ArcBlock outlines plans for 2020 and beyond

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What's Next for 2020 Release

In 2019, ArcBlock year could be summed up in two words; it is "hard work."

After a lot of ups and downs over the past 12 months, we realized that startups in the blockchain industry are very different from traditional internet startups as we a new startup focused on building an entirely new internet where the old rules no longer apply. In late 2019, CEO Robert Mao wrote an article, "Five Key Words and Moments", and those words can be used to describe 2019 - "challenge, persist, think, grow, community."

Looking back to when ArcBlock was founded, we released a revised 2019 project roadmap. Today, on the last day of 2019, we realize that we had a very aggressive plan. While we are sorry that we didn't hit all the points on our roadmap, we are grateful that we have been able to adjustments decisively. In some cases, we focused on things that were impractical or out of focus. In 2020, ArcBlock will not follow the so-called tradition of blockchain projects to spend time revising the "roadmap," but instead share our principles and key initiatives with you.

Focus, Focus, and Refocus

In 2020, we will be focusing a lot of our resources on building and refining our existing products:

One of our important strategies moving forward is not to develop services and products that are not directly related to these and to ensure that we invest all our energy in improving, upgrading, and servicing existing products.

We plan to further develop our capabilities around decentralized identity giving ArcBlock a unique and strategic advantage that is unparalleled in the industry. As many of you know already, we released the world's first decentralized identity DID wallet in 2019. In early 2020, we will be the first to deliver on the promise of decentralized identity and blockchain by delivering the industry's first Software as a Service solution. Through the SaaS service, we can enable ordinary users, developers, and enterprise customers to use our DID and blockchain technologies very little code.

Developers, Partners, and Community

In 2020, we will go all out to support ArcBlock developers, partners, and the community. In 2020, we will give developers and partners additional capabilities beyond our product 1.0 by releasing enterprise-grade asset chain that includes bi-directional pegged token swap capabilities between ArcBlock and Ethereum.

We are also expanding our efforts around education, awareness, and knowledge sharing by proactively working with several prestigious publishers and training institutions to publish and release ArcBlock and blockchain-related training materials, online/offline courses, curated content and more. We have also created a new education consortium of universities, training partners and others to build and deliver a education business that is focused on empowering the global blockchain ecosystem.

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Protocols, specifications, and standards

Since the birth of ArcBlock, we have worked tirelessly to adhere to standards and industry specifications. For example, ArcBlock's Open Chain Access Protocol (OCAP) was implemented using GraphQL and gRPC. Our focus wasn't to reinvent the wheel but expand and use existing standards to improve the user experiences and capabilities. In 2019, we also joined multiple international standards organizations and associations to help ensure that our products were built on the leading standards and that we were able to contribute to those standards wherever possible. For example, we actively participated in the development of the W3C's DID protocol by adding our DID:ABT protocol specifications.

Over the next year, we will be investing time and effort to improve and publish the following protocols and specifications:

  • Open Wallet Protocol: This is a decentralized wallet protocol based on the DID:ABT method. In 2020, we will improve and open this agreement and provide development tools so that any third-party services and developers can interact with ABT Wallet independently and conveniently;
  • ABBA (ArcBlock Basic Asset) Protocol: This is an open digital asset protocol based on DID:ABT technology. Through this protocol, developers can set a variety of standardized business logic on the digital assets of the blockchain, such as certificates, licenses, attestations, etc;
  • Open Economic Protocol: This is a new protocol used to replace the traditional blockchain economic model. Its core idea is not to solidify the economic model and incentive model in the blockchain in code, but to use it as a protocol to allow the upper layer applications to participate. In 2019, we did a lot of research and demonstration on the economic models and incentive mechanisms of blockchain and decentralized applications, and also learned the lessons that the entire industry has taken in many ways in this regard. Our conclusion is to adopt the simple design implementation and replace the economic model with a protocol, which we will launch in 2020.