Building the Ethereum of Oracles | Jasper de Gooijer - https://www.seda.xyz/

[Music] thanks everybody for being here um today we'll be talking about how we're building the ethereum of oracles at seta and before we dive into that I wanted to take you guys through sort of like the era or the ages of uh crypto middleware in infrastructure so it all started in the age of Bitcoin and this is the era of Peace there was just like users interacting with one network for the most part through um wallets that were connected to rpcs to the Bitcoin chain and Bitcoin was just like this monolithic application specific network uh that had the only goal of essentially accounting um throughout this era there were some competitors that came to Market but most of them were just incremental improvements or application specific change that were a bit early then we entered the age of the monolith we had ethereum join to the party and outside of just having uh one wallet or one set of wallets or infrastructure to interact with Bitcoin a second set uh came to life to interact with ethereum and other than that there was a new need for infrastructure uh because ethereum was not only a blockchain that didn't just do accounting it's also a platform to build application upon and these applications um very early on noticed that because they didn't have access to any data outside of their blockchains execution environment they were heavily Limited in the sort of like use cases uh that they were able to power um so this is where some middleware infrastructure such as oracles uh came into play and at this time there was not really interoperability because there was just like Bitcoin and E for the most part so if you wanted to swap currencies or swap chains you did that through a centralized exchange um there are some other chains that launched around the same time with similar functionality to eth but at this stage I don't think they're relevant enough to mention anymore for the most part um then we entered the of fragmentation and I think we are about in the final stages of this era right now um to visualize this is we have like a bunch of blockchains right during the in the beginning and you're seeing that the middleware uh is not completely reusable there's not enough standards so you're seeing that um middleware that was built for ethereum originally such as oracles need to redeploy their entire infrastructure structure it doesn't scale well uh to all these different chains and at this stage what you're seeing is that um some of the middleware is actually starting to act as king makers if you can get some of the like great middleware providers to launch uh on your chain that is like a huge selling point and I don't think that's necessarily what our industry was built around um yeah uh this is now I mean a few months ago even so imagine trying to serve all of these network with sort of like the previous iteration of middleware and infrastructure that we saw um that's not working very well there's like huge weight times huge uh sort of like uh fees that you're paying or contracts that you're signing with these middleware companies in order for them to launch to your uh to your network so it's time for middleware to catch up um at seta we believe that we're now about to enter the age of hypers specialization we are going to see a bunch of hyp specialized uh Network spin up and these networks are going to do one thing really really well and through seamless interoperability will be able to create an experience that's cheaper than what you're seeing with a bunch of the monolithic chains that are out there to day because you have like specialized networks doing just the thing that they're designed to do and yeah as interoperability gets better that will be like more realistic um so I think we're right now we're like right between the age of fragmentation and specialization uh some of the things to look out for right now are like chain abstraction and intents that are really like going to be powering this stuff so for seta entering this age of hypers specialization um we wanted to do the following uh we had to following design goals kind of so we had we wanted it to be horizontally scalable that means that new um chains launching and wanting to interact with our Network should not add necessarily more load or integration times um the second point is modularity uh which is kind of like I'd say it's like permissionless accessibility uh we want new blockchains new smart contract Chains new rollups to be able to plug into our infrastructure from day one and have access to some of the core features that are necessary for uh sort of like having a successful ecosystem right so if you're building an ecosystem there is um two things you three things you want you want developers you want liquidity and you want you users and if you don't have it's sort of like a chicken egg Coupe problem or no or something you know like you need you kind of need all three and you need to have like this this network effect and in order to um to do that there's like a base level of infrastructure that you need and as there's new ch ch uh chains launching every day and that's only going to accelerate over the next few years um you need to have permissionless infrastructure to yeah basically be able to plug in and and get sort of like this base uh infrastructural Necessities such as like interoperability price feeds Etc um very much leaning onto that as well is the programmable part uh the fact that uh seta does not dictate uh what feeds you have access to you can actually launch your own feed on our Network so if there's like some longtail asset that's not supported uh day one you can essentially deploy what we call a uh program to the Sai chain that dictates how data has to be qu I'll dive into that in a sec so what does this infrastructure look like um a little bit intimidating it's it's quite simple uh you have requests for data flows down data flows up and uh we'll dive a little bit deeper into how this works exactly but the key is is that we have the seta chain which is a uh checkpointing and settlement layer this is where uh sort of like a single source of Truth where people stake and uh slashing happens in case of misbehavior then we have the overlay Network which is a uh MPC layer so multi-party computation Network that does the query and compute uh of the actual uh feeds the data feeds and then on top of that we have the data providers which is sort of like the supply side of data and these data providers can be anything anything it can be price data to power price feeds and defi it can be RPC data providers to provide interoperability or execution proofs for solver networks uh it can be llms uh to create agentic smart contracts that can interact and own essentially rights to Smart contracts or defi data providers for like I don't know funny uh like longtail uh Finance applications um yeah oh and then on top of that you have like the solver relays the relays is the distribution mechanism so like I said before seta chain is the single source of truth but how do you uh from there bridge that data over to the actually consumer chains and that's what the solver network uh is there for uh let's take a little bit of a closer look and like how this would work if I would want to query a new price feed so what I would do as a deployer of a new feed is I would deploy what we call a program to the network and the program is essentially a wasen binary that dictates it's like a set of instructions that dictates what data is to be queried from where and then how that should be computed into a final outcome so you deploy this to uh the seta chain and in return you get a ID referencing uh your program then anybody that actually wants to program to be executed by the set a chain references this program in a transaction to the seta chain the seta chain then uses vrfs to select a secret random Committee of overlay noes NPC noes that are then selected to actually perform the query and computation um so yeah let we'll zoom in on like the overlay node right now so the overlay Noe is essentially a wrapper around a wasm FM and it just e blindly sort of like executes the uh the binary so it just does like in this example it like queres four sources and takes the median uh median price um it then reports the final outcome that comes out of the computation back to the seta chain where it's then batched merized and signed by the validator set and then this is where the solver relays come in because of the way we use uh because of like our cryptographic uh sort of like um accumulation on the seta chain you'll have a signature that can be verified on any destination Chain by any smart contract which allows you to prove uh data state so any solver can then come and essentially Bridge the data from seta to a destination chain of their need so there's like sort of like three triggers that I'd say would trigger a solver to do this uh the first one is that it's a solver run by a project so let's say I run a lending protocol and a rollup I deployed and I want the price to be updated every minute um what I would do is I would run my own solver that basically just pings the seta chain every minute and updates it on my destination chain um the second reason is because maybe there is me Exposed on the destination chain right so there is a liquidation that can be uh executed on a lending uh rollup so me as a solver decides to bridge the data over and um yeah liquidate the position because it's profitable for me and then the third one is because there is a bounty posted on the destination chain it's sort of similar to the second point of me but it's not uh yeah it's like just the Bounty being posted on the destination chain and I can claim that Bounty by bridging data over uh in case that the application does not want to be responsible for the delivery of the data um yeah so to run the point sort of home of why I sort of like make this comparison between seta and ethereum is that you can describe ethereum as enabling anyone to deploy smart contract which then any other person or themselves can interact with or any smart contract right um seta enables anyone to deploy data feeds which can be interacted one by any smart contract on any chain and it's sort of like how Bitcoin was sort of the application specific blockchain uh that just did like one thing that it was programm to do that's also what you're seeing with a lot of the Oracle products that are out there today is like they're just doing price feeds they're just doing bridging where we're trying to build a more of a platform that allows people to build permissionless data products uh on top um yeah that was it thank you very much I'll be out front there if anybody has questions