# Background

### ~~Information~~ Opoch Age

Humans hunted and gathered food for close to _100,000 years_. The only occupation ensuring survival.&#x20;

Next, agriculture dominated for nearly _10,000 years_. The agricultural age reshaped us as a society paving way for an epoch of pyramids, communities and kingdoms.&#x20;

The las&#x74;_&#x31;,000 years_ saw coming of industrial age making industries and large scale production a norm.

21st century will be the unveiling of the information age. Thes&#x65;_&#x31;00 years_ will reshape us as a true information society.

Internet and the last 25 years have been the early phase of this era. We've seen the global infrastructure come to existence connecting 4+ billion individuals every month\[26]. Internet and information age now await an ascend.

Bitcoin, Blockchain and Web 3.0 are next phase of evolution for internet. Driving their adoption to masses, while reducing friction for interaction and utility, is what Opoch aims to solve.

We know the problem of information abuse and privacy with internet. Blockchain, an enhancement over it does enable us to solve a few today. We believe large scale penetration of Web3.0 technologies would open markets, opportunities and experiences such that each individual realises the arrival of information age. We call it the **Opoch Age.**

### Current Status

Cryptocurrencies have seen tremendous growth in recent years. The total market cap has risen from \~$15B in Dec'16 to \~$400B in Dec'17. The trading volume of these cryptocurrencies has risen from \~250M$/day to \~10B$/day in the same time period \[i].&#x20;

Despite being in hyper-growth phase in the early adopter community, we have not been able to see similar growth curve for larger audience. The percentage of total population using cryptocurrencies beyond trading is very small number. Some aggressive estimates on anyone, who's ever traded or utilised cryptocurrencies are at 76m or <1% of population\[27].

Centralised exchanges are the primary entryway for these users at the moment. However, their critical vulnerabilities are being increasingly exposed blocking mass Crypto acceptance. Hacks, malicious activities, etc. present themselves on almost a daily basis. Next phase of crypto, now calls for decentralised exchanges.

### Bitcoin Blockchain

A blockchain is a decentralized ledger that can record transactions between two parties in a verifiable and permanent way without the need for a central authority \[\[ii]]. Bitcoin was the first blockchain introduced with Bitcoin Whitepaper paving the path to new trustless global economy \[\[iii]]. Bitcoin made it possible to do transfer of economic value without any third party intermediary dictating the rules.&#x20;

~~Script,~~ Bitcoin's stack-based scripting language is at the core of these transactions. This not Turing-complete Script enables the change of parameters to enable complex transactions like Time Lock transactions, Multi-Sig transactions which allows transactions across multiple business use-cases.

### Smart Contracts

As the Bitcoin blockchain grew in popularity, several teams started building over Bitcoin core and created independent blockchains that they felt were an upgrade.&#x20;

It was fundamentally difficult to build applications directly on Bitcoin blockchain, the community efforts were being divided in different projects. It gave rise to the idea of Ethereum and other Smart-contract enabled blockchains.

`Ethereum enabled building Smart-contracts over blockchain with its Turing-complete language Solidity. Smart contracts are computer protocols intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. For instance, Smart-contracts allow us to code value in our programs and build secure trust less escrow systems. They are programs which run exactly as defined without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.`

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