Catalyst Update: Oracle Side Chain

See content below for Milestone 2 for project 1100091

Project 1100091 “CHARLI3 — Cardano integrated Side-Chain Oracle built on Substrate”

Proof of Achievement — Milestone 2

Previous milestone 1 “Guiding Questions” for milestone 2

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

Feasibility Report Summary

TL;DR responses to guiding questions

1. No
2. Yes, it is possible to run the Oracle architecture on Substrate. Yes, there are significant optimizations that are possible. Currently IOG is developing the partnerchain integration with Substrate, the team is dependent on this work to complete the final step to integrate. For Milestone 3, the research team will implement POCs that demonstrate the feasibility and possible optimizations (e.g. show working code on Substrate and demonstrate data rate optimizations)
3. For posting data onto Cardano, the assumption is yes this is the best option available. For the proof of concept report required for Milestone 3, the team will provide a summary into possible other options such as Cosmos (in preparation for interoperability to EVM etc).
4. The team is currently on steps 4a and 4b now; step 1 is complete and we are working with IOG on step 2. Detailed feasibility questions addressed during the POC phase are included in this document

Feasibility Report (pdf): click here to access the full report