Top Things You Should Know About Ontology (ONT)

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29 Apr 2024

Hey guys, Today I’ve compiled for you, a comprehensive list of questions and answers for the high-performance public blockchain platform – Ontology (ONT).
In the following article, I lay everything out on the line so that you can fundamentally understand what Ontology is and what sets it apart from so many other smart contract functioning, dapp building cryptocurrencies.
I hope you enjoy it.
Oh, and if you haven’t already seen my latest articles on VeChain (VET), Decred (DCR), and Ethereum Classic (ETC), be sure to check those out as well.
The list of Q&A is pretty long so first comes the list of questions that I have prepared the answers to:

What is Ontology?
Who and When Created Ontology?
What is Ontology Gas?
What is the ONT token used for?
Do you mine or stake Ontology?
What are the Dapps atop of Ontology Blockchain?
What are some notable partnerships and collaborations of Ontology?
Where to Store Ontology?
Where to Buy & Sell Ontology?

1. What is Ontology?

Ontology website homepage

Ontology is a high-performance public blockchain and distributed collaboration platform that enables a decentralized network environment that solves key issues of identity security and data integrity.
Ontology’s distributed ledger system includes a core distributed ledger, smart contract system, cross-chain solution, sharding, and security system. With this robust blockchain system, Ontology aims to maximize data sharing and productive collaboration in a trustless manner in attempts to usher in mainstream blockchain adoption for businesses of all sizes.
In addition to the Ontology blockchain framework, the project provides its clients (ie. small, medium, large, and enterprise businesses) with a series of protocols and frameworks that help them build and deploy robust and blockchains and decentralized applications (dapps).

Ontology’s Blockchain Offering:

Ontology’s blockchain infrastructure (source)

Infrastructure
Ontology provides businesses with a high-performance blockchain framework in which other reliable blockchains can be built on. Ontology’s infrastructure is scalable, stable, and allows some level of customization for different business requirements.
Ontology-built blockchains can be built with the following features:

Scalable lightweight universal smart contracts
Scalable WASM contract support
Cross-chain interactive protocol (processing)
Multiple encryption algorithm support
Highly optimized transaction processing speed
P2P link-layer encryption (optional module)
Multiple consensus algorithm support (VBFT/DBFT/RBFT/SBFT/PoW)
Quick block generation time

Extension
Ontology offers businesses a series of pluggable components and protocols which provide their proprietary blockchains with a variety of functions and benefits. Such plug-ins include:

Ontology Multichain
Ontology Sharding
OEP-4 Token Standard
OEP-5 Non-Fungible Token Standard
OEP-8 Crypto Item Standard
Oracle
Anonymous Credential

Developer Frameworks
Ontology provides both individuals and businesses with 8 different development frameworks and toolkits including:

Punica Suite (dapp development framework)
SmartX (one-stop Ontology smart contract IDE)
Cyano Wallet (web-extension wallet)
SDKs (software development kits)
dAPI.js (Lightweight JS library for Ontology developers)
Ontology CLI (Command line client of Ontology)
Sign Server (Service to facilitate account management and secure signing of messages)
Ontology API (RPC/Restful/Websocket specification of Ontology)

2. Who and When Created Ontology?

Onchain website homepage

Ontology (ONT) was created in 2017 by Onchain, a leading blockchain technology company in China.
OnChain is the same company that founded NEO in 2014 and is also spearheaded by NEO’s founders, Erik Zhang and Da HongFei. In other words, Ontology is yet another cryptocurrency created by Erik Zhang and Da HongFei under the guise of Onchain.
When Ontology launched to market, a lot of NEO supporters and crypto/blockchain enthusiasts were confused as to why the founders of NEO launched a brand new cryptocurrency while NEO’s development, goals, and vision were still far from completion.
Well, it appears that Zhang and HongFei were largely driven by venture capital funding at Onchain, which was used to fund and develop a new type of Distributed Networks Architecture (DNA), which was written in a different programming language than NEO.
That said, Onchain discreetly put NEO’s development on the back burner while allocating a lot of their resources towards Ontology’s development with the new DNA. During which time, Ontology launched and stole the spotlight, rising in market cap while NEO faded away into the background.
For a brief time, Ontology even surpassed NEO in market cap in February 2019. This is when many people began to speculate that NEO and Ontology’s founders abandoned NEO in their chase for VC funding and more riches by launching a new cryptocurrency.
Whether this was truly their intention or not is up for debate. Nevertheless, time has since passed and both NEO and Ontology are on good standing ground. The two projects have strategic partnerships together and both are progressing separately.

3. What is Ontology Gas?

Ontology Gas (ONG) logo

Ontology Gas (ONG) is a utility token used for Ontology’s on-chain services.
The Ontology public blockchain network utilizes a dual token (ONT and ONG) model, where Ontology Gas (ONG) is used as a “toll fee” to use the Ontology network. Whenever you make an Ontology (ONT) transaction, you need to pay 0.01 ONG.
In other words, you use ONG to pay for network usage. The token is decoupled from ONT to alleviate the influence of violent fluctuations of the native “ONT asset” value on the gas fee.
The ONG token came into existence when Ontology’s mainnet went live on June 30, 2018, with a total supply of 1,000,000,000 ONG. ONT token holders who held ONT before the mainnet went live could migrate their ONT tokens over to the Ontology mainnet and claim an amount of ONG that’s based on their ONT holdings.
Besides claiming ONG with pre-mainnet ONT tokens, ONT token holders can stake (lock-up) their ONT to contribute to the security of the network by helping to verify transactions and earn rewards paid out in ONG. And according to ONTCalc, you can expect the yearly percentage of ONG earned for staked ONT to be ~2.8%.

4. What is the ONT token used for?

Ontology (ONT) logo

Ontology (ONT) is the native cryptocurrency of the public Ontology blockchain platform and it plays a critical role in Ontology’s governance as well as incentivizing ONT holders to participate in the network with staking rewards.

Ontology (ONT) use cases include:

Staking to grant holders governance rights
Staking to earn rewards paid out in ONG
Trading and speculating

ONT & Governance
Ontology has implemented a novel PoS consensus mechanism called the VBFT consensus algorithm and has adopted what’s called the ‘Triones Consensus Membership System Governance Model’. This on-chain governance model enables anyone with a minimum of 500 ONT to stake it and take part in Ontology’s network governance.
ONT Staking Rewards
Even if you’re not interested in participating in Ontology’s governance system, ONT token holders can still stake ONT to earn a decent annual return on investment of ~2.8%, according to ONTCalc. The ONT staking rewards are paid out in Ontology’s utility token, ONG.
ONT Trading & Speculating
Ontology’s ONT cryptocurrency is a popular coin to invest/trade. As of May 7, 2020, ONT is ranked number 32 on CoinMarketCap and has a decent amount of trading volume and liquidity in comparison with many other cryptos. ONT is a popular speculative investment among cryptocurrency traders.

5. Do you mine or stake Ontology?

You can stake Ontology (ONT) to receive passive income dividends in the form of Ontology’s utility token (ONG). As for mining Ontology, it is not a mineable cryptocurrency; it uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) based consensus mechanism called the VBFT consensus algorithm.

Stake ONT and Earn Rewards

Staking Ontology (ONT) is easy. All you need to do is hold a nonzero balance of ONT in an Ontology-supported cryptocurrency wallet that supports staking to start earning rewards. You don’t even have to lock up your tokens or deposit them into a smart contract address. When Ontology tokens are in your wallet, they automatically generate rewards paid out in ONG.
To get an estimate of how many ONG rewards you can get for your staked ONT, check out ONTCalc, a simple ONT staking calculator.

Stake ONT to Participate in Ontology’s Governance

Ontology uses the VBFT consensus mechanism to secure its network which requires 7 nodes, that are voted in by ONT stakers, to participate in consensus every block. Ontology network participants vote for nodes they trust by staking their ONT tokens in multiples of 500 tokens per stake.
When participating in the governance staking, users actually deposit their ONT into a smart contract for a round to secure their vote. Once staked, the ONT must stay deposited in the smart contract until the voting round is complete (rounds are composed of 120,000 blocks each) with each block ranging from 1 second to 30 seconds.
Users are incentivized to participate in Ontology’s governance staking through rewards paid out in ONG. Staking ONT this way pays more than simply leaving your ONT in a wallet to earn ONG dividends.

6. What are the Dapps atop of Ontology Blockchain?

DappRadar website

There are many dapps built atop of Ontology but for the purpose of simplicity, I cover just the top three here.

HyperDragons Go (blockchain game)
Treasure Land (blockchain game)
Seed (token)

HyperDragons Go
HyperDragons Go is a blockchain-based RPG game that’s featured upwards of 1500 users and volume close to 15K ONG during a 24hr period.
Treasure Land
Treasureland is a blockchain-based multiplayer online role-playing game that’s featured nearly 600 users and 704.5K ONG volume within a 24hr period.
Seed
Seed is a multichain, community participation token that encourages participation through its creation and distribution of SEED, a cryptocurrency token reward for participating in its corresponding blockchain’s governance. Seed has seen upwards of 30 users and nearly 80K ONG during a 24hr period.
All in all, Ontology’s high-performance public blockchain platform has yet to be used for any major enterprise dapps.

7. What are some notable partnerships and collaborations of Ontology?

The Ontology project has garnered a multitude of partnerships and collaborations since its mainnet launch in 2018. Some notable ones include:

Microsoft
GoWithMi
MovieBloc

Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai (Third Cohort) Graduation Award

(Source)

On June 21, 2018, Microsoft held an accelerator program/exhibition event where OnChain won the Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai (Third Cohort) Graduation Award for their Ontology blockchain platform.
GoWithMi Joint Venture to Develop a Decentralized Location-Based Service Ecology

(Source)

On February 27, 2019, Ontology launched a million-dollar investment in GoWithMi to build cross-platform, decentralized, location-based service infrastructure with a focus on the digital twin virtual land rights based on the public chain of Ontology.
MovieBloc
On March 12, 2019, Ontology announced a partnership with MovieBloc, a movie & content distribution platform based on KMPlayer and blockchain.

8. Where to Store Ontology?

ONTO Wallet website homepage

Ontology is a popular cryptocurrency and is supported by a wide variety of reputable cryptocurrency wallets.
However, not every ONT wallet is the same.
The only wallets that support Ontology’s governance staking are the core software wallets. As for third-party wallets supporting Ontology, most of them only support automatic ONT dividend payments in ONG and some don’t even support that.
That said, see the most popular Ontology (ONT & ONG) cryptocurrency wallets below:

Official Ontology Wallets:

OWallet (desktop)
ONTO (mobile)

Third-Party Ontology Wallets:

Atomic Wallet (desktop, mobile)
Cobo (mobile)
Exodus Wallet (desktop, mobile)
Guarda Wallet (desktop, mobile, web)
Ledger Wallet (hardware)

9. Where to Buy & Sell Ontology?

Ontology (ONT) can be bought and sold on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis but the most popular way to buy, sell, or trade Ontology is through cryptocurrency exchanges.
You can buy ONT with cryptocurrency or fiat at the following top exchanges. In most cases, you will have to fund your account with fiat, buy Bitcoin or Ethereum, and then use BTC or ETH to buy Ontology (symbol ONT).

Binance - BTC, ETH, BNB, BUSD, USDT, USD
Kucoin - BTC, ETH, USDT
OKEx - BTC, ETH, USDT
Bittrex - BTC, USDT
Huobi Global - BTC, ETH, USDT, USD

In addition to the exchanges listed above, Ontology (ONT) is also traded on a wide array of other exchanges and platforms that enable people to buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrencies.
Hope you enjoyed that read, Let me know if I have missed something in the comments.
Cryptocurrency Blockchain platform Ontology (ONT) Ontology Gas (ONG)