Developer’s Diaries. The end of winter

Sergei Lonshakov
Robonomics Network by Airalab
6 min readMar 14, 2019

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March has come, which means spring has begun, so it’s time to be more active. Let’s start with the list of important events of October’18 — February’19 in the life of Airalab:

  1. We’ve prepared 5 Aira releases on GitHub.
  2. We’ve published 3 releases of smart contracts of the Robonomics network.
  3. We’ve created the Airalab sidechain with Robonomics deployed on it and also made a bridge of XRT token to the sidechain.
  4. We’ve brought out 12 technical releases of Robonomics on Substrate, including the support for Grandpa and an experimental PoS using the XRT token. Telemetry.
  5. We helped in the R&D of a trading system for autopilot vehicles for a place on the road. The project won the first place in the competition called Mobi Grand Challenge.
  6. We’ve launched tutorials on YouTube for developers and startups that learn to work with Robonomics.
  7. Since January’19 we began experiments using Aragon in order to build new ideas for the use of DAO. Thus, the ideas of creating the first hardware-software product by Airalab — DAOS — appeared. Finally, the team is going to shift to the DAO for real!

The Robonomics DAO

The further work of the Airalab team over the Robonomics platform is supposed to be based on the idea of reinventing organizations. This experiment has been brewing for a long time, and even was partially integrated into the team during 2018. But there has not been such a large-scale experience of involving the majority of the community yet. It’s time to fix it.

It was decided to start the Airalab evolution as a DAO with the use of a voting system, where one vote is enough to make a decision. If no one is against. This way you can ensure a high level of democracy in the team. For voting, we assume to use a karma token — this is how we called the token that can be emitted to any team member’s balance in gratitude for helping with the work or contributing to the project.

It turns out as an experiment on the use of accumulated karma in the team as an important value when making joint decisions.

After testing the work of the DAO, developers will transfer the management of the Robonomics.eth record in ENS to a voting smart contract.

Also we would like to involve the community of XRT owners to make several important decisions about the further development of the platform. XRT holders will influence the launch of the Dutch auction and control platform releases. The minimum quorum for decision making by XRT holders is proposed to be set at 6%. And to make a condition of 67% of consonants among those who voted for a positive decision.

The Robonomics DAO will use Aragon. Now we are testing the team work on the Rinkeby network. These tests are supposed to be finished by the end of March in order to go to the Ethereum mainnet. The appearance of the Robonomics DAO is planned to be associated with the transition to the 5th version of smart contracts in the Ethereum mainnet.

The 5th generation of Robonomics

Robonomics platform generations are changing together with communication protocol changes that affect the code of smart contracts such as a factory, a lighthouse template, a liability template, or XRT. In the new generation of Robonomics, the mechanism of working with observing networks is changed, which affects the liability contract template of a robot. This improvement will make the work of observing networks in Robonomics more flexible.

Let me remind you a little bit about observing networks: if in the process of building the communication between a user and a robot an observing network is not indicated, only the robot can finalize the liability.

In the 4th generation of Robonomics, if an observing network is indicated with the smart contract address or just the address of the observing account, only the observing network can finalize a liability through completing a transaction on the Ethereum network. Alexander Krupenkin changed the working mechanism of the observing networks in such a way that the set of validators is checked and the Robonomics providers are used in order to send transactions to the network, whether the observing network is indicated or not. The implementation of the new mechanism for the observing networks can now be used even in the simplest situations, for example, limiting the number of blocks to perform a robot liability.

Together with the change in the observing networks, we will inject DAO elements into the work of Robonomics and launch the KYC mechanism for converting AIRA tokens to XRT.

FMA opinion on XRT token regulation is received

In summer’18, Aleksandr Kapitonov and I spent a week discussing the Robonomics white paper with lawyers from Liechtenstein. One of the questions was to get the opinion of the European financial market regulator on the acknowledgement of the XRT token unregulated from the point of view of dinosaurs existing rules of trading, selling and issuing securities in Europe. On the 10th of December, 2018, lawyers from Nagele prepared the legal opinion on XRT and sent it to the FMA. The answer came on the 7th of March, 2019.

According to the FMA, the Robonomics token (XRT) is not subject to regulation and does not require any licenses to be obtained within the supervisory departments of the financial regulator in Europe. Many colleagues believe that the legal opinion of Nagele and the FMA response will be of interest to a wide audience, so we will think about how to highlight this on our main website — Robonomics.network.

The Robonomics Winter and Spring School

In January and February 2019, the Airalab team published a set of lessons on YouTube, which teach how to work with the Robonomics platform, and also accompanied the school participants with examples of GitHub code needed to launch a robot through Robonomics. As for me, I like the YouTube format of lessons. I see how many of the team, including those who mostly work with Google documents, better and more often work with the platform as a working tool with the help of these lessons. Therefore, we should continue. The winter school will continue from the second week of March in the “Robot as a Service” section. So, subscribe to the Airalab channel on YouTube and go through the lessons with us!

DAOS

In conclusion of this entry in the diary, I would like to give the first announcement of the hardware-software product by Airalab called DAOS or DAO-space. This will be the home controller, which should help manage the common workspace on the principles of a decentralized autonomous organization. DAOS should become an example of a situation where a DAO will not be associated exclusively with issues of managing a cryptocurrency balance in a smart contract account.

In the initial configuration, DAOS will be supplied with a smart lock and an air quality sensor. Your team will be able to decide cooperatively who will be given an access to a room, a small balcony for smoke breaks or … I think, you will make up a hundred of different options. Similarly with obtaining information on air quality: if the DAO adds your address to the access list to receive data from the sensor, then you can request readings from DAOS at any time. A sensor, a lock or any other open source device will be able to obey the decisions of the DAO directly. This will be DAOS. We took LattePanda 4G/64G as a basis, crossed it with Aira, and soon will offer our community to purchase it.

Sanuk and Sabai, friends!

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