OriginTrail

What is OriginTrail (TRAC)?

OriginTrail is a “decentralized knowledge graph,” organizing AI-grade knowledge assets and making them discoverable and verifiable for a sustainable global economy.

The ecosystem builds on the principles of neutrality, inclusiveness, and usability, aiming to contribute to a more transparent, collaborative, and trusted economy.

Advanced knowledge graph technology is central to some of today’s top tech firms. OriginTrail decentralizes it and uses it to link, verify, and value both physical and digital data and bring both realms into a single, connected reality.

Thanks to the Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), anything from supply chain data, consumer goods, or digital collectibles can be evolved into discoverable and verifiable Web3 assets driving transparency and trust.

Who are the Founders of OriginTrail?

OriginTrail was developed by a firm called Trace Labs, which in turn was founded in 2013 by Žiga Drev, Tomaž Levak, and Branimir Rakić. Trace Labs drives the deployment of human-centric, trust-enhancing technology through investments and its own R&D.

Trace Labs is based out of the United Kingdom with a presence in Slovenia, Serbia, and Hong Kong. Its partners and clients include the British Standards Institution, Oracle, Swiss Federal Railway, Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center, and the World Economic Forum.

Among Trace Labs’ advisors is Dr. Bob Metcalfe, internet pioneer, Ethernet inventor, and formulator of Metcalfe’s law, which states that “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users.”

How Does OriginTrail Work?

OriginTrail is based on the idea of a knowledge graph, which is generally defined as a network of entities and the relationships between them.

Knowledge graphs focus on data connections as “first-class citizens” and are designed to ingest data from multiple sources and in different formats. They use flexible data models and are easily extendable.

Most major Web2 tech firms use knowledge graphs for various applications, including search, data integration, recommendation engines, analytics, machine learning, AI, and more.

OriginTrail’s DKG is a global shared knowledge graph composed of an openly shared set of signed verifiable assertions. It enables permissionless Publish and Query operations as well as decentralized applications (dApps) with search, integration, and more capabilities for any data source, including blockchains, decentralized storage, enterprise systems, and web services.

The DKG crucially removes central authorities and is hosted on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network. Using the ODC, it is possible to query for data across many systems, exchange it via several data exchange protocols, and integrate it into a local knowledge graph or data store.

DKG adopts a layered approach to its architecture and uses decentralization, connectivity, and data ownership as the first principles. There are five layers in all, namely:

• Architecture layer. Encompasses both dApps and traditional applications which utilize the OriginTrail DKG as part of their data flows.
• Service layer. Implements core and extended services such as authentication, standard interfaces, and data pipelines.
• Data layer. Hosts the knowledge graph data distributed across the network in separate instances of graph databases. Supports linked data and industry-specific standards.
• Network layer. Made up of a peer-to-peer swarm of DGK nodes hosted by individuals and organizations, implemented on a Kademlia DHT.
• Consensus layer. Implements interfaces to several blockchains hosting OriginTrail smart contracts used to manage relations between nodes and implement trustless protocols.

What Makes OriginTrail Unique?

OriginTrail DKG is a powerful Web3 backend, and alongside the DKG SDKs offered by OriginTrail, developers can create graph-native Web3 applications that interface with verifiable assets on the DKG.

The DKG allows developers to easily discover, query, and integrate data sets from multiple sources and securely share semantic data across systems and dApps. In addition, it provides for easy monetization of APIs and data using fungible and non-fungible tokens.

It’s also easy to build custom verifiable data pipelines and integrate them with existing SSI and blockchain tooling.

It also has significant network connectivity, operating with Ethereum and Polkadot alongside Polygon and Gnosis, and more networks are to come.

How is the OriginTrail Network Secured?

OriginTrail DKG can be viewed as a layer 2 network, meaning that consensus is provided by the underlying blockchains. Currently, that means that Ethereum and Polkadot are largely responsible for OriginTrail DKG’s consensus.

However, there are many types of protocol actors involved. For example, among the 1000+ nodes on the network are data creator (DC) nodes that publish datasets, data holder (DH) nodes that host datasets, data viewers (DV) that query the DKG, and data providers (DP) that provide DCs with data.

Any given graph vertex or edge in the DKG can be verifiably associated with a publisher DID, its originating dataset, and cryptographic hashes proving it is contained in that dataset, as well as enabling data integrity verification on-chain and off-chain.

What is the Use of TRAC?

TRAC is one of the two native tokens of OriginTrail. Since OriginTrail DKG is essentially a layer 2 network created on top of the consensus layer, it was initially deployed with the TRAC token on Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis.

In 2022, the project won a Polkadot parachain auction and deployed the OriginTrail Parachain tailored for DKG. This network is powered by the OTP token.

These tokens serve as utility tokens for managing relations in the network, compensating DKG nodes for their services, including graph hosting and Publish/Query operations.

How Much TRAC is In Circulation?

The TRAC token has a fixed maximum supply of 500 million, with over 365 million TRAC already in circulation. The token went live following its ICO on the 17th of January, 2018.

How Do You Buy TRAC?

You can buy TRAC tokens on several top-tier cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s usually paired with fiat currencies such as EUR and USD, but crypto pairs like BTC and ETH are available on several exchanges.

TRAC is also available on several decentralized exchanges (DEXs) within the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Bancor and Uniswap.

How Do You Store TRAC?

Since the TRAC token follows the ERC-20 fungible token standard, it’s extremely easy to store. Any EVM-compatible wallet, such as Metamask, will do the job reliably. You can also use hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor to store TRAC.

The OTP token is an OriginTrail Parachain native token that needs a Polkadot wallet like Talisman or the Polkadot.js extension. Ledger support is also in development.

Is TRAC a Good Investment?

OriginTrail DKG is a multichain system that can integrate all assets native to the connected blockchains and extend them with asset graphs and smart contract-based dApps such as data marketplaces.

It’s a powerful technology with a wide-reaching application, and the basis for it has powered Web2 firms to the heights of value and power. OriginTrail brings a sense of principle to that same power and offers a glimpse of an open-source, Web3-enabled future.