Tezos Commons :: A Closer Look at Acurast — Data Delivered on Demand
November 29, 2022A Closer Look at Acurast — Data Delivered on Demand
There’s a solution for developers wishing to bring data on-chain in a trustless manner without middle man intervention on Tezos
Awhile back, we were first introduced to Ubinetic oracles. The premise was simple, there’s a clear dilemma in obtaining certain data off-chain and bringing it on-chain in a trust less manner.
As the seeds have been laid for the Web3 world, there needs to be a way to access verifiable, interoperable, and accessible on-chain data. Let’s learn more about what Acurast is and how its enabling developers to deliver data on demand.
What is Acurast?
Acurast provides an infrastructure for developers to deliver data on demand. With a multi-chain approach, through a native interoperability layer — developers are able to cut out common centralized approaches and reduce the need for a middle man in all their data needs.
Current chains supported include Tezos, Cosmos, Polkadot, Kusama Network and others.
Acurast makes use of a trusted execution environment which is leveraged by developers and data transmitters in the Acurast trusted virtual machine. The data transmitters provide computation and infrastructure to developers who are in need of it or certain off-chain data such as price feeds to be used in their decentralized applications.
Beyond merely fetching price feeds, this system enables developers to create new use cases through the scripts they create and specify in code.
For instance, say you’re building a decentralized betting platform and you need the results of the latest world championship like whoever makes it to the Fifa World Cup, that is coming up. With other solutions, you’re not really able to do that. Here, as a developer you can go in and define the API’s where you need to get the price and the data for the results of this football game. They can then be posted on-chain and used in the decentralized betting platform.
What’s essentially being built here is a protocol-native and permission-less marketplace connecting data consumers (developers) and data transmitters together. In that marketplace, a data economy is being created giving developers access to data on demand.
Data transmitters process data and computation in a trusted execution environment on their hardware and in return earn rewards from the developers successfully executing Acurast jobs. Likewise, developers are able to come in and define a script that is part of a Acurast job.
So far, we’ve seen entities such as Taurus SA and Madfish join as independent data transmitters.
To learn more about Acurast, be sure to head over to their docs and learn more on their site!
Key Insight from Pascal Brun of Acurast
Pascal was kind enough to chat about Acurast and highlighted what’s changed and some things to be excited for in the future.
In terms of Acurast, what all has changed since Ubinetic?
I think it helps to give some context. In the case of youves, what was initially developed was the data transmitter side of things. This allows the price feeds to be brought on-chain, so it was the infrastructure responsible for fetching prices and pushing them on-chain.That was the starting point.However, the interesting thing from a technological perspective is that the data transmitter in that setup is utilizing a trusted execution environment. This is something that allows you to do a computation in that environment that can prove given instructions were followed without outside interference. This is one of the main factors of this system that enabled it to become trustless.So, what you’re trusting is the integrity of these trusted execution environments and in the case of Acurast, we’re using hardware security modules that live on mobile devices. Google Pixel phones in our case, have a dedicated chip that allows it to be used as a trusted execution environment.What we have done is created this trustless virtual machine that is completely programmable by developers. Essentially, with a lot of solutions out in the market you have a more centralized point. Say, you’re a DeFi platform and you want to have price feed support of an asset that is not there yet, in a lot of cases you have to go to a more centralized approach. Asking for a listing, etc.Here, there are no more middle men. The developer is able to write a set of instructions of a script in code. Then, that gets passed to the data transmitter to get executed. There’s a lot of use cases that can be derived from developers with this layer in the ways in which they define these scripts.
When you mention there’s a lot of use cases for developers, what exactly do you mean by that?
The most significant change in our approach was doing it completely decentralized. Matching developers with data transmitters is something we need to do in this current stage but what we are aiming at essentially is a marketplace. This marketplace will enable a developer to essentially come in and create a script, add certain parameters they wish and allow for a reward to be given if someone else comes in and executes it.On the other side of this, there are the data transmitters with infrastructure and computation available. They can go to the marketplace and find a job that matches their requirements and fulfill it. So, you essentially have this completely trustless and censorship free marketplace that furthers the narrative of a developer wanting to build new use cases.
Looking Forward
Bringing the real world to the Web3 world is a novel goal. With the data economy Acurast provides between developers and data transmitters, we’re essentially seeing the access to verifiable, interoperable and accessible on-chain data as a service for developers. Not only is cutting out exhaustive time through centralized approaches, it’s bringing the power directly to developers in accessing the data they need in a trustless manner.
We look forward to seeing the evolution of Acurast’s marketplace and Tezos’ role within it.
A Closer Look at Acurast — Data Delivered on Demand was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
