Oracles The Old Way of Doing Business Is Dead | Meredith Pitkoff - Stork Oracle

[Music] my name is Meredith I'm the co-founder and CEO at stor Labs uh we're the main development company behind stor a decentralized Oracle Network and uh I'm very excited to be here today so thanks for having me I will be diving into why the old way of doing business for oracles no longer works today um or I guess a little bit more strongly is dead and uh before we actually dive into the business models though we're going to lay some of the groundwork or foundational understanding of what an oracle is and how it's used oracles were created essentially to connect blockchains to external systems the way that you can think about an external system is anything that's happening outside of the blockchain itself um that can apply to offchain data or it can even apply to what's happening on another blockchain but for the purposes of this presentation we're going to be focused on offchain data and to dive into really how blockchain or oracles are used on blockchains uh back in you know 2020 2021 the first use case with real product Market fit was leveraging oracles to provide the price feeds of major cryptocurrencies for Lending protocols so that they could valuate collateral positions um and you know just to like remind ourselves of what blockchain ecosystem looked like at that time we only had you know a handful of blockchains coming to Market we did only anticipated a handful existing it was incredibly expensive to launch these blockchains so a lot of the new new folks coming into the space after etheria mainnet and sler were raising tons and tons of capital um and also these lending protocols themselves were only accepting collateral positions for the major cryptocurrencies so you could imagine you know the top 10 top 15 cryptocurrencies would actually be accepted so what that actually looked like in terms of a product for oracles to support was periodic updates on what is the price of Bitcoin or ethereum or soul and putting that on a single blockchain every few hours very from 6 12 even sometimes every 24 hours if there wasn't a lot of volatility in the market and I'm not going to get too into the weeds of what the architecture looked like but I do think it's important to just give a high Lev overview of when an oracle wanted to integrate with a blockchain it would basically have to stand up infrastructure from the ground up for each individual blockchain so what we're looking at here is an oracle integrating with a single blockchain and the important piece here is really looking at that third row where it says publisher so sometimes referred to as a data publisher or an oracle node operator but either way uh this publisher would put data directly on the blockchain so in the instance or example of a lending protocol trying to evaluate collateral you could imagine each of these three Publishers is publishing the price of BTC at a given time on the blockchain that they're integrating with and then from there there would be a smart contract on the chain that would aggregate that data determine what is the actual price um often times a median calculation and then store it to that contract which then can be queried by daps themselves or decentralized applications so um okay the things to take away from this though are basically if I'm an Oracle and I want to integrate with two chains I have to rebuild this entire stack twice if I want to integrate with five chains five times so that means your costs increase linearly every time you integrate with a new chain uh also gas at this time was pretty expensive and the Publishers were bearing the cost of each so basically the outcome of this is it's actually quite expensive to integrate with a new chain and there's a lot of pressure to limit the amount of data that's getting put on chain in order to keep costs in line okay so this this model doesn't work any anymore and given that we're not in 2021 anymore I'm sure everyone kind of has an inkling why but just just to lay it out you know we have seen an absolute proliferation of new chains uh we no longer live in a world where maybe there will be 10 you know legitimate blockchains um instead we're seeing hundreds now and anticipate thousands so um what's happening alongside this is basically it's becoming increasingly cheaper and easier to Launch new blockchain and you know we used to think of a blockchain being this general purpose chain where you could have thousands of applications building on top of it so if you're an oracle putting data on that chain you're basically thinking of this as a public good right so I'm going to put the price of bit or my network is going to put the price of Bitcoin on this chain and now thousands of applications can leverage that price point and as a result oracles would actually charge millions of dollars to integr with a single chain but we're seeing seeing this shift in Market while yes we still have General blockchains but we also see Specialized blockchains or app chains where they're catering to a smaller number of applications or perhaps their own application in which case SP spending millions of dollars for an oracle integration makes no sense um just to like further iterate the point it there are a number of rollups as a service companies now you could think gelato Caldera conduit um another a number of others that make it incredibly easy and cheap to launch a blockchain uh or a rollup basically you can do it in a matter of minutes um sometimes even seconds and uh you know if you're on test net you might not be paying a single Dollar in order to do so so if you're thinking about additional infrastructure that you need to integrate with your own chain you're obviously going to expect that you can integrate it almost as fast and also incredibly cheap okay so beyond new chains why else is this uh architecture that we saw in the previous slide why why doesn't it work well it wasn't designed to support low latency apps as I mentioned you only see updates every six 12 24 hours and as a result the entire end to-end flow of getting that data on chain could take several seconds and that wasn't seen as a massive tradeoff but we now see you know uh an increase of many daps that are focused on real time as well as chains themselves in 2022 we started to see a surge of decentralized perss come to Market and that has only taken off since there's now 100 plus decentralized perss and all of them are thinking about how can I get data as fast as possible to ensure that I'm minimizing risk on my platform um similarly we have a number of you know low latency realtime l2s and l1's coming to Market who are all thinking we want to be able to provide a ux to the end users here that is competitive with web 2 and so what that means is things need to happen as low latency as possible we're seeing block times that are sub 1 second um some even been touting you know 50 millisecond latency or block times um and then we're you know with mega eth we're seeing some realtime blockchains in product uh being built as well so that means that the data that's being fed into those systems needs to be able to keep up as well and that's incredibly hard to retrofit into something that wasn't designed for Speed and then the last one is we're seeing just new use cases come to Market so the old model was really designed for the singular use case it was quite rigid um and it didn't support a lot of different data types so as we try to bring New Primitives to the space new use cases for applications that comes with that our requirements for new new types of data so ener stor um I won't bog us down too much with all the details of what's happening in the architecture here but I'll just talk about it at a high level from from left to right some of the innovations that we've made that we think address these problems so first of all overall we've modularized the stock and so what that means is as a first class citizen we want this Oracle to be incredibly composable and support the unique needs of anyone who wants to partner with us and we also want to be able to leverage our stock to integrate with every chain in the future so we we anticipate a world where there could be thousands or tens of thousands of chains and it can be incredibly easy for stor to scale to support all of them so uh on the left hand side of the screen you can see um this concept of a publisher which we mentioned before uh what we've introduced is this publisher agent and basically the idea behind it is there's an easy one-time setup for anyone who wants to provide data to our Oracle Network and after doing that their data can be used on any chain so it's onetime setup and it's incredibly easy to get started we've had some Publishers get up and running in production in less than an hour the second piece here is we've introduced an offchain aggregator and instead of relying everything to go on chain for verifiability we rely on cryptographic signatures throughout the stack um so that there's still traceability and you can minimize any trust assumptions but what this means is that one aggregator can support many many chains or an infinite number of chains and in order to make this actually work the key piece um is that subscribers actually have the tooling themselves you can think of a subscriber is either a chain or a decentralized application to put data on chain themselves and that's labeled as a chain Pusher and basically what that means is we can support incredibly high frequency of data of throughput of updates and the individual applications can determine when they actually need a data put Point put on chain for their unique use case overall what this unlocks is we can scale infinitely without worrying about added costs and we can cater to very unique use cases okay so just to like double click into some of the things I mentioned there really um the unlocks here are we have support for high performance realtime feeds what that looks like in practice is we um most of our data feeds have updates every 250 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds as well as um can support conditions based off of a change in value so for instance a lot of the data feeds we support update if there's a 10 basis points change in price the architecture itself is in intended to be composable and non- opinionated so that means again we can Flex into unique use cases which I'll uh highlight in just a bit um again easy setup for new data providers which again makes it incredibly easy for us to support new types of assets and new use cases we've also built out programmatic chain deploys so basically there is a piece of this architecture that lives on chain chain for verifying and storing the updates so that they can be used by any dap and uh we can have any of our smart contracts deployed you know programmatically via API for example we have an integration with gelato who's a rollup as a service provider and uh you know their clients don't even have to get directly in contact with stor in order to include us in their their app chains or rollups again unlimited data catalog and you know I think the most important piece here is this stack because it was built to scale can actually be made available at a reasonable cost to developers two applications Two Chains based on what their use case is uh so they don't have to worry about that millions of dollar of overhead or have to raise millions of dollars in order to bring on an oracle partner so uh you know I've talked a lot about or I've mentioned a lot about uh new use cases being supported this is really what gets us incredibly excited and what I see as real differentiator for stor so just some examples that I'd like to highlight today in 2022 the first example we actually brought to Market with a new type of data feed supported was U Were Mark prices so for those not familiar a mark price is basically something that is used by most of the major centralized Perpetual exchanges and they use it to determine when to trigger a liquidation for for those who Haven an actually trade per themselves um these can be offered with 10 20 50 100x leverage um so it means that they're actually very sensitive to small changes in price and the exchange itself can be at risk if they don't trigger a liquidation quick enough because they could get stuck with the bad debt why do we want Mark prices that said we want to protect the user experience we want to make sure that we don't ever trigger liquidation and that shouldn't have happened and basically Mark prices are used to smooth out scam Wicks that can happen with uh very volatile assets and so we were the first and only Oracle to bring Mark prices to market for decentralized applications uh these are just four apps that are using it now vertex Apex Pro bsx and rehea um but many others are as well um and we're still the only Oracle that actually supports these today uh a bit more Niche um and and exciting as well is we're partnering with Helix which is the Dex on Native Dex on injective the blockchain um and they've actually built entirely custom indices using stor stack so that they could offer new Financial products to their customer base and help encourage onboarding new institutions into the space as well a couple of those examples include they have a uh market for the bidle fund which is black Rock's um fund that and basically it tracks the market cap of it and allows folks to trade perss on top of that and they also have a custom AI index which tracks the market capitalization of both cryptocurrencies and equities that are in the AI space um we're also doing a number of other projects with them um and very excited about the work that's being done there uh we anticipated will onboard a lot of new folks to the space um as users and then lastly in terms of examples for today uh we onboarded Ki as a data provider last year right before the election and for those that aren't familiar with Ki they were the first cftc regulated prediction Market in the United States uh they were the first exchange or Marketplace in the US that could legally offer prediction markets on the presidential election in over 100 years um and leading up to November there was obviously a lot of excitement and anticipation about how that ction was going to go so they actually integrated with st because of how lightweight it was and wanting to build upon their relationship with blockchain applications um and so they provided data feed so that applications could actually offer products on top of what is the result of the the presidential election um Helix actually was a partner who who leveraged those feeds as well as d8x and a number of other exchanges too uh just some highlight stats just to kind of iterate you know what adoption has looked like for this model that that was is quite different from the traditional Oracle model um up in the top left hand corner we have total transaction value which is essentially a measure of total volume traded on the exchanges that leverage stor so you know massive amount we've supported over $600 billion do in volume traded over the last couple of years with our data feeds um we just rolled out the programmatic deploy for chains as I mentioned and in the the bottom leftand corner we've now integrated with 50 chains and we anticipate this number to accelerate rapidly um you know uh I think last week we integrated with four chains in a single day um you know we're supporting over 375 data feeds we uh have very low latency as I mentioned end to end the stack has under 10 milliseconds latency and we're supporting massive throughput or scale of data just under 70 million updates a day um just wanted to highlight some of the additional brands that I didn't mention earlier that are part of the ecosystem across both decentralized applications that are using our feeds as well as uh the many chains that we're partnering with um and yeah that's that's the presentation um we're really excited about a future where folks are able to get access to the data that they need at a reasonable rate um where oracles are no longer a blocker for Innovation and uh thank you for letting me uh walk you through all that if anyone is interested in partnering with us or learning more our Twitter handle is @ stor Oracle and my email address is Meredith st. Network thank you [Applause]