hi everyone thanks thing
to learn more about Oracle's and how
they fit into smart contracts and and if
they're iums overall future so I think
the the first useful thing is for us to
get some share context and to look look
at the security problem that we're
trying to solve and then look at the
different ways in which that security
problem can can be solved effectively so
the nature of the problem is that smart
contracts on great networks like
aetherium can't connect with external
data this is based on how they reach
consensus about transactions how they
verify verify the data in in in blocks
and it isn't something that's likely to
change it's it's an inherent problem of
all decentralized infrastructure that
seeks to package transactions into
blocks because the miners set that you
have doing that you don't want a
specific miner responsible you don't
want him having control over the ability
to you know make your contract trigger
from data or not trigger and you also
can't have the entire miners set exposed
to various arbitrary API s so this is
this is known as the Oracle problem and
it's the inability of layer 1 systems to
interact with external data now the
significance of this is is rather large
the significance of this is is why we
are currently mainly defined as an
industry by tokens and we're defined as
an industry by tokens because that's
effectively what base layer 1 systems
can do because they have it inherently
built-in to incentivize mining and
therefore allow their you know their
base basic existence now the the reality
is is that if you look at the the rest
of the world and you look at all the
digital agreements powering financial
products in in various centralized forms
the insurance industry the global trade
trade finance industry all of these
industries use some form of digital
agreement and all of those forms of
digital agreement require inputs inputs
about what happened relative to the
agreements terms so generally speaking
we call these events and the ability for
a contract to know about an event is the
is the necessary point is the necessary
for it to be written about that event so
essentially the the significance of the
limitation is with without the ability
interact with events smart contracts
would stay related to tokens which is
only a small percentage of what our
technology could be about so our
industry could be about financial
products insurance global trade if if
we're able to solve this problem so
historically how our industry has
actually evolved is it's gone from a
smaller set of capabilities for
developers to a larger set of
capabilities the first large shift in
capabilities was from Bitcoin Multi
signature as the only capability that
anybody could build around in around you
know 2011-12 and then in about 14 you
had the first app coins as they were
called
these were protocols smart contracts
where you had to bake up smart contract
into each protocol then the protocol
smart contracts got switched over to
scriptable contracts and scriptable
contracts is what aetherium deserves the
vast majority of the credit for they've
done a fantastic job of taking our space
from these protocol contracts that took
months to get launched to scriptable
contracts which took days to launch and
because they took days to launch we now
have all these people launching massive
high value systems based on this
capability and as you can see a lot of
those systems are pretty much
exclusively focused on tokens because at
the moment that's what scriptable
capabilities allow what we think is that
scriptable contracts together with
external events is how our space moves
into this entirely new stage of
usefulness for for developers for users
you know how we redefine our space to be
about tokens and all the other types of
digital agreements that that underpin
you know very important global
industries generally speaking this is
the problem that we work on we focus on
creating secure blockchain middleware
that product is called chain link and it
basically focuses on enabling the
ability to get data into networks like
aetherium get networks like aetherium to
pay in other systems and interact with
other environments as well as get them
to do cross chain things
we're ready live on main net it's all
working and and the things that I'm
going to be showing to you are live and
working and usable by by us developers
so generally speaking the the I think
there's kind of two two key points and
in this talk one one key point is how do
you define the security of an Oracle so
that you can rely on it to trigger your
contract so that's that's a very
important question and then the second
question is once you rely on the
security of an Oracle what can an Oracle
really do for you right like okay I've
arrived at a place where I can can
assess and feel comfortable about the
security of these of this Oracle
mechanism which effectively makes up the
second half of my contract because if my
contract is about an event I have a
piece of it about on change state and I
have a piece of it about the event and
both the unchanged state and the off
trained event needs to be properly
guaranteed from a technical point of
view in order for the the smart contract
to retain its unique property of
reliability so the these are these are
kind of the points I'm going to be
speaking about and and elaborating on
what what it is that that what makes a
secure call and what a secure Oracle can
do to expand what developers in our
space could build to create all these
other various types of usefulness and
and valuable contracts generally
speaking our approach to all of this is
the ability to provide decentralization
for the Oracle mechanism by having
multiple independent node operators
validate the accuracy of Oracle Oracle
reports we do this through something
called binding service agreements
binding service agreements make an
Oracle commit to delivering a certain
quality of data or computation or our
payments outcome and that commitment is
both technically in cryptographically
guaranteed and crypto economically
guaranteed through things like staking
the ability for all the binding service
agreements that an Oracle a generates to
be aggregated into a picture of that
Oracle's overall reliability the
application of something called
defense-in-depth where we lay around
multiple security approaches on top of
decentralization such as trusted
execution environments and zero
knowledge proof
and the fact that we do this with a
large open-source community made up of
some of the best academic researchers
the best some of the best security
auditors and and a large and growing
group of developers that are excited
about enabling this world of smart
contracts beyond tokenization so it's
usually useful to look at the problem or
solving the the specific problem we're
solving is the the problem of
centralization and the capacity for an
Oracle to fail because it's been it's
been it's been it's been made unreliable
by being attacked as a single point of
failure generally speaking that the way
to approach this is through the
centralization just like the contract is
secured through multiple node operators
validating the the inputs and the
validating the transactions that the
block and the contract is made up of we
have multiple Oracle's validating that
an input is is indeed correctly
validated and secure and reliable enough
to trigger large amounts of value this
is partly guaranteed by service
agreement service agreements are not
legal documents they are on chain
commitments that are cryptographically
and technically enforced to guarantee
that an Oracle does deliver data and
that if the Norrell doesn't deliver data
there's there's immediate and
inescapable penalties both to their
their long term usefulness for other
users an immediate loss of stake and and
and and other negative factors generally
speaking we see a world where just like
you have right now extreme
decentralization aetherium you should be
able to have whatever degree of
decentralization you'd like to have from
the Oracle mechanism and also that'll
probably lead to the centralization at
the data source level such that you know
the highest value hundreds of millions
of dollar contracts you already see them
thinking about all these things in more
detail and you see them wondering why do
I think an Oracle is secure how do I
know that this data source won't be
compromised how do I protect myself from
a data source being compromised how do I
protect myself from an Oracle being
compromised these are the problems that
our space is going to have to have an
answer to if we want to if we wanted to
move into this realm of events driven
contracts so that's that's the very
large focus that that that we
have is solving the problem of how do
you reliably provide guarantees that
your Vince driven contract can have a
billion dollars put into it and can be
considered reliable reliable enough to
move that million billion 100 million
billion dollars in a matter of seconds
which is the the real promise and value
of our space so generally speaking the
way this looks in practice is you know
service agreements are made up of
something called jobs jobs are basically
function as a service of blocks of
predefined computations that a node
operator lists themselves as opting into
do you interact with them as on a
service agreement they commit to do this
computation for you in this case the
retrieval of price you select from a
multitude of nodes we have I predict
approaching 70 high quality nodes now
and I think a quarter of them are
securely reviewed in a two week process
what a security interview at the end
both creating civil resistance in an
overview of their security
infrastructure which we then present to
users as well and generally speaking the
goal is well the dis goal right what
iswhat I shown you here has been
achieved you if you want to compose a
reliable Oracle network with multiple
independent parties running that network
and multiple independent data sources
feeding your decentralized finance
contract reliable data you can is now
been achieved on may not
it's been live for you know a number of
months now without without any security
issues likewise if you wanted to compose
something like smart smart contract a
smart contract for crop insurance the
crop insurance would would learn about
whether it would aggregate death or data
about whether and it would then arrive
at at a conclusion for that for that
outcome and then also through through
the set of Oracle's that we have be able
to execute payments so it would be able
to ingest inputs put outputs and these
are the previous defy example in this
example are what we're really trying to
get the space to so that just just like
you could write a token in a day you
should be able to compose a high-quality
externally connected contract in a day
generally speaking what what all of this
usage does and and this is one of the
important nuances of how you would
evaluate
Oracle is generates a lot of data it
generates massive amounts of data just
like you have block explorers for a
theorem contracts we have even more
detailed block explorers for Qing link
Oracle reports that define exactly what
somebody did what they committed to do
and whether they met their previous
commitment you can you can find all this
in a multitude of resources and I'll
show you how to do that at the end of
the talk for for a set of Oracle's
Oracle networks that we call reference
data networks so generally speaking that
part of the goal here is how do I as a
user effectively assess a node operator
that I can then compose into greater and
greater networks and such that if not
the value of my contract grows I can
compose greater and greater collections
of node operators we enable this by
floating provable information about
their infrastructure how how they've
been able to successfully fulfill their
commitments and also what specific
infrastructure they run on and also the
capabilities they can give you through
that infrastructure so so that's the
thing that we've actually been seeing
quite a bit of since since launching on
main net we've been seeing quite a lot
of adoption and in an additional usage
not only in data delivery but in the
ability for a chain link to connect
smart contracts to all the different you
know function as a service systems all
the different computational environments
other other than other than block chains
which which gives smart contracts the
capacity to securely use huge huge
amounts of computing resources this is
for example a diagram we released in in
a post with Google describing how a
theoretical architecture would look in
in the case of using Google cloud
platform
for one of their specific services like
bigquery and here here at Def Con
there's been released by one of our
users Foam you know great group of folks
basically building an incentive serve as
a service to generate valuable location
data using token incentives and and
here's how that architecture looks so
just like you know just like we started
out with data and we've started to
enable a lot of define a lot of simpler
arching contracts with data the next
stage in in in all of this is actually
expanding
the definition of an Oracle beyond just
something that provides data but
something that actually provides access
secure and provably secure access to all
the different computational resources
available outside of blockchains this
includes random number generators it
includes all the resources in cloud
providers all the great pre-made
services and functions as a service that
you would want to use and the capacity
to validate and prove that those
computations were correctly executed on
one server serving across across
different services so I think the
interesting thing that we've seen is the
capacity to move beyond data and into
data plus computation such that chain
link becomes an off chain resource that
developers can go to to compose whatever
interactions they need to compose around
their contract in in in in the world of
all of Auld already existing high
quality of chain computation that's out
there another example of this is a
recent announcement at the start of this
conference about how chain link enables
aetherium contracts to use Intel's
trusted computing framework so Intel has
spent a lot of time and effort and and
we've been working with them to generate
a good trust of computing framework that
implements trusted execution
environments as as something that can be
used in layer 2 systems and the capacity
to use layer 2 systems that use trusted
execution environments as as an option
computational resource that provides
highly highly reliable highly scalable
private computations while keeping a
contract on chain is is right now due to
the current limitations of launching
contracts probably the way people are
going to build high throughput high
value applications that still have
access to public network value right so
on the one hand we want applications
that exist in large public networks like
aetherium that have access to that the
user set to the network effect kind of
value that that network has a accrued
but at the same time we want a lot of
functionality because we want to build
more and more complex more and more
valuable and useful contracts and the
middle ground seems to be the capacity
developer to use an auction computation
environment to interact with all the
different computations they need and
then to prove back on chain that those
computations that they performed were
properly performed that the data was
properly delivered for those
computations and that that computation
can't form a reliable part of that
contract so that's that's kind of the
expansion of of what we're starting to
define chain-linked as what what a lot
of this leads to is it leads us to a
world where across environments we have
chain link node operators that are
servicing various different chains and
they're accruing usage and that usage in
various different environments is once
again another source of proof it's a
source of proof that there's you know
five defy applications to insurance
applications you know five gaming
applications using this note operator
and this note operator is able to
successfully deliver data and randomness
and and and various types of data to
these users and that provides even
greater surety so as a system like ours
gets used you you start to accrue a lot
more data about each individual note
operator and that accrual of data
provides even greater assurances so
there there's kind of a network effect
from usage that allows people to
continually define greater degrees of
their security and guarantees for users
now one of the things that we've been
using you know when it when at one of
the Oracle networks that we've composed
for the use of the ecosystem are these
reference price reference data networks
price reference data networks basically
put data on chain they put data on chain
for use mainly by D Phi projects and
right now price reference data networks
like like the one I I'm showing here
powers all of the centralized finance
well it except if somebody made a
centralized Oracle and you took a big
risk on that but you know that's that's
their decision which I don't really
advise so these price reference data
networks that we've already made right
now have grown to be the largest most
secure most civil resistant we can
definitively say that because we have
the most note operators for example in
this network with eath USD price we have
seventeen and we're far ahead of
schedule to reach the targeted twenty
one we have multiple high quality data
sources so not original exchanges but
data aggregators that take on the the
burden of making sure the data is
correct and it's a civil resistant
network because we've validated these
node operators over the course of a
two-week process and a final security
interview and it's also you know
security reviewed in many other forms
like the ways that I showed you so even
the note operators I showed you in the
previous slide with all that detail are
the ones that are powering a network
like this so these reference data
networks are actually very important as
you can see you can dig into them we
encourage you to go and and and and and
look at them you can once again see
exactly what they're doing and and this
level of clarity is supposed to provide
users a guarantee that the reference
data on this network is reliable enough
to trigger their hundreds of millions of
dollars in value whereas any other type
of reference data network or some
centralized Oracle wouldn't have any of
this information you wouldn't have any
guarantees that this Oracle is committed
to or has successfully performed its
obligations previously we've we've had
so much success so far doing this and
it's it's been done so securely all over
the past number of months that we've
were basically committing to expand the
amount of reference data networks these
are the next seven reference data
networks that we're going to be
launching bitcoin dai USD c0x rep WB TC
and and bat prices these prices and and
feeds were chosen based on the needs of
our users and customers they're meant to
service systems like compound partially
synthetics partially other systems that
are going to be building their contracts
and securing their value using these
reference data networks these reference
data networks are once again I mean
they're provided free by us if somebody
wants to add security to them we're
going to be releasing information about
how somebody could take reference data
network with you know five or seven
Oracle's and how they can add more
Oracle's to that reference data network
in case they start using it and they
want to add more security on top of the
initial security we paid for but we're
we're very excited to be giving back to
the community because the etherium
community has done a huge amount for us
and where we think that the capacity to
have high quality data on chain and to
make it extremely usable and rely
is one of the key things that were
kickstart defy and so right now we're
committing to put these seven networks
out because we know they're going to
successfully service you know existing
users and customers and beyond that we
plan to launch many more in in that vein
if you if you have a deep eye project if
you have a need for a reference data
price on chain we we want to support you
and our goal as a company is actually to
make our users succeed by giving them
access to this reliable data so our
chain link is basically here to enable
smart contract developers to build any
kind of externally connected or
next-generation contract and if that's
what you're doing you know we're very
collaborative very helpful people we
have a huge integration engineer and
support engineering staff that that that
is there to help you build these
contracts and likewise even make a great
reference data network possibly even
even starting out for your use case but
then getting used by other other dphi
projects as well so thank you thank you
very much and I'm looking forward to
seeing you all at the conference thank
you