Hi Astar and Shiden community, on behalf of DIA, I would like to propose integrating DIA verifiable randomness oracle as a public good and request gas funding for the contract updates.
SUMMARY:
DIA is a multi-chain oracle that provides asset prices for fungible and non-fungible assets as well as verifiable randomness across different ecosystems including Astar and Shiden.
Randomness can be used to empower new utility and is instrumental for on-chain applications such as games, lotteries, prediction markets, and NFT launches. Here is a short case study of a project using DIAs randomness oracle on Evmos, which was also funded as a public good after receiving a community vote.
We value randomness as a public good and would like in partnership with Astar and Shiden to provide builders with a high-frequency and low-cost solution. For this reason, we would like to request treasury funding to support the operational expenses of DIAs randomness oracle as a public good available to all developers in the Astar and Shiden ecosystem for one year.
REQUEST:
Provide gas for the randomness oracles on Astar and Shiden based on actual gas consumption. The cost would be gas for an update every 30 seconds. This would be at the current gas cost approx 0.0005 ASTR and 0.00004 SDN per update and around 525 ASTR and 42 SDN per year. The cost will be the actual cost (525 ASTR and 42 SDN are just an estimation based on current fees).
BENEFIT:
A pre-funded and live verifiable randomness oracle reduces friction to build new applications for dApps that require randomness, targeting use cases within but mostly beyond DeFi including games, lotteries, prediction markets, or NFT launches.
As such, a randomness oracle as a public good will allow for more innovative and new types of applications to be built on Astar and Shiden. Currently, there are no options available for randomness on-chain on Astar and Shiden.
NEXT STEPS:
We would like to collect any possible feedback and questions from the community over the next 7 days prior to having a vote on the proposal. If this proposal gets approved we would start with the integration (approx 14 days lead time, possibly impacted by Christmas break).
Following the integration, we would align on marketing activation introducing randomness on Astar and Shiden, publish specific content, documentation, AMA, etc.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
What is DIA:
DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is a multi-chain, end-to-end, open-source data and oracle platform for Web3.
The DIA platform enables the sourcing, validation, and sharing of transparent and verified data feeds for traditional and digital financial applications. DIA’s institutional-grade data feeds cover asset prices, metaverse data, lending rates, and more.
DIA’s data is directly sourced from a broad array of on-chain and off-chain sources at individual trade-level. This allows DIA feeds to be fully customized with regards to the mix of sources and methodologies, resulting in tailor-made, high-resilience feeds and thereby setting a new paradigm for oracles.
You can find more details in our documentation:
What is Drand?
Drand is a distributed randomness beacon daemon written in Golang. Servers running Drand can be linked with each other to produce collective, publicly verifiable, unbiased, unpredictable random values at fixed intervals using bilinear pairings and threshold cryptography. DIA uses the drand’s public randomness beacon, and updates its oracle with round number, randomness, and signature.
As Drand has gained maturity, an increasing number of organizations (including NIST, Cloudflare, Kudelski Security, the University of Chile, and Protocol Labs) started taking interest and decided to collectively work on setting up a Drand network spanning these organizations. As Drand has gained maturity, an increasing number of organizations (including NIST, Cloudflare, Kudelski Security, the University of Chile, and Protocol Labs) started taking interest and decided to collectively work on setting up a Drand network spanning these organizations.
What is randomness?
Randomness is the property of lacking any sensible predictability. It is very difficult to create random events on-chain due to the deterministic nature of any EVM or EVM-like environment.
Centralized randomness is susceptible to attacks by the randomness source, as a single non-random outcome cannot be distinguished from a random one. Thus, having a single RNG source provide randomness via an oracle is not enough.
Who needs randomness?
Random numbers can be very relevant for on-chain applications such as games, lotteries, prediction markets, or NFT launches.
Relying on pseudo-random values like the last blockhash can be manipulated by miners and is not advisable.
Drand runs distributed nodes to produce their randomness beacon. Drand uses Pedersen’s DKG (Distributed Key Generation) protocol to create collective private/public key. Participants in their League of Entropy then generate randomness in rounds and broadcast it together with its signature.
How does the randomness oracle work?
The oracle writes results from the distributed random beacon provided by Drand.love on-chain. These results are written about every 30 seconds by the oracle. Here is DIAs documentation, as well as a guide, on how to exactly use the oracle.
Why is funding required and how much ASTR and SDN are needed?
Funding is required because the randomness oracle incurs gas costs to push new verifiable random outputs on-chain. Gas costs are estimated for an update every 30 seconds. At current gas costs, this equates to approx 0.0005 ASTR per update and around 525 ASTR per year and 0.00004 SDN per update, and 42 SDN per year respectively on Shiden.
Astar treasury will provide 500 ASTR and 40 SDN as initial funding to designated addresses which are solely used to fund the Astar and Shiden randomness oracle.
DIA will update the community on actual gas usage for the oracle in case it deviates strongly over a longer time frame from expected gas costs, which might be the case if gas cost fluctuates from expectations. DIA will inform Astar to add funds need-based.
After 12 months of using the oracle, total expenses will be shared in an update and future actions and or developments will be requested and based on community feedback.
Gas costs are solely used for updating the oracle. DIA does not charge or use any of the ASTR/ SDN but for contract updates. Any remaining unused gas will be sent back to the treasury if the community does not wish to prolong the randomness oracles.
Are Astar/ Shiden and DIA already working together?
DIA has been the first Oracle to deploy on Astar. DIA values the Astar team and community as well as builders tremendously. We have been fortunate to partner and integrate with projects such as Starlay, SIO2, Astrid DAO, Orcus Finance, and Starfish Finance. DIA also uses the Arthswap DEX as a price source, and has the first and only WASM oracle on the Shiden Network.
