Sui has officially launched to mainnet and Switchboard is thrilled to support developers in the Sui ecosystem with our oracle infrastructure!

Oracles play a crucial and integral role in the genesis of any blockchain mainnet launch — providing developers with the necessary data (such as price for DeFi) to plug into their products.

Hence, in order to build a strong infrastructure foundation, Switchboard has implemented our v2 iteration on the Sui blockchain.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• What we currently support
• What to look out for
• Links and resources to start developing

Read our #PluggedintoSui article to learn about our expansion to Sui.

We’d love to take the opportunity to thank Sui for supporting us to hastily kickstart the process of research and development, and eventually push production to mainnet.

Switchboard Serverless offers a suite of computing services that enables developers to build the future of blockchain applications.

In the previous Switchboard-v3 article, we covered the “Why build Switchboard v3?” and the technology, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) behind it. In this article, we’ll discuss the whats and hows of v3.

In the previous iteration, v2 offers a great infrastructure — the standard “honest” staked nodes consensus model. Switchboard v3 introduces a new paradigm and a greater solution when building with oracles, providing a secure, verifiable and customizable solution to tailor fit to your data and off-chain execution needs.

About TEEs

A Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a specialized hardware that specializes in data software integrity and privacy.

What are TEEs?​

TEEs represents a secure environment within a machine’s hardware or software that is isolated from the operating system and other applications. TEEs are designed to provide a trusted and secure environment where sensitive information can be processed without the risk of being accessed or modified by unauthorized parties. TEEs can attest another TEE to be running a particular software. TEEs are commonly used in mobile devices, banking or digital wallets to provide secure storage for sensitive data.

In a blockchain context, TEEs can be used to securely store private keys for blockchain wallets, ensuring that they cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties. TEEs can also be used to securely process blockchain transactions, ensuring that they cannot be tampered with or modified by hackers or malicious actors.

Bringing back the ‘Dialed in with Switchboard’ series where we wrap up Switchboard’s endeavours every quarterly!

In 2023 Q1, Switchboard continues to strive for excellence in areas such as the ongoing Switchboard Expansion and growing our developer community!

Statistics

Our statistics on Solana has improved overall, such as increasing our percentage of transactions to 8–10% of total Solana transactions; and other achievements like doubling our VRF requests count since last quarter.

Check out the dashboard here.

Switchboard 2023 Q1 Statistics on Solana

Presenting Switchboard v3 — an oracle protocol using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

Current oracle consensus mechanisms

Today, most oracle protocols achieve consensus using trusted nodes to aggregate results to publish on-chain. For example, a price feed involves a number of oracles aggregating a number of results from different sources and publishing the results on-chain.

From the example, this carries the assumption of an honest majority of nodes answering correctly. This introduces additional overhead of additional network fees (to incentivise oracles) and latency waiting for sources to respond/network propagation.

Additionally, if an oracle is responsible for securing millions of TVL on each update, shouldn’t the oracle be at risk of losing millions of dollars on each update to align on incentives? This form of economic majority introduces additional challenges with capital efficiency.

What if there was a way to use verifiable computation and cryptography so that you didn’t need to rely exclusively on an economic majority for every transaction? What if you could rely on just 1 of N nodes to respond and know the result was accurate?

How is Switchboard v3 different?

TRUST BUT VERIFY!

Switchboard v3’s TEEs enable oracles to become verifiable, offering low latency, low cost and most importantly verifiable compute services.

Core blockchain has officially launched to mainnet in Q1 2023 and Switchboard is thrilled to support developers in the Core ecosystem with our oracle infrastructure!

Oracles play a crucial and integral role in the genesis of any blockchain mainnet launch — providing developers with the necessary data (such as price for DeFi) to plug into their products.

Hence, in order to build a strong infrastructure foundation, Switchboard has implemented our v2 iteration on to the Core blockchain.

At Switchboard, we believe the future of oracle protocols is to expand across the ever-growing amount of blockchains — empowering any developer coming from any background, touching first base on any codebase, blockchain and ecosystem.

Question: Which chain?

#PluggedintoStarknet

Starknet is a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (often referred to as ZK-Rollup). It operates as an L2 network over Ethereum, enabling any decentralised application to achieve unlimited scale for its computation — without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security.

With the features of being a scalable, composable and general purpose L2 blockchain, this inlines with the visions of Switchboard oracle protocol. Switchboard Labs is excited to officially announce the expansion of Switchboard protocol to Starknet blockchain!

At Switchboard, we believe the future of oracle protocols is to expand across the ever-growing amount of blockchains — empowering any developer coming from any background, touching first base on any codebase, blockchain and ecosystem.

Question: Which chain?

#PluggedintoCore

Core’s Satoshi Plus Consensus Mechanism (leveraging the Bitcoin mining hashrate) delivers the composability of an EVM compatible blockchain — what this means is Core combines the optimal features of Proof of Work (PoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) in order to achieve the maximum security, scalability and decentralization, all with incredibly low fees.

With the features aforementioned, this inlines with the visions of Switchboard oracle protocol. Switchboard Labs is excited to officially announce the expansion of Switchboard protocol to Core blockchain!

Switchboard Labs wishes our Operators, Publishers and everyone a very happy new year! In this year’s Switchboard Wrap Up, we’ll touch on these pointers:

• Notable achievements;
• The Switchboard Experience;
• The Switchboard Expansion;
• The Switchboard Ecosystem;
• Teasers to Switchboard Unwrap 2023!

With the recent Solana update on Fee Markets, all types of users on the Solana blockchain can utilise priority fees to bid for priority for their transactions in the leader’s queue. In the recent FTX situation, we’ve experienced an increased amount of users opting for prioritised transactions — meaning they utilised priority fees in times of need. This lead to non-prioritised transactions to not succeed timely.

Links to external sites to view recent trends of fees on Solana:
Solscan Fee Tracker
Dune Dashboard

Oracles remain a critical infrastructure for all types of products to execute timely at any given scenario. Hence, in the event of an increased amount of users opting for prioritised transactions, crucial data feeds on Switchboard must participate as well — introducing Data Feed Priority Fees. Furthermore, after researching, we’ve implemented a Sliding Window feature to improve oracle success rates.

Building & Managing Data Feeds through Multisig Solutions

Switchboard protocol provides a permissionless way to customize data feeds to your specific use cases. Our approach has always been developer-first, allowing developers to build feeds through our low-code interface, the Publisher app and manage seamlessly all in the same application.

As our ecosystem protocols grow and scale together with Switchboard, there will be protocols that require a similar set of data feeds. Take example of a group of DeFi protocol, they are likely integrating with similar crypto assets and thus, requiring a similar set of price feeds to plug into their protocols.

In order for teams and developers to co-own data feeds in a secure manner, a multi-signature (Multisig) wallet solution will be able to achieve it.