Catalyst Milestone Update: Partnerchain research

Milestone 1:

Charli3 is collaborating with the Txpipe.io team to deliver Catalyst Project 1100091 entitled, “CHARLI3 — Cardano integrated Side-Chain Oracle built on Substrate”. This medium article is the output for milestone 1. The requirements for milestone 1 of this project are the following:

1. The research team information (total size, contractors, partners involved, and internal team)
2. A list of the guiding research questions
3. A timeline for completion
4. Official start date for the research milestone 2 component

Please find 4 sections below with our update.

S1. Assigned Team

1. Internal Team

Robert Hever — Business Lead

Co-founder Charli3.io, Emurgo Academy advisor

10+ years experience in Software, multiple business founder

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robhever/

2. TXpipe team (Research Leads)

Santiago Carmuega, Eng — Tech Lead

20+ years of experience in software development

3 years of experience in Cardano

Main Contributor of many relevant projects for Cardano Blockchain

Github: https://github.com/scarmuega

Alexsander Falcucci, Eng — Main Dev/Tech Writer

10+ years of experience in software development

3 years of experience in Cardano

Contributor of several projects in Cardano

Github: https://github.com/falcucci

Federico Weill, PhD — Project Manager

15+ years of experience in software industry

3 years of experience in Cardano

PM of many relevant projects in Cardano

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federico-weill-84b0281b/

S2. Research Guiding Questions

Our Catalyst Project starts with the following premise: Due to the 20 second block update restrictions on Cardano, it is not possible to get accurate & reliable data on-chain under that limitation.

1. Primary Guiding Question:

Can you overcome the 20 second block timing limitation of Cardano?

2. If the answer is no, the research will be guided at a secondary question:
Is it possible to achieve data rate optimizations from the current Cardano based Charli3 infrastructure using Substrate and the IOG partnerchain?

Can we improve the overall performance of an Oracle solution by offloading all of the preliminary operations with the goal of optimizing performance to reach the theoretical max rate while minimizing cost, optimizing data quality, for as many concurrent feeds as possible. In short, what can we achieve using IOG’s new partnerchain infrastructure? Can we offload Charli3 oracle architecture to Substrate and achieve reasonable optimizations not achievable on Cardano alone?

3. And thirdly, the team will address alternative options:

Is Substrate and the new IOG partnerchain infrastructure the best option available to optimize the Charli3 architecture?

4. Summary

In order of priority here are the guiding questions for the project:

1. Can we overcome the Cardano block timing limitations?
2. If yes, then lay out the options available to do so with a focus on the upcoming IOG partnerchain.
3. If no, can we utilize the upcoming IOG partnerchain infrastructure to maximize and optimise the Charli3 infrastructure?
4. In response to either routes 2 or 3, the following guiding questions apply:
5. The team will pursue a hands-on development approach to understand the feasibility of building and scaling an implementation of the Charli3 oracle infrastructure on Substrate connecting with the IOG partner-chain and/or another solution (e.g. Cosmos)
6. Step 1: Building the Charli3 solution out on Substrate
7. Step 2: Connecting to Cardano via the IOG partnerchain
8. Step 3: POC that demonstrates it’s feasibility and a plan to scale
9. Define the more detailed guiding questions to achieve that implementation

S3. Estimated Timeline

The Txpipe team has completed 75% of the Feasibility Report as of July 7th 2024. Our expectation is to submit the second milestone by July 15th 2024.

Due to the innovative nature of this research project, there will be “hands on” development to push the limits of what is possible. The expectation is that by August 2024 a proof of concept with documentation will be provided. In other words, the development team will work not only to create a theoretical report with armchair research but try to produce an implementation that could successfully scale.

S4. Milestone 2 start date

The team begun milestone 2 (Feasibility report) in June 2024 and it is near completion already.