2017 Retro and the Year AheadBeginning of this week, we hosted our third community call where Gnosis co-founders Martin and Stefan gave a retrospective of 2017 and presented an updated roadmap for the year ahead.
What have we been up to? 2017 Retro and Major Milestones
Olympia (Live)
On Monday, we achieved a major milestone: we successfully launched Olympia, the first application of our prediction market platform. It provides participants with a playful environment to try out trading in prediction markets and win GNO tokens as a reward for successful predictions. For developers aspiring to build dApps on top of our platform, Olympia should serve as both a test environment and an inspiration for what is possible to create with Gnosis. We’re very thankful for all the feedback we’ve received so far from the community and are working hard to keep improving the product.
In case you haven’t predicted how much cryptokitties will make up of the entire Ethereum network by December 22nd, definitely do so now and don’t hesitate to send us feedback about your experience!
Dutch Exchange (Q2 2018)
As you might have already seen in an introductory post on our blog, we will launch a decentralized exchange for ERC-20 tokens based on the Dutch auction principle. We’ve made some really good progress on its development and plan to go live early in Q2 2018. This week, we will introduce the auction mechanism in detail on our blog.
A nice side effect of the Dutch Exchange is that it can basically also serve as a reliable, on-chain price oracle for ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. This is especially important for our WIZ token mechanism — with our auction based exchange serving as a price oracle, smart contracts can understand what tokens are worth.
Gnosis Safe (Q1 2018 for Android/Q2 2018 for iOS)
Currently, the way most people are interacting with the Ethereum network is by entirely relying on private keys. If you ever lose access to your private key, you’d lose access to all assets that are in your wallet. That’s why we think that Two Factor Authentication (2FA) is a really good tradeoff between usability and security. The Gnosis Safe wallet is geared towards single users using 2 or more factor authentication. The additional factors can be held by mobile devices (phones, tablets) and hardware ledgers.
We finished a first MVP for Android — feel free to download the Android APK from our repository and install it on your phone. By the end of January, we plan to release the next MVP that will feature 2FA. In March 2018, we hope to have the first Gnosis Safe Alpha featured in the App Store.
Gnosis JS/Smart Contracts Beta
We had the smart contracts audited and already released a few versions of our Gnosis JS library for which we also created detailed documentation. The Gnosis JS library is the foundation for Olympia.
Management Interface Beta
We’ve successfully released the alpha version of the Gnosis Management Interface in the form of our prediction market tournament Olympia. While the Management Interface can be considered as a generic approach, Olympia simply is a fork of it, adding the elements that are required to run our competition on top (i.e. high score, OLY tokens, etc.). If everything goes well with Olympia, there’s a good chance that we will release a first version on the main net including only a handful of markets before the end of 2017.
GnosisDB
Currently, queries that you would usually do against a database are extremely slow if you do them against the Ethereum Full Node (or the guest client for example). That’s why we’ve built GnosisDB, a storage for prediction market data that lives on the blockchain. The Gnosis database is replicating what is already entailed in the smart contracts and enriching this data with information from IPFS. Gnosis DB makes all the data available in a way that it can be easily and quickly curated from the front-end.
We use GnosisDB for both the Management Interface and as part of Olympia.
Hackathons
This year, we tried to get talented developers excited about the power of developing on Ethereum by being part of several hackathons: Cal Hacks, the world’s largest student hackathon hosted by UC Berkeley, InOut, India’s biggest community hackathon, and ETHWaterloo. Stay tuned about our upcoming developer incentivization programs to be announced in 2018!
What is still on our To Do?
Crytoeconomic Experiments (Q2 2018)
We made a lot of progress on the cryptoeconomic experiments (the smart contracts are written), but decided to run these next year since it makes sense to have an easy-to-use user interface ready first that can accommodate a broader audience. Therefore, we prioritized Olympia which will soon also support the conditional markets needed to conduct the planned cryptoeconomic experiments.
We’re very happy that Robin Hanson officially joined the Gnosis Advisory Team team. His help and expertise has been invaluable for the experiment setup as well as the Gnosis’ prediction market design and some of his ideas have already been implemented into our core infrastructure. In the coming months, he will continue to advise us on the experiments to test the viability of Futarchy.
Reality Keys/Oracle Integration (Q2 2018)
For the year ahead, we will look into oracle integrations with providers like Reality Keys, Chainlink, or Reality Check. Fortunately, many companies have entered this space which will give us a good opportunity to reevaluate the current market and see which integrations make the most sense for us.
GNO/WIZ Functionality (Q1 2018)
While we’ve already started to integrate the GNO/WIZ functionality, we will fully release it into the wild in the new year once it can actually be used on our services. We're in discussion to rename the WIZ tokens to OWL.
https://blog.gnosis.pm/2017-retro-and-the-year-ahead-42959d1380b5
