Oracle Ecosystem Initiative - Acurast

The oracle problem is considered to be the Achilles heel of public blockchains. As more complex and intricate systems are built on permissionless blockchains, the importance of Oracles grew as well since most complex economic interactions require some external data source. Achieving a trustless and decentralized oracle solution is challenging, and several approaches have emerged, with many of them reintroducing Trusted Third Parties (TTP) and thus undermining the permissionless design principles.

The Current Challenge In The Ecosystem

The Polkadot ecosystem has seen multiple attempts to establish a feasible oracle solution, e.g., Chainlink announcing the support of a Pallet for Substrate (Polkadot SDK) chains. Unfortunately, in this example, the agreed upon support was never established in a production setting and the maintenance and support of the Pallet was discontinued.

Even though there exist oracle solutions (e.g., Redstone, Chainlink) covering multiple different environments, most of these solutions lack support and coverage of the Polkadot ecosystem.

It is time to establish a solution supporting Substrate (Polkadot SDK), EVM, and WASM. It is time for a feasible solution that does not rely on a centralized party or setup, but one that offers minimized trust assumptions based on strong cryptography and the latest advances in secure hardware, offering the flexibility to seamlessly expand new price feeds without additional roadblocks.

About Acurast

Acurast provides a zero trust, off-chain Execution Layer based on secure mobile hardware to create a trustless and confidential computation environment. In connection with a Substrate (Polkadot SDK) based chain responsible for permissionless orchestration of computational request.

Context of the proposal

1. Establish an ecosystem-wide solution for oracles accessible in three distinct environments: Substrate (Polkadot SDK), EVM and WASM
2. Provide price feeds for all Polkadot and Kusama assets, other popular crypto assets and Real-World Assets (RWA).
3. Establish an ecosystem-wide solution with these integrations that can be leveraged by every Polkadot-based project, utilizing a third-party audited solution.
4. Provide support to projects to integrate price feeds into their environments
5. Add support for new asset classes as price feeds.
6. Provide access to larger off-chain compute resources for additional use cases.

Voices From The Ecosystem

Some ecosystem feedback on this proposal:

“Given how Tanssi is building an infrastructure protocol to facilitate appchain deployments as much as possible, tools like oracles are essential for many use cases within the ecosystem. Acurast standardizing oracle solutions via a pallet will allow developers to include price feeds within their runtimes in a practical way, and it's highly complementary to what we're building at Tanssi.”
Francisco Javier Agosti, Founder and CEO of Moondance Labs

“Acurast and Astar have been collaborating, in adding support for price feeds through Acurast and bringing them to Astar. An ecosystem wide solution, like Acurast is proposing, will not only improve the developer experience on Astar EVM and WASM but the broader Polkadot ecosystem.”
Maarten Henskens, Head of Astar Foundation

We would love to get your feedback on this proposal. Find more details in the full proposal