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ARTIS is a decentralized backend for the emerging #ZeroCarbonSociety. It is the most energy efficient Ethereum compliant blockchain network and offers high scalability, low fees, near-instant transactions and easy deployment.
The ARTIS network is a public blockchain based on the Ethereum protocol, optimized for the energy and mobility sector. It keeps evolving based on application requirements and newly emerging technical possibilities.
The native token is called ATS or "Schilling". "Crypto-Schilling" if you like.
Ethereum is a great system and ARTIS would likely not exist without Ethereum. But Ethereum is also quite expensive, has highly unpredictable transaction costs and doesn't offer fast transaction confirmation. ARTIS is based on the Ethereum protocol, but configured and governed such that it's better suited for many applications in the energy and mobility sector.
It's optimized for low operational cost and fast transaction confirmation (few seconds). Since ARTIS belongs to the Ethereum ecosystem, we are also actively participating in the process of standardization via via EIPs - Ethereum Improvement Proposals.
No, ARTIS is complementary to Ethereum. While Ethereum has substantial traction in the emerging space of Decentralized Finance (see DeFi Pulse), some of its properties render it less than optimal for the needs of the energy and mobility market. Applications can also take advantage of so called "bridge contracts" which allow interaction between Ethereum and ARTIS on the smart contract level, for example for moving tokens between the two chains.
Not so much. We consider Bitcoin an awesome technological break through. But while the community has been very vocal, the technology has not changed much in the past 10 years.
The Ethereum ecosystem - tools, devs, processed transactions, technology, etc. - is outpacing everything out there, making it a much superior ecosystem for the needs of ARTIS
The lab10 collective eG is a non-profit cooperative based in Graz, Austria. All its projects are aimed at supporting the transition towards a #ZeroCarbonSociety.
This effort started with the ARTIS blockchain network, which is governed by the holders of freely floating native tokens. The lab10 collective eG currenly, which owns a minority share of those tokens, currently consists of 38 members and keeps attracting members and talents who join the purpose-driven and non-profit cooperative. Meet the team and find out more at: https://lab10.coop/en/team
ARTIS is sustainable in several ways - ecologically, economically and socially.
First of all, due to the use of a consensus protocol not relying on Proof-of-Work (currently ARTIS runs the AuRa consensus protocol), ARTIS isn't just more energy efficient than Bitcoin or Ethereum, but its energy efficiency is also about 500x better than that of Visa. We consider this an important detail, because the goal of new technology should be to be superior to previously existing one.
Second, there exist economic incentive for running a node and becoming a validator for the ARTIS blockchain network. This makes sure that ARTIS is self sustaining and not necessarily relying on the fate of the organization bringing it to life.
And third, being an open platform, usage of ARTIS is permissionless, removing the potential hurdles of any registration or other onboarding processes which are common in traditional, centralized services. In the longer term, participating in the consensus protocol will also become permissionless (currently, this is governed by on-chain voting of the current set of validators).
Unlike blockchains that use the energy-thirsty Nakamoto consensus algorithm (Proof of Work), ARTIS is using a Proof-of-Stake-based consensus algorithm to synchronize the network in a more cooperative way. As a next step it is planned to transition the network from the AuRa consensus protocol towards the Honey Badger BFT consensus protocol, which allows further decentralization (=more nodes) with lower latency and higher performance.
We have done a comparison with the typical human 'heat radiation' of about 100 Watt. One ARTIS transaction consumes about as much energy the human body emits as heat in 0.1 seconds. The equivalent for a Visa transaction it's 64 seconds and for a Bitcoin transaction it is in the order of 18M seconds (7 months).
The ARTIS network is designed to be financially sound for at least 100 validator nodes with a ROI between 2 and 15%, leading to sufficient decentralization, without creating an incentive to grow the network beyond sufficient redundancy and decentralization.
This depends on your interest and technical capabilities. The simplest way it to use applications built on top of ARTIS and using wallets like Minerva Cash, Minerva App or AlphaWallet.
If you also want to support the network on the consensus layer, it will become possible with the POSDAO upgrade (to be scheduled), which allows permissionless staking.
If you bring the technical skills to run your own validator node and you have sufficient ATS token for the required collateral (currently 4,500,000 ATS), you can already ramp-up your own node and join the current validator set supporting the network.
The ARTIS network is especially designed to fulfill the needs of green energy communities and the green mobility and transport. Besides a performant blockchain system, this requires several components that are sometimes overlooked:
Through our research projects we have gained valuable insights about potential future use cases and business models. Some examples: energy communities and companies engaging in certificate trading, P2P trading, prove of origin, M2M payment, voucher bonus systems, local energy based currencies, automated license accounting, data validity checks, identity and community based optimization, machine learning and optimization, etc.
To reduce the dependence on identity service provider as middlemen, the W3C has drafted several standards about what decentralized identities (DID) should look like. You can find some use cases here.
In essence, a DID can be created by anybody and works as a unique identifier which is exchanged only between peers or registered on a public blockchain network. The person or organization controlling the DID can provide a proof via a digital signature and hence can be securely identified to provide services, accept payments or grant access. In connection with DIDs, there are so called Verified Credentials (VCs or simply certificates) which can be provided by governments or organizations and used for proofing a status or achievement to someone else (e.g. a university certificate or a membership).
We think it is due to the complexity, the tediousness of establishing widely recognized standards and the need to reach sufficient scalability and market penetration - in essence we witness the transition from Web2.0 to Web3.0.
Back in 2014 it was simple, you had Bitcoin and many copy cats with slight modifications. Since 2015, the Ethereum ecosystem has sparked the emergence of many more ideas for how to design blockchain networks and how to make them sufficiently scalable for all sorts of applications. Since 2019 we see an increased specialization (e.g. Ethereum is mainly used for decentralized finance #DeFi) and an explosion of new proposals to improve scalability without compromising security or decentralization.
The distribution and sale of electricity follows a top-down logic of wholesale and retailers. With every intermediary some cost are added, which was working quite well as long as big power plants supplied our electricity.
Now that everyone can become a producer and supply power to the grid, it becomes difficult to apply the same model without major cost increases. Therefore, a completely automated system where households can sell to each other - within the constraints of the grid - is the most efficient choice. This follows the same logic as if you buy directly from your producing utility, but built to handle much more electricity producers and no need for costly and profit seeking middlemen. In essence it is democratizing the energy supply, for the benefit of everyone.
The EU Clean Energy Package, which will become national law in all EU countries by 2021, defined 'Renewable Energy Communities' (REC) and 'Citizen Energy Communities' (CEC). The REC is acting within a small region and is using every form of energy (electricity, heat, ...) from 100% renewable sources while the CEC is limited to electricity only (no need to be renewable) but has no regional limitation. Within a REC or CEC, every member can buy and sell energy and the community is organized as a non-profit organization, benefiting its members.
Certainly, we hope you liked our video. We moved Dai (a US-Dollar-pegged stablecoin) from the Ethereum network to the ARTIS network via a bridge, using a so called 'lock and mint' process. On ARTIS, the Dai tokens were instantiated as "streaming tokens" according to EIP 2100, allowing for continuous transfers between two accounts. We called that token sDai and transferred it via the Minerva digital wallet from the account of the car owner to the charging station operator. The started of an sDai stream automatically triggered the charging of the e-car on the stage, using the Matrix Charging system from Easelink. Stopping the charging (triggered by the driver entering the car) stopped the money stream towards the charging pad operator. At every moment during the charging, the user could see the realtime-status of the payment stream for the charging operation on the lock screen of the mobile phone, while the operator had a live view of the payment on the "operator dashboard".
The easiest way is by using a digital wallet with native support for ARTIS, like the Minerva wallets and AlphaWallet. It's also possible to use any Ethereum wallet which allows the user to manually add networks, for example Metamask.
A non-exhaustive list of supported wallets can be found at: https://artis.eco/
If you develop your own application, we recommend the use of a framework which handles the user choice of a digital wallet in order to improve the onboarding experience for your users.
A digital wallet can come in all shapes and forms, ranging from an under-the-hood keystore without any user facing UI, to standalone applications with sophisticated UI.
State-changing interaction (simplified: "write operations") with a blockchain network needs signed transactions and creating such signatures require a private key. Who is in control of that key is up to the application and the trust someone has in an organization who might act on behalf of someone. In our developments we typically strive to allow all options, so that the best solution to provide convenience without a lock-in towards a certain provider can be offered. Just like the money on your bank account, you can always move it to another account and move on to a better service.
You can use the different options on footer of the webpage or join our Telegram channel and discuss with us what you have in mind.
Currently, the OpenEthereum (former Parity) client is used and soon it might be possible to also use the Nethermind client for ARTIS. OpenEthereum is cross-platform compatible, but we currently only actively support Linux based platforms.
ARTIS is using the AuRa consensus, which was developed for the Parity client (now OpenEthereum) and is integrated into the Nethermind client as well. Considerable work was already done for the next iteration, when the network is heading for the Honey Badger BFT consensus which has many advantages over AuRA - e.g. instant finality, full asynchrony, very strong censorship resistance, low latency and on-chain randomness.
Yes, and we highly encourage to do that. Instructions on how to start your own node and even become a validator can be found for the ARTIS Sigma1 mainnet and the Tau1 testnet on Github.
Another option is to run the node on a DAppNode system.
Yes. This is currently managed via an on-chain governance system and requires a stake of 4.5m ATS. Once the number of validators von ARTIS Sigma1 exceeds about 20, the staking requirement is likely reduced in order to allow for broader participation. There's also work ongoing for switching to a fully permissionless consensus protocol, governed by the POSDAO smart contract system.
The POSDAO (Proof-of-Stake DAO) system is a set of smart contracts which allows everyone owning staking tokens (in ARTIS, that's ATS) to become a validator candidate (requires operating a node) and/or to stake tokens onto one or more existing validator candidates (doesn't require operating a node).
POSDAO allows for a much larger number of participants in the consensus protocol without increasing its communication overhead to the point of slowing down the network. This is achieved by introducing the concept of "epochs" and by randomly assigning a subset of the validator candidates to every epoch (in ARTIS, the size of that subset will likely be set to 19) - with the probability for each validator candidate to be selected depending on the cumulative stake put onto that validator (bounded by an indirect upper limit).
Participation is incentivized for both validating and non-validating stakers, with the incentives designed such that they are dynamically adapted based on participation.
The xDai Chain was the first network transitioning to POSDAO with a 2-token concept - one for staking, called STAKE, and one for transaction fees, called xDai (Dai bridged from Ethereum to the xDai chain).
POSDAO was also deployed to the ARTIS tau1 testnet.
Currently the requirements are rather low, but might increase over time with raising load. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) with 2 Cores, 4GB RAM and 80GB of low-latency storage (e.g. SSD) suffices for now. The same applies for a DappNode based node.
Because the ARTIS network is decentralized, protocol changes can be deployed only by enough node operators updating the node software. Usually, the improvements from the Ethereum ecosystem are built into the node software and at a specific block-height the switch to the latest version is triggered. Some software updates don't change the protocol and are thus not mandatory while updates involving protocol changes require a majority of the node operators to update, otherwise the protocol changes will not come into effect.
Every EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible smart contract language (e.g. Solidity or Vyper) can be used for ARTIS.
Our Virtual Machine will be the same as the one Ethereum is using - the EVM.
Join our Gitter channel and ask for further directions.
ATS is the native token for the ARTIS blockchain network and is needed to pay transaction fees on this public blockchain network.
There are several ways to get your hands on ATS token, while it is not listed on an exchange. The most simple way is to contact people via the public ARTIS Telegram channel or the Gitter channel and state your interest to buy some ATS token. Another way is to get ATS20 token on Ethereum and move them to ARTIS, where you will have to pay the target sales price of 7.2 Euro-cent for 1 ATS (= 13.7603 ATS / EUR). If you intend to invest at least 15,000 € you can also contact the lab10 collective and negotiate a price directly.
You can either engage in an OTC purchase with the community or wait until a public sale via an Initial-Exchange-Offer (IEO) or something similar is done. Currently the public sale is planned for 2021, depending on the demand from the community.
Currently we see a rise of decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, while large exchanges are going through their first consolidation. Building a community and useful applications on the ARTIS blockchain network is therefore paramount and if the development of DeFi on Ethereum continues with the current speed, we expect that ATS token are best traded on Ethereum or one of the various Layer 2 markets launched right now. Consequently, we will monitor what is best to provide sufficient liquidity for everyone willing to engage with the ARTIS network.
You can engage with the ARTIS Blockchain via applications and ATS token are needed to pay transaction costs for those applications. You need ATS to qualify as a validator, which currently needs 4.5m ATS with a prospect to be reduced to 750,000 ATS in preparation for a possible fully permissionless POSDAO system. With the POSDAO system in place, everyone - even with little amounts of ATS - will be able to help securing the network, by staking on their preferred validators and get rewarded for this.
The initial coin supply in Nov. 2018 was 300,000,000 ATS and with every block 1 ATS is minted and given to the validators. With the current block time of 5 seconds, this increase the supply by 6,307,200 ATS per year or about 2.1% inflation. As soon as there is a proper governance defined, it is planned to mint also 1 ATS for a sustainability fund to support interesting projects and applications built for the ARTIS network.
The lab10 collective has currently about 34% of all ATS in circulation and will use them to support the growth of the network. Everything else is free float among early supporters and investors.