everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting pre-recorded in warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today we're going to talk about the oracle special oh yeah okay there's actually a master plan and it's coming together gradually i'll put a little put a little asterisk here okay so what is the oracle master plan so smart contracts are super duper cool basically they're these little programs that run on a blockchain they connect to transactions and other such things you activate them to do interesting things you can do like escrow contracts with them you can build daps from them you can build whole d5 platforms you can build stable coins and you can build dexes and so forth unfortunately smart contracts are basically blind they can't see the outside world okay so you need some mechanism that's going to allow you to inject state from the outside world information from the outside world into a smart contract okay so where does that come from it could be something as simple as what is the value of ada to usd if you have a dex or a stablecoin or any of these other things the network needs to be aware either by some mechanism where we the users inject it or some trusted source injects it uh that the system is uh what the price is yeah it can be events like who won the super bowl it could be events like who won the world cup it can be who won the election was it trump or biden these types of things it could be how many people have been vaccinated for coronavirus okay so whether you're writing a gambling contract you're writing a defy application whether you're writing anything that touches the real world estate planning contracts uh aunt jane has died and now unlock the contract so that the inheritance can be given or the bitcoin can be transferred from aunt jane's account to for survivors these types of things you need some way of injecting that into the blockchain so smart contracts can operate on that and generally speaking we call that an oracle okay it's something that provides information the network itself cannot verify so what we've been doing is we've been slowly but surely building partnerships and capabilities and today let's talk about three of them so we have the spos we have singularitynet and we have wolfram okay and these are all interconnected in a very subtle way so first off you have to have an access point for smart contracts to get oracle information and what's nice about the stake pool operators is they run infrastructure for a business they preserve the state of the chain they advance it uh they're responsible for building uh the blockchain of cardano and their public figures are registered on chain you know a lot about them they're very reliable so this is a very natural set for us to start building out apis and infrastructure so that your smart contracts can talk to data feeds that are hosted aggregated federated through the spo population and emergo has been doing some great work with its partners and beta testing all kinds of cool things with this setup and i think the spos are very natural set but then you also need to operate on that data and you need a source okay the power and magic of singularity nad and the power of magic of ai is that you can do all kinds of really really cool things with that platform with the agents of that platform that will enable you to verify uh veracity and mine interesting statistics and so forth and wolfram has a language named wolfram and one of the largest sets of data in the world to operate on okay and they have deals with siri they have deals with alexa they have deals all across the entire space i think they work with google there's not a single fortune 500 that doesn't talk to the wolfram platform and they have this amazing programming language which allows you to compute on the data okay so basically the idea here is that oracles are only as good as the source and availability and computability of the information okay so you need the info itself you have a notion of veracity so the truthiness of the data you also have an availability issue okay and you also need completeness so you have all the info that you want it's there when you want it and there's some way of determining that that looks good then layer two you need the ability to access it okay and so even if it's available from the source you have to get it into the cardano network itself and the spos they provide that okay then after that you have to be able to compute on it compute it and this is where wolfram their programming language and this is where singularitynet are two incredibly powerful tools that will allow you while you're writing your smart contracts to write custom domain specific queries to be able to do all kinds of computations on that and this entire flow can be done in a uniform way okay because at the end of the day you have the smart contract living here now when we talk about the source of the info that doesn't have to be a central database that can be the spos that can be a trusted server that can be a federation of actors that can be chain link okay there are many different sources so this is kind of the first stage in the great oracle pipeline it's determining a source and then you basically from that we'll have an opinion about the veracity of the information how true it is how reliable it is you'll have a opinion about is this going to be available 24 7 when i need it where i need it also is there everything there or do i have to stitch it together okay the access control there's a very natural regulating mechanism for that the spos and then you need bespoke capabilities to compute on that data so you can get it into a format that data into a format your smart contracts can understand and operate on and be able to find useful so what we're doing is we're building capabilities and partnerships so we're going to build some infrastructure for the spos and basically this is the oracle access layer okay and that'll make it very easy for the spos to provide interfaces for smart contracts to operate on we'll make sure that that oracle access layer is able to take queries that are written with agi so singularitynet and take queries that are written with the wolfram programming language and if you are querying from wolfram and then using this on the other side it can plug into different data sources the very first data source is going to be the wolfram data source because that's enormously complete you for example can ask questions like how many shipwrecks have happened uh around the coast of florida from 1950 to 2000 uh that lost more than 100 million dollars worth of cargo in the months of august to september and draw a map of it showing the frequency by uh a pitcher and it actually be able to return a query it's absolutely extraordinary what wolfram has but then we believe in choice so you should be able to use other sources as well with this generic framework so anyway the plan in 2021 is to construct this oracle access layer allow a rich oracle query experience so we'll kind of call this a common oracle query language so that you can uh so you can go ahead and send interesting messages there and then we'll make it quite uniform an interface so that uh people can plug different data sources in whether it be a different cryptocurrency it'd be uh wolfram and so forth uh that's basically what we're looking for okay now what's the goal here the goal is to put you the developer in charge of your oracles and what you can do with your application is you'll have a very easy turnkey way of being able to query what you need operate on what you need and have certainty that what you need has veracity it's right that it's going to be there when the contract needs it and you have as much as you need okay and make it very uniform and easy for you to add multiple sources and weight those sources accordingly so this is a 2021 project and it's something that we've been gradually building partners around we first announced singularitynet we also then announced wolfram we'll keep announcing it emergo is doing some great work as well it's just a matter of pulling all these pieces together but this is one of the core pieces of d5 that we think is really really important and it requires us to build different things it requires us to build kind of an interface here to make it uniform for data to aggregate and send information in that's kind of a standard uh we need to build an access layer that the stake pool operators can run and then we need to build a common oracle query language interface so that your smart contracts can then talk to basically these backends and you can embed wolfram code and embed the code required to talk to singularitynet and these other things and you can have very very rich queries with these things but all in all we're just a brick in the wall all in all everything looks pretty good it's not super hard to put all this together oracles are much more evolved in 2020 in upcoming 2021 than they were just a few years ago and there's a lot of great market standards and we believe in choice here and so our goal is to build an interface and framework that makes it very easy to plug these things in and then you can create your own oracle services external oracle services like chain link can plug into it and services that are data aggregators and and give you the great compute ability like wolf ram can plug in i and other services like singularitynet can plug in and then ultimately you can get a really really rich experience as a developer and you as a developer will not have to implement your own oracle solution uh you can just use this interface and it's there it creates a little bit of a revenue stream for the spos because they can get some of the transaction fees for the querying so it gives them an incentive to operate the oracle access layer and it also means that there's a lot of standardization that can occur as things flow through so it always gets into the right format when it hits your smart contract and then eventually we can put over the years more sophisticated routing so if one source goes down you can actually automatically have backup sources so that you have much stronger availability and then you can also add layers of verification in between so our hope is with this oracle access layer uh that in addition to just providing access to the data that the oracles can augment things like completeness or veracity as well and you can pay on a kind of an all-a-cart basis of how many layers of assurance and checks and balances you want to have for your smart contract there's only so much that cardano can do because cardano can only know things for certain that are within the network like for example it'll know that a certain transaction happened at a certain block at a certain time that's something we have absolute faith in it does not require trust the minute that you're injecting information into the system ultimately you have to trust that information somehow and so you have to build veracity you have to build layers of assurance of that data and based upon the value at risk and so that's the point of the developer and what we want to do is create a common path for the developer to be able to get that level of assurance that they need and the users of their products to have that assurance that they need as well okay so this is the very brief oracle special uh we've been slowly building out uh kind of a war map for how we're gonna deal with oracle's in 2021 it's very exciting uh and it's just so cool to have great partners like singularitynet and wolfram they've been around for a long time they've been doing this for a long time and it's going to be cool to create a common oracle query language with them to embed wolfram code or what comes from singularitynet and to design with the stake pull operators the axis layer and be able to create interfaces to be able to plug in data sources so you'll hear a lot more about this in q1 of next year we're going to bring in a dedicated product manager specifically for this endeavor and task uh and we were mostly in 2020 kind of talking around how to do this and bringing in partners and we wanted to make sure we had the right people at the table we also wanted to see how the market itself evolved it's been really impressive to see what chain link has been able to do and provide uh and how their ecosystem has evolved and now it's gotten to the point where we're in the right place to be able to build out an end-to-end interface and then of course we'll try to compete within that interface and we'll give lots of generic interfaces for people to uh have their own solutions so oracle special very brief video i'll make some videos on stable coins and other such things at a later date but we're building out the d5 portfolio and our goal in 2021 is to make cardano the best platform for developer to develop on and it comes with batteries included for all the hard stuff so you can focus on the stuff that makes you rich your actual application your logic and the things that are going to help you compete in the market thanks for listening and talk to you guys soon cheers
