2020 Q1 & Q2 Update

[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

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ORIGINAL PLEDGES START
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Other

DBGrow will maintain 50% efficiency through the first year.

Through Q2, DBGrow shall liquidate only the FCT needed to cover tax liabilities.

DBGrow will submit support staff entries to the Factom Mainnet every 3 hours.

For managing two nodes at 50% efficiency

• At a FCT price of $15.29 we will scale down operations.
• At a FCT price of $8.64 we will scale down to only staff in server support roles.
• At a FCT price of $5.55 we will scale down to a single server support employee that will respond when server issues appear.

For managing a singly node at 50% efficiency

• At a FCT price of $29.1 we will scale down operations.
• At a FCT price of $15.8 we will scale down to only staff in server support roles.
• At a FCT price of $9.64 we will scale down to a single server support employee that will respond when server issues appear.

DBGrow will be capitalized by a $50,000 fund to maintain the operation of M3 nodes in severe market conditions.

Development

Tentative Development Plan:

• Overhaul DBGrow.com to reflect Factom operations
• Full Support System Application
• Factom Quickstart AMI’s for AWS, Azure, and Digital Ocean
• Point in time snapshots of testnet and mainnet
• Alpha Factom Dapps library
• Alpha Factom ObjectDB library
• POC Factom HPLC/MS interface
• Alpha Factom MongoDB library
• Exploration of Factom in scientific applications
• Continue development of most promising projects toward production ready release

Future interests:

• Factom Wiki
• Scientific Applications of Factom
• Public Key Infrastructures

Marketing

Tentative Marketing Plan:

• Pursue new avenues to promote Factom online and at SIlicon Valley events
• Begin developer relations campaign

Testnet

Maintain 1 node per mainnet node

Give same level of support

Willing to run additional nodes upon request
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ORIGINAL PLEDGES END
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[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

Quarter 4 has been an exciting period for DBGrow, and we are proud of the progress we have made within the Factom Protocol.

The Factom Asset Token Protocol

In Q4, DBGrow released our creation and work on the tokenization and smart contract protocol for factom, called the Factom Asset Token (FAT) Protocol.

Factom Asset Token Github: https://github.com/Factom-Asset-Tokens

Factom Asset Token Specifications: https://github.com/Factom-Asset-Tokens/FAT

Factom Asset Token Discord: https://discord.gg/8ADPfSc

DBGrow, along with Canonical Ledgers, Luciap, and Layertech applied for and received a grant to continue this work, and progress on that grant can be followed here:

https://factomize.com/forums/threads/factom-asset-token-protocol-grant-update-thread.1380/

Progress is going very well; we are ahead of schedule, and are adding new deliverables to complete during this grant round.


Legal & Governance Work

This has been a very busy quarter for governance work for DBGrow.

Working off of the Legal & Governance Review Grant, the Legal Research Working Group released the

• Decentralization Review of the Factom ecosystem.
• Factom Protocol Non-profit research and suggestion
• Factom Protocol licensing research
• Trademark/IP exploration research

DBGrow has also, with the Legal Research Working Group, continued to write and review Factom governance documents.


The Factom Protocol Website

In Q4, DBGrow built out the initial version of the Factom Protocol Website.

https://www.factomprotocol.org/


Open source releases

DBGrow has continued it’s work on open source technologies for the factom protocol, and this quarter released a full version of the Factom ObjectDB (https://github.com/DBGrow/factom-objectdb) with a full specification.


Committees

We have continued work in committee’s within the Factom Protocol,

• Marketing Committee
• ANO Pledge Committee
• Documentation Committee
• Exchange Committee
• Legal Working Group

In quarter 4 we grew to our full team, hiring Sebastian Fletcher-Taylor full time in the final weeks of December as our head of research.


DBGrow’s Q1, 2019

In short, DBGrow’s Q1 2019 will be about continuing to scale our resources and work within the Factom Protocol.

We will continue to build out the Factom Protocol’s governance. Our goals for Q1 2019 are

• A thoroughly updated Governance Document 001
• Continue to work through better processes for ANO, Guide, and Grant rounds
• If the community decides to move forward with it, help lead the creation of a non-profit for the Factom Protocol

We will continue to build out the Factom Protocol Website. Our goals for Q1 2019 are

• Transition the documentation section to a more comprehensive portal for all things developer related. This includes sections for developing on the Factom protocol, core protocol code information, developing with the abundant open source infrastructures being created (FAT, Digital Identities, different language libraries, etc), ANO node information, testnet info, etc.
• Begin adding foreign language support in major community regions
• Integrate a Factom Protocol roadmap
• Integrate additional governance sections like a Bug Bounty system
• Prepare and begin work on an enhanced Ecosystem section, in accordance with what the community decides is the best structure. This will extend past just the factomize forums and into a more comprehensive portal for community and governance processes.
• Add additional Enterprise Solutions
• Continue to decentralize control of the website resources, including working through all legal blockers

We will continue to work within the committees, and we hope to put more focus on building out documentation within the ecosystem through the Documentation Committee.

And Lastly, we will continue to lead development of the Factom Asset Token Protocol.

We will look to hire more resources for building the factom ecosystem, infrastructures, and technologies, as well as products on top of the factom protocol. We are hiring Nic Robinette as a “Governance Builder”. We are also currently recruiting for full time developer positions. All DBGrow efforts continue to be, and are planned moving forward, for building on and with the Factom Protocol.

We have enjoyed deepening our relationships with people throughout this ecosystem over the past quarter, and we look forward to continuing to build our relationships and strengthening our collaborations with members of this ecosystem. We are very excited for the future of the Factom protocol, and the part that DBGrow will play in its future.

Thank you everyone in the Factom Community for an amazing 2018, and hears to what we can accomplish in 2019. Happy new years!

[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

Q1 2019 Report


Website

In Q1 we finished the first overarching development cycle for the protocol website, completing testing, small bug fixing, and minor improvements throughout the website. We subsequently began our second overarching development cycle that began with the hiring of our new web developer, Greg Wolff, who has been great to work with this quarter. The first release for this second development cycle is the new factom ecosystem portal. As we go we continue to build out the developer portal, and we believe that this portal is becoming a fantastic resource for developers within the the factom ecosystem.

Ecosystem Page: https://www.factomprotocol.org/ecosystem
Documentation Portal: https://developers.factomprotocol.org/
Update: https://factomize.com/forums/threads/factomprotocol-org-second-major-version.1674/


FAT Protocol

The Factom Asset Token Protocol made huge strides in Q1 2019. This was the quarter that the FAT protocol was truly brought to life. Please read the below update thread for more information:
Update: https://factomize.com/forums/threads/fat-development-grant-2-update.1880/


Legal

DBGrow continues to play a part in the Legal committee, lending our insights and experience and helping manage key relationships. In Q1 DBGrow has taken a backseat for the majority of the work to Nikola and Shuang, lead by the consistent hard work of MattO. While DBGrow is taking a smaller role in the legwork for the legal committee, we continue to lend our experiance where needed, and absorb all of the information we can as it is absolutely critical to have members of this community be knowledgeable on legal matters surrounding the factom blockchain and ecosystem, and knowledge from the work within the legal committee continues to be essential when discussing the factom protocol with corporate and government entities.
Update: https://factomize.com/forums/threads/legal-research-working-group-update-jan-2019.1454/


Outreach

DBGrow continues to engage important parties about FAT and the Factom protocol. We believe that the impact of these meetings over time will be important, and will help contribute to a growing mindshare for the factom protocol with developers, companies, and government.


Private projects

This section will cover all DBGrow work as well as co-ventures with other entities. In Q1 we have made exciting strides in our developments with clients and partners. We hope for Q2 and Q3 to be able to discuss this work more, and to see more projects go live on mainnet. We are very excited by where we stand right now.


Looking ahead to Q2 2019

Q2 2019 will see a continued revamp and refinement to the factom protocol website, continued promotion such as the Odyssey Hackathon, continued outreach to important entities, continued work with clients/partners, finalization of the core of the FAT protocol, and plans to bring on new developers and delve into exciting new FAT protocol functionality to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible on the Factom Protocol.

[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

Q2 2019 Report


Protocol Website

In Q2 of 2019, DBGrow finished the third major development cycle for the factomprotocol.org. Within this cycle, DBGrow spearheaded the governance formation of the Website Committee, published several additions to the website, as well as completed numerous improvements and tests.

We began our Q2 development cycle with the establishment of the Website Committee. To continue our goal to decentralize important resources in the Factom Protocol. DBGrow drafted the Website Developer Governance document and established various permissions and project management processes to enable the Website Committee and Marketing Committee to collaborate seamlessly.

Currently, we have just finished development of the media-pack page, and are actively developing a press release submission portal, integration of the blog and store, as well as other marketing specific enhancements to the website. These efforts are in coordination with both the Website Committee and the Marketing Committee. Additionally, we have submitted an updated design for the homepage the Website Committee and have begun development on an enhanced technology page. From this point, we look forward to continually expanding the core Factom Protocol website with the support and guidance of the Website and Marketing Committees.


FAT Protocol

The Factom Asset Token Protocol continues to make strides in Q2 2019. FAT is rapidly becoming a beta stage technology ready for live development. We are currently focusing on Smart Contract integration for FAT, with WASM and DAML integration as our highest priority. As the technology continues to improve, our ecosystem grows, and our documentation expands, our confidence in the strength of the FAT protocol only increases and we continue to see interest in the FAT protocol.


FAT Smart Contracts

The FAT smart contract grant has been progressing on schedule, with some major developments. We have been steadily adding to our research paper and base of knowledge over this quarter to help us make major architectural decisions in how to implement smart contracts on FAT. After research, both WASM and DAML offer promising platforms. Our current research is focused on finding a clear direction forward for implementing a contract platform on FAT in either of these languages.

So far we have produced a WASM based Proof of Concept that successfully demonstrates how a WASM contract can be published and against a Factom network:

https://github.com/Factom-Asset-Tokens/wasm-contract-poc

While the POC lacks an authentication or context layer and is simple, it clearly demonstrates the core concepts required to run contracts on Factom, and also provides insight into how we could architect a system on top of FAT.

We are currently working with BIF to explore DAML more deeply and find a common direction as they also have a grant to integrate DAML with Factom.

Our teams will continue to research use cases, candidate technologies, and produce sample code as our grant progresses, and are excited to keep pushing towards FAT smart contracts being a reality.


Legal

In Q1 2019, DBGrow took a smaller involvement in the Legal Research Working Group (LRWG). In Q2, this involvement increased back to full capacity as the nature of the work shifted back to topics more within our domain. We continue to research, build resources, manage important relationships, and work with entities outside of the LRWG and entities outside of the factom ecosystem.


Exchange Committee

Julian Fletcher-Taylor of DBGrow has taken the position of Chair of the Exchange Committee. In this position, he shall primarily serve to detail information about the protocol and provide that information to various parties such as exchanges.

This position is currently a very large time commitment.

https://factomize.com/forums/threads/new-interim-chair-of-the-exchange-committee.2126/


Governance

We continue to stay active the Factom governance, working on governance document revisions, facilitating governance processes, taking part in important discussions, and working on new governance processes.


Documentation Committee

DBGrow continues to play an active role in the development and upkeep of documentation and managing the developers portal run on factomprotocol.org. The body of documentation continues to grow.


Marketing Committee

DBGrow continues to play an active role within the marketing committee. Over the course of Q2, DBGrow completed the following:

• DBgrow launched integrations for Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as additional enhancements at the request of the marketing committee. The media-pack page has been developed, and additional extensions such as the Factom Protocol Block and Store will be integrated on the site as soon as those services launch.
  
  
• Dbgrow has been in continuous attendance of the marketing committee bi-weekly meetings
  
  
• Formed and co-chairs the marketing committee working group 5. This working group is aimed at compiling enterprise solutions from companies and developers in the Factom ecosystem to expand the enterprise solutions section on factomprotocol.org
  
  
• Dbgrow has continuously reviewed and forwarded any leads and newsletter sign-ups generated by factomprotocol.org to the appropriate individuals within the marketing committee, exchange committee, and broader Factom ecosystem.
  
  
• DBGrow has made large strides toward improving the search engine optimization of factomprotocol.org. Initially ranked 90+ in Google search, the website has so far reached a peak rank of 1 on Google and Duck Duck Go for the search term “Factom Protocol”. DBgrow looks forward to continuing our SEO work in hopes of reaching a top 5 rank on Google in Q3 for the search term “Factom”.

Website Committee

DBgrow has taken the role of a core member of the website committee. Within this role, DBGrow is taking responsibility for the following:

• Contribute to further development of factomprotocol.org in accordance with Website Committee and Marketing Committee decisions
  
  
• Establish project management processes for defining goals / requirements, tracking issues and delegating tasks
  
  
• Contribute to committee governance including but not limited to crafting governance documents, defining roles, establishing a development approval protocol and further expanding the website roadmap

Outreach

DBGrow continues to engage important parties about FAT and the Factom protocol. This work includes the following:

• Working to align the factom protocol with a well connected initiative applying blockchain to government and aid processes, hopefully yielding a mutually beneficial collaboration/partnership between the initiative and the factom protocol.
  
  
• Beginning exploration of a FAT and factom based solution with a well known international organization. This is at a very early stage, but there are some qualified people interested in this solution.
  
  
• Attending a variety of blockchain events around the bay area, connecting with developers, companies, and government officials about using the factom protocol. In Q3 we have been invited and plan on speaking at the Santa Cruz Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency meetup. We will continue to develop the presence of the factom protocol within the Bay Area.
  
  
• In April 2019 Julian Fletcher-Taylor and Devon Katz from DBGrow were invited to the Odyssey Hackathon in Gronningen, Netherlands by BIF as an advisory ("Jedi") team to represent the Factom Protocol and FAT with participants. The hackathon was an absolute blast with 100 amazing teams from all over the world. We had the great fortune of working with a team, IDShapers, to implement Factom in their winning project, with several other teams begging to explore Factom and FAT as a solution in their project. It was very exciting to see the enthusiasm for Factom with teams we had a chance to work directly with. As the first time we had worked in that capacity at a hackathon, it was very beneficial toward nailing a factom pitch for developers, and we will definitely take up opportunitities to represent factom at future hackathons.
  
  
• Promotional discussions around the factom protocol with government and corporate entities in the US and abroad. We hope some of these will pan out and be publicly releasable in Q3.

We believe that the impact of these meetings over time will be important, and will help contribute to a growing mindshare for the factom protocol with developers, companies, and government.


Collaboration with members of Layertech LLC

Members from DBGrow are excited to be working with members from Layertech LLC as well as other partners outside of the factom ecosystem on a venture utilizing FAT and other factom based technologies. Any future updates about these projects, as well as other commercial development from members of DBGrow, will likely come from those entities involved.


Looking forward to Q3 2019


In Q3 2019, will see continued revisions and refinement to the factom protocol website, continued promotion and outreach at Bay Area blockchain events and to important entities, maturation of the FAT protocol, investigation and potentially implementation of Smart Contracts on the factom protocol, a new developer hired to work on FAT, and a continued drive to push the boundaries of what is possible on the Factom Protocol.

[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

Q4

While ANO income has dropped to between 4k-6k USD/Month for the majority of this quarter, we have continued to actively participate in committees, uphold our responsibilities, and push forward our open source work on the Factom protocol, while continuing to develop our business utilizing Factom.

Protocol Website

DBgrow has continued to maintain the protocol website, and took the role of a core member of the website committee. Within this role, DBGrow is taking responsibility for the following:

Designing, developing and launching the official roadmap on the Factom Protocol website in Q4. The process has included regular updates and improvements with input from the standing parties in the Factom Protocol ecosystem.

Handling security events such as the potential scam website copying factomprotocol.org that popped up, for which we had to write and serve letters to various parties.

Contribute to further development and of factomprotocol.org in accordance with Website Committee and Marketing Committee decisions. This includes many optimizations based on analytics for the website focused towards improving newsletter sign ups, and funneling users towards documentation, discussion boards, and discord.

Continue to contribute to committee governance including but not limited to crafting governance documents, defining roles for the documentation and website committees.


Committees


Exchange: We continue to chair the exchange committee, and have made progress with exchange listings. We lead the work with VCC to bring FCT listing back to a bittrex orderbook. We are working with a firm now that is leading a large portion of the joint effort of FCT and Pegnet listings.

Website Committee: Described above

Documentation: We continue to maintain the factom protocol documentation portal and make incremental edits. We also continue to help with other ANOs requests for edits to documentation.

Marketing: DBGrow has participated in the regular marketing committee calls and governance of the marketing committee. These include interfacing between the marketing and website committee to make sure the Factom Protocol marketing goals are reflected on the website.

For the rebranding effort, working with the LRWG, DBGrow managed the name, domain, and trademark search for dozens of potential rebrands.

Legal Research Working Group: The majority of work in this committee was directed at Exchange work, and rebrand efforts over Q4.


Authority Nodes

Nodes have continued to be upkept very well. We still have the longest running leader outside of Inc !

We also continued to upkeep Factom and FAT courtesy nodes on both the mainnet and testnet.


FAT

During Q4 DBGrow and Canonical ledgers have been successfully researching and developing Smart Contract support for Factom. Over the past several months the FAT ecosystem has seen a number of experimental additions oriented towards smart contracts including:

New Standards & Edits

- FAT-107 Data Store Standard - Universal data storage format for data hosted on the factom blockchain. Any data or file format can be uploaded to and interpreted from the Factom blockchain via FAT.

- FAT-104 Contract Publication Standard - Describes a specialized type of FAT-107 data store solely used for contracts and it's requirements. Defines the contract's Application Binary Interface (ABI) structure that must me included in FAT-104 datastores and the basics of interacting with contracts.

- FAT-105 Host Interface Standard - Lays out the standard set of functions that are available to contracts from the host environment

- FAT-0 - Add new smart contract related fields and validation. Describes basic implementation and workings of contracts. Links 104 and 105 together in functionality.

Reorganization & Optimization

- The FAT Daemon sync has been optimized by improving the concurrency during syncs

- General reorganization of the daemon code to accommodate implementing smart contracts

FAT-JS

- Test implementation of both FAT-107 and FAT-104 standard

Test daemon/datastructure implementation

- Test implementation of FAT-107 datastructure in Golang

- Implementation of new requirements in FAT-0 datastructures in fatd

Created a website for FAT, which may be merged into Factom Protocol website if desired

• https://www.fatprotocol.org/

Overall the effort is progressing smoothly and we expect a release of experimental smart contract functionality in the coming weeks. Once completed, these additions will allow end users of FAT to create any distributed app or ecosystem of their desire on Factom. We are excited to take the next step in making FAT a more full fledged tokenization ecosystem with the addition of contracts.


Promotion

We continued to promote factom to important entities around the world. While most of these entities, some very high profile, are related to our main project on Factom that we can’t discuss at this time, we can discuss that we have had multiple meetings with a couple different UN agencies, as well as with companies working in aid and economic development. Discussions center on the role Factom can play in aid programs, universal identities, and fighting corruption in the developing world.

We are seeing significant interest from these discussions. It comes down largely to a lack of familiarity, not a lack of interest, in the application of blockchain technology within these governmental and intergovernmental organizations. We are hoping that both our discussions directly with such agencies, as well as other entities that work on these projects, can over time introduce factom into various development projects.

We also had a great time promoting the factom protocol with Sphereon at the Dutch Hall of Knights event in the Netherlands this November!


Projects on Factom

We continue moving forward with our large project utilizing public FAT and Factom, which represents the majority of our work. While we cannot discuss the details of this project at this time, we hope to be able to in the future through that entity.

[Julian Fletcher-Taylor]

2020 Q1 & Q2 Update

Mainnet:

Factom Nodes have been well maintained, and updated in a timely manner.


Testnet:

We continue to maintain our testnet node, 1x Testnet authority node


Exchange Working Group

We continue to diligently work toward new listings for FCT. This includes

1. Weekly calls with the two firms we are working with for exchanges
2 .Document reviews from exchanges
3. Producing information for exchanges
4. Communication and negotiations with exchanges on a number of points
5. Strategizing within the committee and communicating with the community
6. Coordination with MTH on listings
7. Writing grants for the exchange working group


FactomProtocol.org 2.0

We just released a major update to the Factom Protocol website.

This new website version includes
1. New homepage with rich media, protocol metrics, and important links
2. Protocol page with rich media, updated information and design
3. Technologies page showcasing technologies and enterprise solutions built by the community
4. Integration with the Factoshi API to show real time price, supply, and grant pool
5. Usability improvements and new graphics
6. Roadmap with input from the Factom community
7. Header navigation now includes applications and the new Medium blog
8. Updated ecosystem page with rich media
9. Updated developer documentation
10. Updated media pack page and press assets
11. Footer navigation to the new explorer and applications
12. News section added to homepage
Note: We are working with Hashnstore to get a live feed of Bitcoin/EthereumTX/EthereumContract data costs to replace the static numbers
Note2: We plan on working on any proposals to integrate the Factomize forum more fully into the protocol website

We have reestablished the website committee to approve additions to the website, and help steer any future updates to the website.

Additionally, we finished work on the FATProtocol.org website, described below.

We welcome feedback, suggestions, and any additional applications or technologies you want featured on the site. Please contact Spencer B on Discord or the Website Committee directly, thanks!


FAT

Q1 and Q2 of 2020 we continued to maintain FAT, though we did not submit any grants for FAT. We refined standards and documentation, created a website and roadmap, and continued to maintain infrastructure and ideate with people. These are expanded upon below:

1. Updated the FAT-1 Standard which defines non-fungible tokens to bring it up to date with the most recent changes including data structure revisions, and transaction signing innovations (FAT-103). Removed implicit inheritance from FAT-0 for clarity. Merged the branch to master
2. Updated the FAT-0 Standard which defines fungible tokens to reflect recent changes including allowing send-to-self transactions, zero amount transactions, allowing custom supply precision when creating a new non-fungible token. These changes create the base for master compatibility for WASM Smart Contracts. Merged several improvement branches(1, 2) to master
3. Updated the FAT documentation page in the Factom Protocol Documentation to reflect the developments happening on FAT over the last two quarters, including smart contracts
4. Finished the FAT Website and made it reflect the addition of smart contracts to FAT. Added a helpful video from the Factom Protocol Youtube channel to the homepage that helps explain the basics of what FAT is
5. Created a Roadmap for full featured production ready Smart Contracts on FAT. With the conclusion of the last FAT grant contracts are in an alpha ready state, but are not yet ready for deployment in production. This roadmap details and prioritizes development of features such as stateful contract storage, a gas mechanism, and cross contract calls that are all required to bring FAT smart contracts to a production ready state in a future grant

We have maintained our FAT courtesy nodes

• 1x FAT mainnet courtesy node
• 1x FAT+FAT Daemon testnet courtesy node

We are currently in communication and are working with several new collaborators including Anton Ilzheev and Kompendium to plan out and execute the next stage of FAT development.


Adjusting Server specs
We will be adjusting the size of our mainnet server instances down, as they are oversized for Factoms requirements and doing so will not affect the performance of our nodes.


Efficiency
Upon launch of the FactomProtocol.org 2.0 website today and this update, we will be raising our efficiency to 25%.


Private Developments
While we had planned on releasing publicly a private project untilizing Factom in Q1, Covid and worldwide lockdowns have put those plans on hold.

With the start of Covid and lockdowns, we were also forced to discontinue our travelling and thus much of our promotion of the Factom protocol. In fact, we were in Dubai working with partners there when lockdowns began, and were forced to cut the work short. We look forward to getting back on the road and continuing our project using the Factom protocol.

 

[Pluto]

@Julian Fletcher-Taylor thanks for the update. Quick question on the private work. What's your best estimate when you will be able to release news in this given the delays you face?