCAP. In response to the developer feedback from our three hackathons, ArcBlock decided to share all internal technology to help more developers learn about blockchain technology and the ArcBlock platform. The technical training video lectures, titled “ArcBlock Technical Learning Series,” began on September 21.

Internal Beta Lecture: "Intro to GraphQL and Absinthe" from September 21

The official announcement:"yes, we will open most of the technology lectures" from September 26

First Official Lecture: “Intro to Ethereum Smart Contract” from September 27

Second Lecture: “Intro to AWS Data Pipeline Services” from September 28

The schedule and registration for subsequent lectures can be found here: https://www.arcblock.io/en/learning/

ArcBlock’s technology training lecture series, together with ArcBlock’s technology blog series can become a powerful tool to share and disseminate information on ArcBlock’s design, technology and products. Here are the blog posts released in September:

September 5 | "OCAP Super Simple Integration Walkthrough (iOS)"

September 10 | "OCAP Super Simple Integration Strategy (Android)"

September 13 | “Understanding OCAP Implementation: Workflow of Exchange Services and Integration into OCAP Services”

ArcBlock made an appearance at Seattle's heavyweight conferences, as global consensus building entered a new phase

The Elixir Conference, held September 4 through 7, and the Seattle Blockchain Conference, held September 10 and 11, were back-to-back US blockchain events for the ArcBlock home team to debut the architecture of OCAP. OCAP Playground and ArcBlocks other new technology products drew broad attention and high praise. This marks the beginning of a new phase of the relationship between ArcBlock’s blockchain technology and global community consensus-building.

September 17 | Details on Elixir Conference and Seattle Blockchain Conference

ArcBlock's appearance at the 2018 Elixir Conference garnered a lot of attention, as ArcBlock was one of the few blockchain companies to show live actionable products the conference.

Robert Mao was invited to attend US government events to speak on blockchain technology

On September 22, founder-CEO Robert Mao was invited to the U.S. government-sponsored hackathon and blockchain technology consultation meeting to introduce ArcBlock’s platform design and application. At this event, Google and Microsoft also introduced blockchain technology application opportunities in the field of government, to an audience full of government technology experts.

ArcBlock became part of the Washington State Technology Industry Association's Founder Cohort program

On September 26, the Washington State Technology Industry Association (WTIA) announced that ArcBlock and other 23 Washington technology start-ups will be part of a one-year peer program covering leadership training, financing, human resources and so on, receiving ongoing counsel from WTIA.

Details: https://www.washingtontechnology.org/24-tech-startups-selected-for-the-wtia-founder-cohort-program/

ArcBlock is in the race to be a CyberMiles Supernode

Our strategic partner, the e-commerce site CyberMiles, is scheduled to go live on October 15, 2018. On September 28, ArcBlock announced its candidacy to be a CyberMiles Supernode. "ArcBlock and CyberMiles have long been partners, and our Supernode means an expansion of the CyberMiles developer ecosystem," said Robert Mao. “We're also giving other Validators (Supernodes) more in return."

September 28 | ArcBlock is in the race to be a CyberMiles Supernode

ArcBlock was invited to attend the sharing session in Chongqing

On the mid-autumn festival on September 24th, Chen Jun, Vice President of Public Relations, was invited to attend the "Sharing Festival with Mount Tiantai," held in Chongqing's Yaling Ii Factory, and gave a speech entitled "Decryption of Blockchain" to the public.

Details: https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404288142680134597&featurecode=newtitle

Media Coverage

September 25 | Hunting Cloud Finance: “Public chain performance is fueled by EOS”

Robert Mao said in an exclusive interview with Hunting Cloud Finance that ArcBlock "does something in terms of performance improvement, but improving TPS is something that should be done in the underlying blockchain, not in the application and platform level."

Link: https://www.lieyuncj.com/p/4780

September 27 | Block Connection: From the Internet to blockchain, a 20-year methodology summary

In an interview with Block Connection, Mr. Mao shared recent developments in ArcBlock, the logic of technology development, and his latest thoughts on the future of distributed business.

Link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uQur-XTgk_KOeCUCV2D4zw

Technical Q&As

In September, Robert Mao, answered the following technical questions in the WeChat group:

Q: Why can ABT reach 100,000 TPS while other chains don't? Does it have anything to do with your algorithm?

Answer: The ABT chain can achieve high performance mainly for these design reasons: First, ABT uses DSL (domain-oriented language) instead of Turing complete VM (virtual machine) design. It is much easier to improve performance than if Turing was complete; Second, ABT adopts the consensus algorithm of Proof of Randomness. The number of nodes needed for each consensus formation is small, so the performance is better and more decentralized than the DPOS of EOS; Third, the ABT design adopts the cloud node architecture, which can be a distributed super-computing node. The performance of ABT is higher than that of any single-machine design node, and the architecture is more advanced; fourth, only resource miners are required to participate in the ABT bookkeeping node, and the overall performance is generally better (the consensus-building performance of blockchain does not depend on the fastest, but the slowest node); fifth, due to the design of cloud nodes, ABT underlying storage can adopt database systems with stronger performance and query ability.

Q: Are all ERC20 tokens AirToken?

A: ERC20 token is not a direct equal to Air. At present, many applications fail to catch up after sending ERC20, because the design of ERC20 is too abstract. It’s only an interface, with no concrete implementation, resulting in "difficult implementation of money issuance.” We'll be able to do it on an ERC20 basis before the main network goes live. In fact, with OCAP, any given application could theoretically be free of any concern about which blockchain comes later.

Insights

On September 6, Robert Mao, who was on a business trip in Europe, came to Ireland after nine years' absence (from 2007 to 2009, he worked in Dublin for Microsoft Europe) and revealed ArcBlock's layout in Europe.

On September 7, Amazon, which has built a thriving business through the Internet, published an article about building a long-term foundation, and Mao shared his thoughts:

On September 12, when the price of Ethereum was low and the belief was shaken, Mao still insisted on being optimistic and supporting Ethereum, and said ArcBlock was willing to cooperate with Eth to create a better application environment.

"Today I think Ethereum is still the most complete public chain in existence, and have always believed that it can improve these fundamental issues. The value of Ethereum is not in speculation, but in its application. So as long as the application can be used, Ethereum has long-term value. This is in line with ArcBlock's interests, and both Ethereum and ArcBlock are important to the future prosperity of the application ecosystem, just solving problems at different levels."

Community

The ArcBlock community tech Q&A took place on September 20

A transcript of the interview is available at： https://www.arcblock.io/ch/post/2018/09/20/techqa0919/

Data

Social networking platforms

Telegram followers: 42,105（-7.1%）

Facebook followers: 9,970（-0.96%）

Twitter followers 40,415（+0.32%）

Reddit followers: 2,215（+1.1%）

Linkedin followers: 1,057（+1.9%）

WeChat Account followers: 8,026（+0.6%）

Weibo followers: 2,702（+4.1%）

Cash users

Token holder: 17,646 （+0.2%）

*(statistics as of October 15, 2018)