What is it:

Origo is a highly scalable off-chain blockchain solution offering data and transactions privacy using a new protocol called Privacy Preserving Application Platform (PAPP). Origo uses sharding, stateless clients and improved hybrid consensus to achieve the desired improved performance levels. The actual execution of the smart contracts happens in the off-chains by the ‘Executors’ and the proof of execution gets sent to the main chain for verification of computation and for registering the transactions.

Origo Protocol has 4 phases bounded by 2 timeouts T1 and T2 – Init, Commit, Execute and Settle

Init: Parties elects nodes in the mainchain

Commit: Individual parties submits their private input and coin to the Mainchain for the verification of the commitment before T1

Execute: “Executors” will execute the smart contracts in the off-chains

Settle: Executor generates ZKP for the execution and passes it on to the mainchain. Mainchain verifies the proof before T2 and records the transaction. Executors pays deposits and gets punishments for not submitting the results back.

Parties can verify the result of the smart contract execution on the mainchain but not the details of the contract. Privacy Preserving Application Platform (PAPP) is a combination of the well-known Zero Knowledge Framework (ZKP) to apply privacy to the data and transactions for the dApps on the Origo platform. So, privacy will be applied to the Transaction amount, Sender/Receiver address and Input/Output data.

Origo aims to solve the performance challenges using a Hybrid Consensus, Sharding and an enhanced VM for faster execution of the contracts.

Hybrid Consensus:

Origo uses a hybrid consensus model utilising the classical consensus pBFT and the blockchain consensus PoW/PoS. Origo basically has 2 chains,

Transaction chain- uses pBFT – periodically, a fixed number of validators gets elected from the nodes in the identity chain.
Identity chain – uses Pow/PoS - Identity Chain has identity blocks with a list of nodes in each of them.

Sharding:

Origo will use computational sharding initially and will adopt state sharding once they can find a solution to address cross sharding issue and the security.

Nodes gets split into groups processing the transactions, BLS signature will be used to generate random number from the pre-elected validators and sender uses this information from the Identity chain. Origo will use the sender address as a criteria so this means a particular sender transactions goes to the same shard always avoiding cross sharding communication issues.

EVM:

Origo uses web assembly (WASM) VM standard and supports C++ for smart contracts.

Product:

No MVP
Q4 2018 Testnet
September 2019 Mainnet

Roadmap:

Metrics:

Unknown in the public forum

Good stuff:

1. I personally like 2 things- off-chain scaling + privacy for data
2. Backed by whole raft of industry known top investors – NGC, Polychain Capital, GBIC, FBG, Kenetic Capital, Signum Capital and Kosmos
3. Has got good hype

Not good stuff:

1. No MVP and Very long roadmap – September 2019
2. Initially smart contracts will use C++ - not a lot knows and uses C++ now. But they will be adding widely used languages such as Java, Ruby etc in the future
3. ZKP causes performance degrades as it affects the consensus speed but Origo aims to tackle this issue using off-chains
4. Executors can become malicious as they won’t be a trusted third party or a hardware- Origo aims to tackle it by penalising malicious executors by not providing the deposit back
5. Origo Idea looks like Enigma clone
6. Cannot see the eligibility to become a validator in the identity chain- Origo has mentioned more information will be available in their yellow paper soon.
7. Team doesn’t seem to have people with blockchain experience – no linkedin means checking history becomes a bit hard - Frank Fang is the only one with working blockchain experience
8. Airdrops for the community