Topic: Gravity.io: Distributed Ledger Solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises (Read 175 times)

Stay Stealthy

Most cryptocurrencies today have transparent blockchains, so that transactions taking place within them are openly verifiable and traceable. However, users want to have the opportunity to transact in a secure and anonymous manner. Moreover, in a business environment a non-disclosure of a commercially sensitive information is a crucial thing, that helps you to avoid showing vulnerabilities to your competitors.

So there is a need for private financial transactions and that’s why we have implemented the Stealth Transactions feature into the Gravity Business Framework.

There is a certain bias in the digital world that stealth transactions are mostly used for illicit activities, but we believe that the ability to transact in stealth mode will facilitate further business adoption of the technology. This makes it a must have feature for a public blockchain in order for it to be adopted by SMEs.

More about anonymous cryptocurresnies and Gravity Stealth Trasnactions read here.

Gravity Testnet Instructions Set #2

Hi, everyone!

Last week some technical updates have been introduced to the testnet. We issue a new set of instructions on the testnet participation. The Gravity Team takes a serious view on information support of the project. If you have any questions which are not presented in the instructions, please leave them in the comments.

Instructions in the Set

• Update Gravity Protocol node
• Resync Gravity Protocol node
• Edit the blockchain configuration
• Find our account’s private keys
• Vote for Gravity Protocol witnesses
• Comittee Memember Registration Tutorial
• Vote for Gravity Protocol Committee Members
• Gravity protocol’s proxy
• Change a node in the Gravity Protocol wallet
• Backup copy of a bin-file
• Brainkey backup copy of your Gravity wallet

Click here to see full instructions and videos!

Gravity Solutions: On the Way to the Marketplace 3.0


A marketplace is an online platform where a customer can compare and buy a wide range of goods and services from several sellers at once. Marketplaces became a popular and necessary solution for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) because they significantly extend their outreach to a global level and offer completely new methods for selling goods and services. Small enterprises found the idea that there’s no need to maintain and promote their online shop attractive, since those tasks can be rather expensive.

The key objective of early marketplace development is to extend the the availability and access to a range of product to the limit, which is not available for an offline retailer. The second stage of marketplace development is to enlarge the audience to an international scale. This is the stage where all marketplaces are currently. However, these stages imply a quantitative increase only, and it seems the next evolution will involve the qualitative optimization of the marketplace.

More on the decentralized marketplaces and DEX as a new marketplace see here in the full article on Medium.

As announced last week, the updated nodes have been introduced. We fixed all of the sync and emission issues, and our testnet is stable and ready for work.

To all the existing witnesses who are out of sync! Please update your node up to the latest version and resync. If you prefer to use a previous configuration, you should first add this checkpoint: checkpoint = [3079462, 002efd26658683618e4a6ca886b6383b8119fc9f].
Once the synchronization is complete, please, send us a message so we can vote for you.

To those who want to become a witness! You are very welcome to do so!

Please, start running the node: https://github.com/GravityProtocol/gravity-docs/blob/master/tutorials/running%20node%20with%20docker.md
Become a witness: https://github.com/GravityProtocol/gravity-docs/blob/master/tutorials/becoming-a-witness.md
And lastly, report to the Telegram channel.

Gravity Testnet Report 25.06.2018–11.07.2018

Hi everyone!
Last fortnight was filled with lots of events! Our team worked on desync issues, refined the Wallet and Block Explorer, and created a new design for the Block Explorer. For more information, read the report below.

The Gravity website moved to a new domen gravity.io, all the old links now redirect users there. The Korean version of the website is also in progress.

The most recent version of our White Paper is on the website now, and everyone can have a look at it here

We are working on a new Roadmap. The old version included everything on one map, but the new one is more detailed and divided into sections: Business, IT, Go-To-Market and so on. You can have a look on it here on our website.

All of the tutorials on the network are now on github. If you have any suggestions or questions, please let us know at our telegram dev-chat.

Statistics for 10.06.2018–24.06.2018
Number of accounts: 2619 (99 new)
Number of signed blocks: 3 827 600 (1,369,338 new)
Number of transactions: 784 881 (103,165 new)
Number of active witnesses: 13
Number of reserve witnesses: 45
Number of active committee members: 11
Number of reserve committee members: 29

Network Activity Index
Network Activity Index is calculated in the testnet once per week and its amount affects the size and availability of emission. Emission is released only if the Activity Index in the last week was greater than in any other previous week. This emission is distributed amongst all the accounts in the network according to their Gravity Index.

In the fifth week of testing, Network Activity Index was 67689, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

In the sixth week of testing, Network Activity Index was 26425, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

For the past two weeks, Network Activity Index was lower than it was on the first week (161469), and as a result, there was no emission in the blockchain those weeks.

Technical Updates
As described in the last Testnet Report, there were issues with nodes staying in sync while trying to calculate Activity Indexes and Emission. Over the past three or four weeks the development team has been working on performing those calculations asynchronously in order to keep the block interval down to one second. This update has passed our local tests and the updated nodes will be introduced into the testnet soon.

Another event that we wanted to share is that the testnet had a breakdown. The likely culprit was the Emission calculation event. This caused some nodes to become out of sync and go offline. Any nodes that were out of sync were voted out of active witness positions.

Tests still need to be performed on the Activity Index calculation (which happens daily) and the Emission event (which happens weekly). Making sure that the calculations function correctly on the testnet is an important step towards launching the main net. After these things have been tested, testnet participants can update their nodes and become active witnesses once again.

Node Update
This week an update of the nodes was released. Now the Activity Index and Emission are calculated asynchronously in three stages:

• Collecting the source data for calculations, waiting the fixed delay to make it irreversible (currently 1000 blocks)
• Starting the asynchronous calculations, waiting the fixed delay to complete the calculations for sure (currently 2000 blocks)
• Applying the calculation results

Now all the witness nodes are updated and function normally. Next Monday we plan to test the Emission, and after that we’ll add to the testnet everyone who wants to become a witness.

Infrastructure

The Block Explorer
A brand new, completely redone version of the Block Explorer appeared this week. We fixed the Explorer’s mobile version display bugs and will continue working on it.

The Wallet
During past two weeks our team has been working on Stealth Transactions. It should be finished shortly.

A new memo-message function was added to the Wallet. You can now add a message to the token transaction.

Also, some small bugs in mobile version and design layout were fixed.

Future Plans
We plan to redraft the current version of the Wallet and refresh its design as well as refine the UI.

Media Publications About The Gravity Protocol

Thetodaycn.com
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Kejiit.com
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Isouthtech.com
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Theshandong.com
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Niuniuwang.cn
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Newsbiz.cn
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Itodaynews.cn
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

Ifuntech.cn
区块链研发公司 Gravity Solutions 致力为中小企开拓数十亿美元市场机遇

To Kill a Middleman: Why Blockchain is Vitally Important for Small Businesses

The term “Blockchain” has been a buzzword for a while. Everyone has heard of blockchain, but few use it outside of cryptocurrency trading and speculation. Usually, people talk about “creating trust where there is none” when referring to blockchain. You may also hear things along the line of, blockchain helping to “kill the middleman”.

However, many may not truly understand, what “the middleman” is, how to get rid of it, and, the main thing, why blockchain hasn’t been adopted on mass yet.

A full article about the issues which discourage SMEs to use blockchain and how Gravity Protocol is going to solve these issues - here on our Medium blog.

Gravity Mobile Wallet


We’re happy to inform you that the work on the Gravity Mobile Wallet has already started. The Gravity mobile client is primarily a highly secure wallet for ZGV and custom token storage, and it also works as an access to the network.

The first version of the mobile client includes voting, accounts management, ZGV tokens transfer, the balance and your activity in the network. We plan to implement Gravity Wallet on the two major platforms, Android and iOS.

Full article with walletfeatures description, UI screenshots and future plans on the Wallet is here on our Medium blog.

Hello everyone!

Last fortnight our team was actively working on the network, developing and improving it. We fixed some small bugs, solved the calculation delay problem (and we’re testing it now), and published several articles and manuals about working with testnet.

Statistics for 10.06.2018–24.06.2018

Number of accounts: 2520 (56 new)
Number of signed blocks: 2 458 262 (1,099,762 new)
Number of transactions: 681 716 (148,716 new)

Number of active witnesses: 25 (2 new)
Number of reserve witnesses: 25
Number of active committee members: 11
Number of reserve committee members: 29

Network Activity Index

Network Activity Index is calculated in the testnet once per week and its amount affects the size and availability of emission. Emission is released only if the Activity Index in the last week was greater than in any other previous week. This emission is distributed amongst all the accounts in the network according to their Gravity Index.

In the third week of testing, Network Activity Index was 80, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

In the fourth week of testing, Network Activity Index was 30, and as a result, 0 ZGV was created.

For the past two weeks, Network Activity Index was lower than it was previously, and as a result, there was no emission in the blockchain those weeks.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to our team for their active work on the project and wee would also like to thank some people personally. Many thanks to Brendan Jensen, who brought lively discussions to our official Twitter account and actively helps the community on our Telegram dev chat and Discord channel. Many thanks to Rieki Cordon and Cryptick Cryptick as well for their interesting ideas and activities.

Technical Updates

A main distinctive feature of our system, is Network Activity Index calculation and the emission calculation based on that calculation. Both of these operations require vast amounts of computing power and they cannot be calculated immediately. At the beginning, when the testnet was launched, everything worked fine. But as the testnet grew larger, the calculations began to take more and more time. They quickly surpassed the one-second limit. This is an issue because if blocks are not calculated every second, the system will experience forks and desyncs. In the testnet, forks are solved automatically, but some of the values still remain out of sync. Due to this desync, the last emission was released with a delay.

Due to this desyncing, we moved the heavy part of the calculations to a parallel stream. The calculations will be done the same way, but this way, there will be an insignificant delay, within reasonable limits. We plan to implement this calculation method on Monday, and it will be tested and approved for an update on Tuesday. At that time, we’ll notify all witnesses to update the software so we can check on how the nodes work. After that we’ll need a lot of transactions to break the last emission record, in order to trigger another emission.. At that point, we’ll see if the system is stable and if there are any bugs to be fixed.

To learn more about the infrastructure updates (including the Gravity Wallet, Mobile Version, Governance, Explorer), plans for the future, documentation and media publications see the post here on our Medium blog

Introduction

Dear testnet participants and crypto enthusiasts! We are beginning to release our first report on testing and from now on, these updates will appear biweekly. First two weeks of testing have been quite eventful, and we want to share the particulars of those events with you.

Statistics for 25.05.2018–08.06.2018

Number of accounts: 2464
Number of signed blocks: 1 358 500
Number of transactions: 2464
Number of active witnesses: 23
Number of reserve witnesses: 25
Number of active committee members: 11
Number of reserve committee members: 29

Network Activity Index

Network Activity Index is calculated in the testnet once a week and its amount affects the size and availability of emission. Emission is released only if the Activity Index in the last week was bigger than in any other previous week. This emission is distributed among all the accounts in the network according to their Gravity Index.

In the first week of testing Network Activity Index was 161 469, and as a result 13 418 831,13383 ZGV was created.

In the second week of testing Network Activity Index was 148 808. It was lower than it was last week, and as a result, there was no emission in the blockchain that week.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to our friends, who actively participate in testing (they are listed in order of witness creation): kennybll (Kenneth Benneth), virtual-crusader (Keegan Francis), dominator008, dganic, blervin, iamredbar (Brendan Jensen), roelandp.

Special thanks are also due to Kenneth Benneth and Keegan Francis, who were, in fact taking care of novices during first two days of the testnet. Kenneth wrote the first guide on how to become a witness before official instructions were released, and Keegan posted his version of the python-bitshares library for Gravity. In addition to that they both created the first bots in the Gravity testnet.

Technical updates

• Last week we found a significant bug in emission calculations. The update was successful, and the emission was calculated correctly, but the emission didn’t sync to the network, i.e. it was calculated only on one machine. Other nodes had to do the resync to obtain the emission values.
• Over a two-week period we have optimized the Gravity Explorer and reduced the time of opening the page fourfold, now it’s 0.7 seconds.
• The internal structure of the Gravity Wallet was reorganized to reduce the loading time and increase sustainability. We also added a new function. The wallet now automatically connects to a new node in case the node that it’s connected to stops working.
• Gravity Governance was updated, modal dialog boxes and information on events and functions were added.
• All the products now have mobile web-versions, which were tested on Iphone 5, Iphone X, and also Android smartphones and tablets.
• We fixed a lot of small bugs in design and blockchain data output.
• We published initial documentation for those who wish to join the Gravity testnet.

Media Publications about the Gravity Protocol
cryptovibes.com
Gravity Protocol Testnet Goes Live Today — Run Nodes, Capture the Network and Make Profit

cryptoninjas.net
Testnet Goes Live For Gravity — a graphene based blockchain protocol

coinspeaker.com
Turn the Radio On — You are on the Air!

cryptorecorder.com
3 reasons why you should watch out for Gravity Protocol

businessnewsasia.com
Blockchain R&D Firm, Gravity Solutions, Introduces a Protocol for Small and Medium Enterprises, and Launches Public Testnet

hkitblog.com
分散式賬本解決方案 區塊鏈的嶄新應用

etnet.com.hk
區塊鏈研發公司Gravity Solutions為中小企制訂協議和推出公用測試網

Plans for the next period
There are currently 4 botnet in Gravity blockchain. We’ve noticed they are not very active. So in the near future we are planning to launch the The Battle of the Bots to increase the amount of bots and their activity. Now we’re working on the guidelines and technical part of the game. We remind you that having your bot in the Gravity testnet will give you a chance to win one of the major prizes.

Ensuring the security of a blockchain network

Recent security incidents with the DAO, Ethereum Krypton 51% attack, and “epic” vulnerabilities discovered in EOS by Chinese security researchers at cution-vulnerability/]Qihoo 360 (luckily fixed) once again tell us that security concerns are paramount for open blockchain networks supported by communities.
First of all, we need to understand – “What is security?” The CIA security triad model, composed of three areas; (1) Confidentiality, (2) Integrity and (3) Availability will be referenced throughout this paper.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):

• Confidentiality refers to “The property that sensitive information is not disclosed to unauthorized individuals, entities, or processes”;
• Integrity is defined as the “guarding against improper information modification or destruction, and includes ensuring information non-repudiation and authenticity”.
• Availability references the concept of “ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information”

What does it take to ensure security in your software system? It means that your engineering team has a certain level of maturity and implements rigorous Secure Software Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC).

The S-SDLC process ensures that security assurance activities such as code review, architecture analysis, and attack modelling, are an integral part of the development effort. The main advantages of pursuing a Secure SDLC approach with regards to an open blockchain are:

• Increased quality and security of software as security is a continuous concern.
• Awareness of security considerations by stakeholders and the community.
• Early detection of flaws and vulnerabilities in the system.
• Overall reduction of intrinsic business risks for the community.

Since Gravity Protocol is an open blockchain offering solutions for small and medium businesses, secure software is our highest priority.


The Gravity Protocol team follows a development process similar to Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), which comprises the following stages:

1) Training: We have experienced engineers on board, all of which are masters of secure design, threat modeling, secure coding, and security testing best practices.

2) Requirements: We’ve established security requirements and performed security and privacy risk assessment. The following types of attacks were ified:

• 51% Attacks.
• DDoS Attacks.
• Attacks through gai
  ning profit from fake activity.

The first type of attacks is only theoretically possible for PoS consensus algorithms in general and for our DPoI algorithm in particular. The second type of attacks is more or less addressed by blockchain architecture. We will focus on the third, which is specific to Gravity Protocol since it implements the Adaptive Emission feature. In our view, Adaptive Emission is one more way to incentivize network participants’ activity. The scenario for “fake activity attack” is as follows:

There exists a chance that a user or a group of users begin to imitate activity, e.g. by passing one coin between several affiliated accounts and gaining the prof.t from the dynamic emission.

3) Design: Gravity Protocol is a fork of the Graphene platform, which has proven to be secure in various implementations. As for a“fake activity attack”, a preventive measure that can be taken is by regulating the cost of transactions. At the same time, it should be highlighted that DPoI consensus algorithm (used by Gravity Protocol) already has some necessary features to protect the system against imitated activity. In particular, the algorithm takes into account both the transactional activity index for each client and their stake volume. Discovering clusters in a transaction graph is another means of managing affiliated accounts in such a way as to protect the network against fraudulent activity.

4) Implementation: Our engineering team performs rigorous static analysis and security checks prior to compilation.

5) Verification: The verification of Gravity Protocol software starts with the modelling of various attack scenarios with modules of DPoI and Dynamic Emission calculation. This modelling is performed by our mathematician Alexey Prokopov and data scientist Svetlana Ivina. The results of this modelling will be published soon, (see our upcoming publications). Our team designed an extensive bundle of automatic tests, which run on our private testnet prior to deployment to public testnet. We also introduce gamification to our verification process and very soon we will announce The Battle of the Bots in our testnet. This game is targeted at discovering security breaches in our software.

6) Release: To provide Final Security Review we asked Qiwi Blockchain Technologies for an independent audit of our network. We are going to reveal main highlights of this audit in an upcoming publication.

7) Response: Gravity Protocol software implements extensive logging and monitoring to enable the prompt discovery of potential attackers. We provide detailed instructions for individuals running our nodes about how to run/backup/resync the nodes.

We hope that our efforts and focus on the creation of a quality and secure software will help us in building great community and establish firm ground for an ecosystem of valuable services and applications for small and medium businesses.

by Alexander Lesnevsky

Are you a Graphene Developer? A developer? Tech enthusiast?
Join our testnet!

With this testnet launch we have two main goals:
To test the assumptions used in our DPoI (Delegated Proof of Importance) economic model, as well as attract interest from developer community and distribute some of our initial stake to people that are interested in our ideas, and capable of meaningful participation in our ecosystem. Some of the things to do are not that complicated, and might be a good first step even if you’ve never been a graphene witness, or contributed to an open source project.

As we continue to go through the testnet we’ll be releasing guidlines about things like what we consider to be a perfect bug report, and the like. It is impossible to solve some problems just by throwing technology at them, remember? Fostering a good culture is also important!

Anyway, without further ado, here are the things that will get you rewards on our testnet:
Most basic thing that you can do is to get an account in our wallet, and for this basic level we aren’t giving any reward, but it is required to proceed further.

• Just launching a node will earn you 1,000 ZGV
• Reporting issues on our github with found vulnerabilities, interface improvement suggestions, etc can earn you 1,000 to 10,000 ZGV
• Protocol improvment suggestions can earn you between 10,000 and 50,000 ZGV
• Rewards for reporting issues with the economic model, Gravity Index and dynamic emission will earn you between 50,000 and 100,000 ZGV

And finally, to make things exciting here is the superprize:

Grand Gravity Grail for taking over the network by being able to assign 2/3+1 witnesses

500,000 ZGV

How to participate

To participate, you need to do the following:

• Register an account on the testnet portal for participants
• Join the Telegram group

For the first step you require a BitShares account and a github account.
Bitshares account is required, because the rewards will be paid out in GRAVITY.WORK token on Bitshares network, that you would be able to exchange 1:1 for real ZGV tokens after the main net launch.

If you need any help with problems that you encounter, or something is unclear in the guides that we provide, please do not hesistate to ask questions in our Telegram group.

• Our wallet
• Our blockchain explorer
• Our github
• All tutorial links are here

Come to our testnet and break our toys!

Follow Us

Website: http://gravity.io
BitsharesTalk: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=122.0
Telegram channel: https://t.me/gravityprotocol
Telegram dev chat: https://t.me/gravity_protocol
Blog: https://steemit.com/@gravity-protocol
Blog: https://medium.com/@gravityprotocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/protocolgravity
Discord: https://discord.gg/bcavmUg
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gravity-foundation/

Want to join our team?

Gravity Protocol is hiring!

Turn the radio on - you are on the air!

We present our contribution to the evolution of blockchain technology: Gravity Protocol  is a Graphene-based blockchain with Delegated Proof-of-Importance Consensus protocol for digital economy and data governance, which aims to economically incentivize their participants for their amount of activity and active engagement within the system, rather than just their stake.

Delegated Proof of Importance (DPOI)

As opposed to POS and DPOS which simply rewards their participants for holding a stake in the ecosystem, the DPOI consensus mechanism rewards participants for active engagement instead of just sitting on their tokens. This is done via the calculation of the Index of Importance (Stake+Activity) of the users. This shift in philosophy will increase the number of active users and projects being built within the ecosystem.

Gravity Protocol Intro

Adaptive Emission

Gravity Protocol also uses a special algorithm which utilizes adaptive emission to calculate the rate at which tokens are released into the ecosystem. The rate of emission is directly proportional to the Gravity Network Index which grows as the network grows. Simply put, the more the activity/projects on the blockchain, the more the emission of tokens.

Adaptive Emission: Making Blockchain Economy Real

Gravity Index

To make it simple: Importance = Activity + Stake

Index of Importance indirectly addresses the problem of DPoS Voter Apathy. Users that are deeply engaged with the network, have more weight of vote than the ones who hold passive stakes.

Another problem addressed by Index of Importance is the fact that there is no incentive for the economic use of cryptocurrencies. This is due to the fact that most of them are deflationary in nature and there are no costs associated with holding them indefinitely (as opposed to other currencies and assets, which either have associated storage costs or inflation). Gravity’s Importance Index is based on economic factors, such as the number of financial transactions in the system, thus the creation of market multiplier.

A Deeper Look Into Dan Larimer’s radio

«Join the next stage of Blockchain Evolution»

The Metcalfe’s law states that “the value of any network (including a blockchain network) is proportional to the number of network users.” The DPOI system economically incentivizes users to be more active on the blockchain. They believe that this focus on activity rather than stake will leverage the Metcalfe’s law to exponentially increase the potential value of their network.

The Gravity Team is calling on all enthusiasts, developers, and believers to attend their testing soon and to checkout the system first-hand for themselves. This could very well be the next stage of the Blockchain evolution.

If you want to read up more on the project then you can follow:

Website: http://gravity.io
BitsharesTalk: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=122.0
Telegram channel: https://t.me/gravityprotocol
Telegram dev chat: https://t.me/gravity_protocol
Blog: https://steemit.com/@gravity-protocol
Blog: https://medium.com/@gravityprotocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/protocolgravity
Discord: https://discord.gg/bcavmUg
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gravity-foundation/