Fennel Protocol
- Team Name: Fennel Labs
- Payment Address: 0xF505894841d53AaBDe6EdeA7C5970fFe3A0240b2 (DAI)
- Level: 2
Project Overview πβ
Overviewβ
Fennel Labs and Whiteflag Foundation aim to improve the ways that organizations communicate with each other in calamitous situations and austere environments where coordination and deconfliction is vital.
This grant proposal describes the first step of a long-term plan to develop Fennel Protocol, a Substrate chain that will provide the Polkadot ecosystem with the Whiteflag Protocol specification, an open standard for a neutral and trusted messaging network based on blockchain technology.
The background of the Whiteflag specification is as follows:
Current armed conflicts are highly complex, because of the sheer number of parties involved: regular military forces, armed groups, peacekeeping forces, neutral parties such as journalists and non-governmental human-rights and aid organisations, civilians, refugees etc. Even though parties are opposing forces, or neutral organisations that do not want to show any affiliation, they do require to quickly and directly communicate to one or more other parties involved in the conflict in different situations.
This is not new. The white flag is the original internationally recognized protective sign of truce or ceasefire, and request for negotiation. A white flag signifies to all that an approaching negotiator is unarmed, with an intent to surrender or a desire to communicate.
This standard for a digital white flag protocol, the Whiteflag Protocol, provides a reliable means for both combatant and neutral parties in conflict zones to digitally communicate pre-defined signs and signals using blockchain technology. These sign and signals can also be used to communicate information about natural and man-made disasters, thus creating shared situational awareness beyond conflicts.
All in all, the protocol forms the basis for a neutral and open network, the Whiteflag Network, for trusted real-time messaging between parties in conflicts and disaster response.
One can find more details about the Whiteflag Protocol specification by clicking on these links:
Project Detailsβ
Fennel Protocol will be a blockchain implementing the protocol outlined in our specification documents. As such, the interface will be exposed through Substrate extrinsics, callable through normal RPC execution. The protocol implementation itself will ship as a standard Substrate executable node. Docker will be used to generate consistent testing environments, and Github Actions will provide continuous revision checking against a set of tests defined during the development process.
The Protocol will consist of 3 Runtime Modules - fennel_trust_pallet
, fennel_keystore_pallet
, and fennel-signal
.
Documentation for the in-progress development of these modules is located on GitHub and is refreshed as changes are accepted into the main
branch of the source repository.
The high-level project specification is located on Github as well and is available as a PDF.
For exact specifications of storage, events, and extrinsics definitions, visit:
A proof-of-concept for the basic functionality of Fennel Protocol was completed as the winning entry to the Conflict Prevention track of the Odyssey Momentum Hackathon in 2020, under the name Theriak. The repository for that project is located on GitHub. The features for this proof-of-concept included key management, basic trust operations, and a simple, preliminary version of the signaling mechanism.
Fennel Protocol is not a user-facing application. Though applications are planned, they are beyond scope for this proposal.
Team π₯β
Team membersβ
- Sean Batzel
- Isaac Adams
- Andre Vanoncini
- Fernando Fonseca-Avalos
- Mateusz Plaza
- Jan Eberle
Contactβ
- Contact Name: Fennel Labs Core Team
- Contact Email: info@fennellabs.com
- Website: www.fennellabs.com
Legal Structureβ
- Registered Address: 1309 Coffeen Avenue Suite 1200, Sheridan, Wyoming 82801
- Registered Legal Entity: Fennel Labs, LLC.