The Orbital Blockchain Network (OBN) is a public ledger where transactions between parties can be recorded on a peer-to-peer basis, i.e. without any third-party control or interference - an antidote to authoritarian, state overreach.
This means no frozen bank or Paypal accounts, no social media censorship, no invasion of privacy, and no petty bureaucrats meddling in your business.
OBN is also intensely focussed on preserving user anonymity and privacy.
Let's imagine that the OBN is like a bustling city marketplace that operates around the clock, and is accessible from anywhere in the world through a special online portal.
In this marketplace, anyone can offer their own goods or services, represented by tokens. These tokens can be anything, from a bag of apples to a painting, or even abstract things like an hour of guitar lessons. You don't need permission to set up your stall and start trading.
The transactions in this marketplace are not managed by any authorities or middlemen. It's like each stallholder directly dealing with their customers, exchanging goods and services for other tokens. Due to the efficiency of the network and absence of middlemen, more of the value created is shared between the producer and the consumer.
In our marketplace, there are special staff called 'validators', who ensure that all exchanges are fair and legitimate. They're like market inspectors who double-check every trade. For their services, you pay them a small fee in a specific currency called 'EPIC tokens'. Not one validator has any more authority than another and anyone can become one as long as they stake sufficient EPIC of their own as an incentive not to act maliciously because they would risk losing their stake if they tried.
To visit this marketplace, all you need is to log in through a simple web app, much like opening a door into this bustling city from your living room. Registration is free, very simple, guaranteed, and you don’t need to share any personal information, not even an email address or phone number.
There's even a sandbox, a kind of a playground inside the marketplace where you can practice trading with play tokens.
The marketplace offers an array of services that you typically use every day, like ride-sharing, online shopping, payments, or even forming your own organisations called DAOs.
The city is continuously growing, with new buildings and features being planned and added. One such feature is 'vaults'. Think of them as secure lockers where you can privately exchange goods without anyone else knowing about the transaction, not even the market inspectors. It's the ultimate way to ensure privacy in your dealings within the OBN and, indeed, in the real world.
If your seller wants to trade in public, perhaps because they want to improve their reputation by showing they have done lots of trades with others, then you can simply create a new account for the public transaction and then privately trade with that account and your own.
This principle is also adopted for completely private and secure communication. Let's say you're passing secret notes in class. Each note you send is placed in a different envelope. Every time you pass a note, you also provide a new return address. The teacher sees lots of envelopes being passed, but they have no idea if these envelopes are all part of the same conversation or different ones, and who’s communicating with who!
Plus, the envelopes are sealed so well that only the person you're passing them to can open them. From the outside, it's impossible to know that a continuous conversation is even happening or who's involved in it. It's the perfect secret message system. And, that’s essentially how it happens in the OBN, using sophisticated but robust cryptography.
You can try the beta app right now which is connected to the sandbox. Email us -
orbital.labs@use.startmail.com
- for some play tokens!
Here is a list of things you can already do on the OBN: →
This app represents a small selection of functionality on the OBN. If you are a developer, the library facilitates the creation of web3 versions of every existing web2 app that you are already familiar with.
In future posts, we’ll cover topics like:
Explainer videos on how to use the web app.
How tokens derive value and the form and role of money in the OBN.
Why reputation, as a function of transactional activity, is more useful than real identity in mitigating risk and how this is achieved in the OBN.
How digital escrow in the OBN provides an extra layer of counterparty protection without adding friction and cost to the process.
How real-world activity is managed and synchronised with ledger activity, including logistics.
How you can create your own apps with zero prior coding experience.
How you can create super apps if you’re an experienced front-end developer - decentralised Nectar, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Uber, Deliveroo, DHL… It’s all possible on OBN.
How to become a validator.
How to create and manage your group activity through the OBN distributed autonomous organisation (DAO).
Various technical articles about blockchain and cryptography in general (which is just as important as decentralisation in its own right), including busting a few common myths spread by people who don’t really understand the technology, like:
how blockchain networks fail if “they” take down the Internet (like this isn’t a bigger risk for all current, centralised networks);
all blockchains are controlled by intelligence agencies through “back doors”;
cryptocurrencies (aka “coins”) are the same as blockchains;
the Bitcoin blockchain does anything except record transactions of itself.
And much more!
I get the feeling we're going to need a parallel economy soon, sooo... THANK YOU!
Sounds like a very interesting enterprise with lots of freedom and opportunity - thank you.