Hello Steemians, we are OpenOrchard^™, a new company made up of the OpenSeed^™ Team and four former members of the Steem Team. Listed in alphabetical order they are: Michael Vandeberg (@vandeberg), Nathaniel Caldwell, Steve Gerbino (@gerbino) and @theoretical.

Logo design by @midlet

About the Team

Michael and Theoretical were founding members of the team that launched the Steem blockchain. As one of the co-inventors of Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (along with Dan Larimer), Theoretical helped train Michael in blockchain development. During their tenures at Steemit they worked on many projects together including the Resource Credit system which makes Hive (formerly Steem) the most advanced blockchain for delivering a consistent user experience.

Steve joined the team in 2018 to assist in the completion of the Smart Media Tokens protocol which went live on testnet in October of 2019, while Nathan helped the whole team execute by serving as product manager.

OpenOrchard^™

These are incredibly talented engineers with decades of combined experience building enterprise grade software, distributed systems, and of course, blockchains. With these additions to the team we have expanded the ambitions of this project in ways that are outlined below. In order to help accomplish our now even loftier ambitions we have created a new company named OpenOrchard^™.

We Support Hive

Before going into our plans for this company, we want to reiterate our support for Hive and the Hive community. Our mission is still to make open source software development economically competitive with private solutions by providing app developers with turnkey backend solutions that make it easier than ever to bootstrap games and applications that utilize digital assets to engage users and generate revenue. We believe that Hive will play a critical role in progressing this mission.

Solving Different Problems

In order to add the most value to the Hive ecosystem, and the blockchain ecosystem more generally, we have to build solutions that Hive does not itself offer. No blockchain is capable of supporting media storage, real-time operations or ephemeral communications at scale. This has left many blockchain-powered applications lacking in basic functionalities like fast, easy, and free account creation, easy login, and encrypted messaging. All of these features will be on display in our social networking and encrypted messaging application, OpenLink, which will be launching with Hive integration to Beta testers soon.

That's why OpenSeed is being developed as a distributed network of servers which are optimized for providing features to blockchain-powered apps like those found on the Hive network. These are only the initial feature sets that we are developing in OpenSeed with the specific goal of delivering value to Hive developers and users.

Gaming Focus

OpenSeed is still going to deliver on promises made to the Steem, now Hive, community and with the addition of blockchain engineers, we plan to build a next-generation base layer named Koinos^™ that we believe will be especially useful to game developers looking to integrate digital tokens and assets into their platforms.

Steem demonstrated that many powerful features can remain stranded in the base layer without tooling that makes it easy for developers to integrate these features into their apps. Well designed second layer tools like Hivemind (the software powering Communities on both Hive and Steem) prove that nearly unlimited features can be unlocked from extremely simple base layer operations like custom JSON.

First Class Second Layer

With OpenSeed, we are treating the second layer as an integral part of our ecosystem. Our priority is ensuring that developers and users have access to as many powerful features as possible while maximizing independence and choice when it comes to where they store their data.

We are leveraging our experience and expertise in the blockchain space to create a blockchain and second layer that are designed to work together. This approach will allow us to provide developers with far more, and far better, tools and features than they would otherwise have access to. By integrating OpenSeed with other blockchains, beginning with Hive, we can provide those tools and features to existing devs and users within the applications they already know and love, while allowing them to take advantage of additional features as new blockchains like Koinos come online.

Developers, Developers, Developers

The most important thing to us is that we develop software that game and application developers, especially Hive app developers, actually need. We have already received some great feedback from developers and we hope to receive far more over the coming months. If you are interested in helping to guide the development of our software please stop by our discord server and join our community.

We have many more exciting announcements in store, so be sure to follow this account for important updates.

To learn more about OpenSeed and OpenLink, check out the following posts:

• Building a Socially Aware Internet
• OpenLink: The Gateway to OpenSeed and Steem (now Hive)