Why CMT Digital Invested in Empiric Network
CMT will be providing data feeds from contract 0x45acdfcad45e50695a79291155e064e0abc9cde11a13006229aa17742b01fa9 signing our data feeds from address 0x03851e76297e6d57c4ff049b502262663d37abc373600eeba4f0f6888d5d38ab
Oracles are a foundational layer of the blockchain technical stack. Oracles enable blockchains to incorporate exogenous data triggers into smart contracts. This external data can come from different blockchains or from more traditional sources (e.g., weather data, the score of a sports event, etc.). Oracles can be thought of as the eyes and ears of smart contracts; without the sensory inputs from an oracle, many smart contracts could not function.
Given how important oracle infrastructure is to the functionality of blockchain systems, it is imperative that an oracle provides traceable, dependable data. Many existing oracle solutions aggregate and deploy their data through permissioned, off-chain mechanisms. This is akin to a black box, where the fidelity of the data is ultimately unknowable. However, this black box solution allows them to aggregate data without incurring usurious layer-1 gas fees charged on many blockchains. The fundamental improvement from Empiric is the ability for the data to be published on-chain.
For the promise of blockchain technology to be fully realized, we believe that oracles should be decentralized, fully traceable, and secure. Thanks to the rise of zero-knowledge rollups and the three-to-four orders of magnitude reduction in on-chain computation costs associated with them, it is now finally possible to build an entirely on-chain oracle solution.
This is why we have chosen to invest in Empiric. Empiric is the first zero-knowledge-oracle solution, which is currently live on StarkNet. Empiric Network aims to decentralize the oracle infrastructure industry within blockchain systems and allow anyone with access to proprietary data feeds to serve them to the community and get rewarded for it. We believe that Empiric belongs in a class of next-generation decentralized oracle solutions that meaningfully iterate on the prior centralized standard for this reason.
Empiric has partnered with its first cohort of data providers, including CMT Digital, that have access to their own proprietary data sources. These data providers will periodically sign their data and post it to StarkNet. Empiric then validates that the data did in fact come from their partners and will also sign the data on-chain to verify this, before aggregating the data for median results, and storing it internally to be served to the contracts when the oracle is called upon.
Why is this structure novel? First, the record of the data source is all on-chain and fully traceable. This means that the data can be used in ways that it couldn’t in a Layer-1 environment. For example, users can track data streams to the original source due to on-chain aggregation, and the fact that each data provider has signed their individual data stream with their unique signature. For the first-time users can definitively be sure of the origin of their data feeds, a factor which is of utmost importance when smart contract security and functionality is at stake. Furthermore, transacting on the ZK environment is so cheap that for the first time, it is possible to have oracle data which is comprised of calculations using multiple data feeds, for example taking the price feed data of BTC, altcoins, and overall crypto market capitalization to construct a BTC or altcoin dominance data feed, something that was previously prohibitively expensive to execute on-chain in an L1 environment.
The ability to compute in a traceable manner can enable a plethora of new activities that will utilize this new data opportunity, iterations on prior on-chain activities such as risk monitoring, algorithmic trading strategies with more complex triggers, more complex analytics, and many more.
The founders of the Empiric Network, Oskar Schulz and Jonas Nelle have shown incredible passion and initiative, qualities that are key to building such a novel product and qualities that have enabled them to get to where Empiric Network is today. Their steps towards enabling decentralized, rewarded data sharing, in an opt-in manner, enable greater cohesion and robustness within the oracle infrastructure layer. They are already serving their next-gen oracle data to the likes of CurveZero, ZKLend, Magnety, and FujiDAO to name a few.
We are excited to support Empiric Network on this journey — Oskar and Jonas, welcome to the CMT Digital family!
