eoracle
Going all the way back to the ancient Greeks people have been obsessed with knowing what is in the “other world”. Whether that be the afterlife or just the future to come, it has fascinated people for ages. What could we plan? Think of the advantage we would have over competitors? No more bad dates! The ancients called the people responsible for bringing this unknown world to life oracles. In Ethereum, we traded the temple and the cave that housed oracles for an Eth node. The task is still the same, bringing the outside world to your tiny piece of Ethereum for others to learn about the outside. eoracle is currently the only oracle AVS on Eigen Layer and we are excited to write about it and to soon provide node services for it at EigenHub.
eoracle's mission is to establish a decentralized oracle platform, that provides blockchain applications with the same programmability and security guarantees as native smart contracts. We will go through the technicals quickly and follow the information flow so you know the basics of the system and if it might be beneficial to you. If you are an operator that only wants to know relevant op information see the operator section below! Restakers un-interested in the technicals just head to the restake section near the end of this article.
So first let’s talk about the oracle market. This market has more or less went the opposite direction of many other eth modules and actually got more centralized over the years. Unlike say sequencers, which started out almost as centralized as possible but are now rapidly innovating to decentralization. Currently the oracle market is dominated by Chainlink. Because of their success, describing Chainlink oracles is describing oracles on Eth in general. Chainlink has a white listed validator set, incentives are mostly hidden for both rewards and penalizations, multi-sigs abound in the current market as well. In our opinion, eoracle is much like Espresso’s shared sequencer in that it is taking a vital but centralized segment of the eth network and using Eigen’s distributed validator set making it more decentralized, transparent, secure, and overall aligned with Eth’s ethics. Improving our network as a whole.
Eigen was made to solve centralization problems like this. Out of the box, Eigen layer already has a trusted, permissionless, and transparent validator set ready to go with no need to incentivize with your own native token. As we have said in other articles. Eigen really is a decentralization Bazaar, allowing any module to shop around for different levels of decentralization, different collaterals to provide its needs, and innovative incentive mechanisms for its validator set. With so many stakers in Eigen, it is not a bad way to get distribution as well!
So with that breif foray into the oracle market, let’s now turn to the workflow for the information as it travels from the outside world, to the operators, and eventually to the Dapps or other clients eoracle will service. This is important if you are node operator and need to know where in the process you are key and what data you will be servicing.
Workflow: Reports sourced from APIs and Websockets to operators> Operators verify reporter ID and periodically a smart contract aggregates the data> aggregation schemes are customizable and Dapps can customize them for their needs or use templates made by eoracle> All computation is distributed and secured by the Eigen nodes> the core attributes of ethereum’s permissionless, decentralized, and verifiability are passed on through EL nodes> Finally, the information is posted to the target blockchain through its own specific on chain contract> Dapps, individuals, or institutions can easily interface with eoracle in the smart contract layer by using the eoracle Solidity SDK and reading their required aggregated data on-chain.
eoracle is a great solution for any service, individual, or institution that needs to interface and retrieve data permissionlessly. All users can verify the data is accurate by retrieving proof components in the process.
Operator Requirements
32 eth stake minimum, reports are weighed by percent staked on network.
Operating System: linux amd x64
vCPUs: 2
Memory: 4 GiB
Storage: 100 GB (0.1TB)
EC2 Equivalent: m5.large
Expected Network Utilization:
Total download bandwidth usage: 1 Mbps
Upload bandwidth usage: 1 Mbps
Open Ports:
3000 Grafana dashboards
9090 Prometheus
If you are running an Eth node you should meet the thread count (vCPUs) and storage requirement easily. Oracles are usually pretty light on hardware requirements, which is important if you run bare metal nodes like EigenHub.
You may also set up a monitoring stack using Prometheus and Grafana here if you so choose
Below are the details on installing the necessary software to operate your validator. You will need to generate a new BLS key pair and store it. You can plain text enter your private keys but this is insecure and not recommended.
Restakers
Oracles should be some of the easiest modules to restake. Most any collateral will do. Restrictions on restakers should and will probably be light. Theoretically, the wider the distribution of the operator set the more data points the oracle can process. The more variance in the collateral the more secure it will be long term from black swans in one particular collateral form. With more data the software should also be able to cross reference on chain information to determine which sources are correct, so more participation in data feeding the better. For off chain info that is easily verifiable by humans, like the price of bitcoin being 70k instead of 1 dollar, a degree of subjectivity works its way into the system. This should bring anyone watching the recent Eigen token launch some excitement. We are only a few weeks out from launch, but with $Eigen staking AVSs like eoracle now have a sandbox of subjectivity to play with. Subjective data could use $Eigen as a court system of sorts, to parse out subjective data, perhaps eoracle’s proof components serving as a trusted “witness” to the subjective data an entity has admitted. It is early days but would be great to see what teams could build with this tool. Yet another reason for restakers to pick up $Eigen!
