Oracles on Cardano

Foreword

Blockchain Oracles is a very important piece of blockchain and we have learned through a series of articles about oracles by the authors team. And Cardano isnt an exception, Oracles will be the gateway connecting Cardano to the world outside it. However, to build an oracles project on a special ecosystem like Cardano is not easy. Here we will learn about how Oracles are and will be developed on Cardano.

I. Oracles Projects.

The first and also very familiar to many people is thinking of projects and teams specializing in building and developing Oracles networks. Since last year there have been a lot of statements or announcement made by some teams.

A. Chainlink.

During the Cardano summit in October 2021, Cardano announced a partnership with Chainlink to develop Oracles. Chainlink will become a partner providing their network resources to Cardano.

 

This is a necessary combination because Chainlink is the largest network of Oracles in the current blockchain with thousands of combined projects. Along with a huge data source, network across blockchains and a professional development team.

Chainlink promises to be an important link for the development of Oracles on Cardano. But up to now, it has been 1 year, we still have not seen many appearances of the name Chainlink on Cardano's ecosystem.

This can be explained by the following reasons:

1 . The crypto market is in downtrend, transactions or projects are not as active as in 2021.

2 . The Dapps on Cardano have not actually exploded or are still in the building phase.

3 . The difference in Cardano's smart contract language (Plutus) and the core smart contract language Chainlink built from the begining (Solidity).

Thus, it will also take time for Cardano and Chainlink to find a common voice with each other. But it's still a promising combination.  

B. Charli3

The first Oracles project to announce that it will build Oracles on top of Cardano. When it first appeared in the middle of 2021, Charli3 received a lot of attentions and expectations. But it also comes with disappointment when up to the present time Charli3 has not met the community's expectations.

 

Looking at it objectively, Charli3 still needs a lot of time to build a good oracles protocol on Cardano. Difficult jobs that they need to do such as:

1. Build a network of nodes.

2. Build a smart contract framework.

3. Connect to quality data sources.

In the elements mentioned above, it seems that the second element is being well implemented by Charli3. They showed how oracles (plutus) smart contracts should work on Cardano.  

Design the operating model of Charli3's Oracles

This smart contract is also audited by Certik. This is something that even Chainlink has not been able to do. The author will present Charli3's oracles operating model in another article because this may be a worthwhile operating model for projects that want to build Oracles that can run on the eUTXO ledger system.  

Diagram of oracles operation when using Charli3 .'s UTXO

C. Other projects.

At the time of writing, there are also a number of other projects that claim to build the Oracles network on Cardano such as API3, Piggy or Orcfax. But in general, they are just statements and do not actually do anything.

 API3 : An Oracles project which is also quite famous in 2021 and considers itself a "Chainlink killer". However, API3 just stopped and announced that they would build Oracles on Cardano, but did not do anything.

Piggy: This could be an interesting project. The Piggy project came out around Q4 of 2021 and is supposed to build Oracles on top of Cardano. But only until 2022, this project did nothing but call to attract token stakes, sell tokens for profit.

Orcfax: This project gives very little information on how they will implement the construction of the Oracles network. And they also have a period of about half a year of downtime without knowing the reason.

  

II. The Idea of a Decentralized Oracles Network on Cardano by Charles Hokinson

In a short video broadcast on youtube at the end of 2020, Charles Hokinson - CEO of Cardano shared about the idea of ​​building a decentralized Oracles network for the Cardano ecosystem. From the author's personal perspective, this is a very interesting idea and fits well with Cardano's philosophy of building an ecosystem.

What elements does a network of Oracles need? a. Diverse and reliable data sources. b. A system or platform that computes, analyzes, and validates the accuracy of data. c. A network of participating actors providing and transferring that data in the blockchain

  In the above shared clip, there are 3 important components mentioned: Singularity.Net, Wolfram Alpha and node operators (SPO).

1 . Wolfram Alpha

As a platform that provides a variety of solutions to analyze and calculate data in accordance with web3 standards. Wolfram also owns a huge real-life data source that allows users to look up and collect a lot of necessary information.

Many large companies around the world use Wolfram's services or are partners, it can be said that this is the first important piece of the puzzle that Cardano has achieved. Thus, Wolfram Alpha will correspond to the factor "a" mentioned above.

2 . Singularity.Net

The information and data put into the blockchain is extremely diverse and decentralized. So to be able to authenticate and ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data included in the Oracles contracts, it is necessary to have a platform that can compute and analyze them. Singularity with the power of AI will be a great tool to help the data about Oracles be processed correctly.

Beside the core part of AI technology, Singularity also has projects in their ecosystem set up to collect data from sources around the world. Eg - Collaborate with Ocean protocol to collect data about all Defi related events in blockchain. - Developing the Nunet project specializing in decentralized computing and decentralized shared data storage. So Singularity will correspond to the factor "b"

3 . SPO

The last component is the pool operators (SPO), it can be said that SPO are the people who will maintain, operate and develop the Cardano ecosystem in the future. All benefits and risks are closely associated with SPO. So the SPO will play the main role as the processor of Oracles contracts, operating the decentralized Oracles system for Cardano.  

SPO plays an important role in Cardano's Oracles system

As the author mentioned in the first article in this series, the essence of blockchain oracles is simply putting real-life data into a blockchain to satisfy a certain request arising from that blockchain. So it is not necessary to rely on specify platforms to be able to deploy blockchain oracles.

Looking at the image above, it looks like a lot of Cardano's current development direction for SPO. Then the Oracles system in the future will be a position of great benefit to SPOs if they know how to operate it properly.

SPO in Cardano can take advantage of pre-built platforms by Cardano like Singularity, Wolfram Alpha, professional oracles networks like Chainlink. In the future when SPOs can operate Hydra, Sidechain, the amount of on-chain data that SPO owns will be of great value.  

Conclusion

Through this article, we can see how Oracles will develop on Cardano in the future. There will be professional platforms like Chainlink, Charli3...will have a system of SPOs supported by Cardano to participate in providing Oracles services.

All will be oriented in a decentralized way and follow the most basic concepts of blockchain Oracles. In the following articles we will go into depth about how a blockchain oracles model can work on Cardano.  

Sources: https://vcoincheck.io/cardano-knowledge/LB120221117085228

Clip community sharing knowledge about Oracles of Vcoincheck team (Vietnamese language)