Introduction to Flare Protocols I Victor Muñoz

Hi everyone. Uh I am super excited to have this opportunity to present this workshop uh with the title introduction to Flur Protocols. If you're watching this, probably it is because you are starting to build on Flur or you're curious about it and want to learn um how to build your first project on Flare or if you're already building, you want to have a few tips. Um, my name is Victor Munes and I'm a developer advocate at Flare Networks. And in today's workshop, I am going to teach you some of the fundamentals to start building with Flur data protocols.

For those who are not aware, Flur is a layer one blockchain specialized in bringing data on chain in an efficient way through our core data protocols. We have something that is called enshrined oracles which means that we have oracles that are part of the network itself not an external component. And today we're going to learn how to utilize this to build new types of solutions. So let's move forward. Okay.

So um in today's session what can you expect? Well, first of all, I really want you to understand how you can use Flur to build new solutions. So, we're talking about uh layer one blockchain that has enshrined oracle. And that means that you can build solutions that are data intensives, but you can also build other protocols and products on top of these other pro uh other protocols. And we're going to explore exactly how this works.

Now I want you to learn uh a very powerful tool today which is called the flirt data connector that allows you to interact with the external work and bring events on chain to flare network. And finally we are going to have a very basic introduction to a very powerful tool called flare smart accounts. This is going to be in close connection with a new protocol that we have deployed called F assets which really is a sort of overcolateralized bridge that allows non smart contracts to have um EVM access to EVM and programmability and defy through all of this. Now let's move forward and understand what is really Flur all about. As I told you uh a few seconds ago, there is a layer one blockchain solution, right?

It is AVN compatible. That means that anything that you can build um on Ethereum, you can actually build on Flare as well uh in a very simple way. Now, the thing about Flare is that it it it's enabling u ways of connecting blockchains and liquidity. So if you think about it, blockchains were created to be secure and that means that they were not created in principle to connect with the external world because the moment you do that in principle um you are introducing new sources of risk, new sources that can um you know pose a threat to the security of your architecture. Now the thing about flare is that we created uh enshrined oracles and those oracles are secured by the network stake.

So this is completely different approach from what you can find on other uh blockchains that usually rely on external parties to connect data to the blockchain. Right? So we have three main uh products as of now and one important tool that is called flare smart accounts. Um but in terms of products first we have two enshrined oracles called the FTSO or Flur time series oracle and the FDC or Flur data connector. The FTSO is an enshrined oracle that provides decentralized data feeds to the flare network.

So think about having all sources of price fits on chain in a reliable and fast way. This is the tool that you will utilize uh to get those price fits. Um now moving forward into connecting external data and events to the flur network so that the uh flirt smart contracts can you know produce certain actions based on these events. Um here we're talking about this other protocol called the FDC or Flur data connector. Um and as the description as the description there says this is a protocol that brings verified data and actions from other blockchains on the internet onchain to Flare smart contracts.

Today we're going to explore a concrete example about this and what is interesting is that you can utilize these data protocols to build other uh protocols or solutions on top. One of them that we recently launched is called F assets which is a trustless overcolateralized asset representation from non smart contract platforms. So today we are talking about FXRP which is an a synthetic asset one backed by XRP. If you are aware of XRP you know that it doesn't have native programmability. Um so for them it's not like simple to have access to EVM DeFi.

Uh and there is a bunch of liquidity. It is at the moment of this video uh the fifth largest u market cap in crypto. So it is not a minor thing to put this idle asset to work. And we are doing this thanks to the F asset system. We're going to see within a few seconds that this F asset system works uh in a unique way because it relies on these other data protocols, the FTSO and the FTC.

So I want you to win if you're going to participate on this hackathon and that you have a strong chance and the way you do that is by using our protocols in a meaningful way. We are sharing all the information about what are the main tracks and how we want you to approach this in terms of utilizing these data protocols uh to build new solution. So if you think about it, most applications actually rely on external data or external events and the world right now is multi-chain, right? So you can rely on for data protocols to build something that is datari and on top of that you can also think about working with the fet system so that you play around with this new synthetic asset FXRP and provide new solutions that perhaps are not yet in the market. You have to think about this because it is the first time that we are putting an idle asset to work with EVM programmability on DeFi.

So of course you will find all the standard things let's say uh DeFi borrowing and and lending and swaps and whatnot. But on top of that there is a bunch of tooling and a bunch of use cases for this new asset that are yet to be built. So think about this and I can assure you that if your case is innovating enough and the implementation is correct um you're going to have a strong chance of winning. Now moving forward I want to take one second to explain uh the flirt data connector. So the first thing that you probably want to do is to explore our documentation.

I'm going to show you around within a few seconds, but of course I put there a QR link code so that you get started uh right away. So essentially what we have here is uh a sort of atestation client for the FTC in which you will have all of these uh you will be able to collect all of this information from external blockchains such as Ethereum and then have uh decentralized consensus attesting that data on Flare and having a voting round that will essentially validate the information that you are providing and once it is validated you can use on chain. Um, a very, you know, straightforward use case for this would be insurance. Uh, we likely are not going to touch that in detail today, but it is worth checking out in our documentation. Now, moving forward, what I do want you to understand because this tool is crucial to build powerful solutions on Flur is how the Flare data connector flow actually works.

Because at the end of the day you will have some sort of if you want to explore for instance a web two solution connecting uh with the blockchain you will have a web two API right and then you will have some sort of processing rules for the data that you want to validate and then you will have some data that will be attested to the change to then generate uh a proof a cryptographic proof that can be verified and based on that then you will have some sort of a smart contract that is going to take this information that has been verified on chain and then do something about it right and that's the whole like highle flow and we're going to explore this live uh within a few seconds um utilizing cursor but right now I just want you to understand with this very simple example that we're going to work through uh which is with a web two API from Star Wars so we will have an AP call uh we will have some processing rules using jq. Uh then we will have the process of fdc verification. This is just a a few coding commands that we are going to have to input so that we trigger this voting. Um and then of course you want to have some sort of smart contracts that is going to utilize this. Um and in this case we're going to add a new information from a character of the star wars.

Then we're going to perform a non-chain calculation of a new parameter BMI which means body to mass ratio or something like that doesn't really matter. Uh and then you will have a permanent storage on the flare blockchain. So you can you know read more information about this on the documentation and you know you can explore the floor which is actually what we're going to be doing today within a few seconds uh with you know a hands-on session. So uh very quickly I also want to emphasize that if you want to work um flare and build powerful solutions you also have to try to understand the facet system. Um that means understanding which are the different components and how this overcolateralized bridge works at a high level.

So essentially you will have a user that is going to select an agent. An agent is a sort of operator in this system that manages different functions and you will pay a fee to reserve this collateral. So if you're on the XRP layer, uh you're a mentor, right? And you will send your XRP to this agent uh and then go and start the process by reserving some collateral on Flare. So here you can see some of the complications because Fl EVM the XRP layer is not.

So we are talking about users that are on two different kind of universes, right? Um so we need to simplify all of these and that's why we're going to touch base on a tool called per smart accounts. Now the user sends the underlying asset to the agent and then we're going to utilize the flur data connector to verify the transaction. We're going to verify that something happens on the XRP layer on the flirt network. And once that happened, you will be able to mint the same amount of uh FXRP uh considering the initial XRP uh that you submitted to the agent and then you have a new programmable uh one-on-one asset for XRP that you can do interesting things with, right?

like you know play with F assets and and play with DeFi uh with XRP through uh FXRP. Now um I don't have much uh time here to explain everything in detail but thinking about this asset system I really want you to think also how to implement flare smart accounts. So here you would have a user on the XRP layer and an operator in which the user will send this XRPL payment to this operator's uh address on the XRP uh and and and you will have to put what is the information about the desired action right and this is encoded in in the memo field uh and that can be minting this asset FXRP or call certain function on a bolt on defy on flur right and you can do all of these from the XRP P ledger and you know controlling things on Flur and executing things on Flur and this is extremely powerful and it simplifies a lot the experience for uh users. Um then you will have the operator that watches the XRP layer uh the payment land on the XRP layer and then of course you have to verify things. So the uh operator asks the splur data uh connector for a cryptographic payment proof that uh XRP layer transaction actually took place and then the FDC will return the proof and then there will be another component called the master controller that is on the flare side um in which the operator submit the proof and the controller contract will verify this and you know then from the controller to the personal account on the flur side uh if it's valid the controller creates or locates that user personal account which is a smart account and executes the memo instruction on the user's behalf.

Right? So we're going to explore this very powerful flow within a few seconds. Um so let's get our hands dirty now. Um so let's get our hands dirty. The first thing that you want to do is uh visit the flare developer have on dev.

flare.net network and then go to the FDC section the guides that we have created and then uh click on the one that says hard hat and then specifically we're going to go over the web two JSON example which allows you to verify web two data uh on chain and perform certain action. Now uh what you want to do here is uh read that guide and then you know you will realize that you will have to fork this flare hard starter kit. Um it's fairly simple to follow this is instructions to do git clone um and then you know install all the dependencies and then compile and you know execute here npx hard hat compile and you know the usual setup. So I'm I did this already on um you know on cursor which is what you see here on the screen.

Uh and you know I'm here on the web tojson.ts script. Uh this is the terminal. I already uh click I actually run the main command here which is regard run scripts fdc example um web to JSON. Uh we did this on custom two.

Let me do that one more time here. uh it's fairly straightforward and the reason I did this beforehand is because the entire flow it does takes a little bit of time as you can see here on the screen it took almost a little bit over two minutes because what it did is just run a script uh do the formal voting for certain information that we are quering for my star API uh and then utilizing that to calculate something on chain. So what I want you to do is that you run all of this stuff. Uh and it's going to look a little bit awful here in terms of like what is really showing because there is a process of encoding and decoding. And what I want you to do is very simple because you will utilize the same starter kit uh in order to you know do something for verifying other data on chain and and you know creating new use cases right.

So you can do this for insurance, you can do this for social media, you can do it for many things. So I'm going to tell you, please explain to me um what is this result and the code that does each thing like very generic thing and I'm just copy pasting here all the code and what it's doing now is of course it's going through all of these files. is reading the lines of code that I shared here and is checking every single utility function, every single piece of code that is implemented on this hard started kit and what I should expect expect on each one of these steps. So the final result is R2D2 data is now stored on the flare blockchain and has been verified by the flare data connector system. Um and you know it it's going to explain even it's going to explain to you like the at the station the key concepts the voting round that happens on flare the Merkel proof uh when you query the DI layer the data availability layer on flare and you know you have each one of the steps that I mentioned before of the flow in this stepby-step breakdown and then you can uh query even pieces of code of this TypeScript code web tojson.

ts that has the entire flow. So if you go over this, you will probably want to modify a few things in order to make it work for your use case. But you really want to get started from here. Now on the last two minutes, I really want to go over uh Flur smart accounts. Now for Flur smart accounts, uh I want you to realize that you know you have plenty of uh alternatives here.

Let me see here. This is the relevant code, the relevant GitHub code. uh we want to use something called flirt smart accounts uh which is the command line interface. So if you go here and you click on uh flirt smart accounts CLI you will see a developer guide that has all of the dependencies uh that you can of course you have to install the requirements do the same thing and then you will have CLI commands from which you can interact with the f asset system and what you can do here is actually quite interesting because you can think about implementing u different types of functionalities. I actually asked here to uh this AI agent here uh on this uh smart account CLI.

So if you want to get some basic uh information for instance you can just ask the help command here. Uh you can actually print for instance the information related to your account. Um you can uh mint and and you can you know you can actually see here the information about um the smart accounts. But uh really what you want to focus on is on the main commands. So I won't have time to go over these main commands, but I'm going to show you where you can find each of these.

Of course, this has all the explanation that you might want to see. And then you will have to learn this encode uh and and this process of how how does it work to encode an instruction that we can send on the XRP layer to then trigger some actions on the Flare network. And you will you can you can go back and forth uh between these two chains and you know put some assets on bolts on flare and we have some very concrete examples on which kind of commands you can execute here uh just like I did uh in recently on the terminal and you can verify that these steps are actually working in the way it is. Now, if you have any questions, I know this was a little bit short, uh, but I strongly advise you to check out all of these guides and that you try to, um, you know, go over this process of understanding the Facet cycle and how you can work with this CLI command so that you can turn actions on the XRP layer on Flur and utilize this new programmable liquidity that is being brought by FXRP in a way that is automatic, and hides All of the complexity.