Switchboard is celebrating its one year anniversary! It’s actually our 3 months past our anniversary but we were too busy chewing glass to look up at a calendar.
In this article,
We’ll be taking a walk down memory lane, looking back at all we’ve accomplished. After which, we’ll take a look at the road ahead of us. We also want to give a big thank you to all our supporters and community members who made this possible.
Looking back…
Switchboard started off as a hackathon idea. We had the crazy notion that developers should be able to take any off-chain OR on-chain data and create their own data feeds.
Permission-less without the bullshit.
NO exclusivity contracts, NO “sponsorships”, NO waiting for teams’ responses.
This means, no headaches and all you need to do is
Select the data (pricing data, outcome of an event, weather of a city);
Customize the parameters to fit to your custom use cases;
Pay the necessary transaction fees to publish a feed on-chain.
Truth is
BTC price feeds are great but what about low cap illiquid alt price feeds? It turns out, many developers and projects want long tail data feeds!
Prediction markets looking for the outcome of an election;
Lending protocols looking to add small cap asset as collateral;
Aspiring artist creating a dynamic NFT collection based off player statistics;
Fret not, Switchboard allows you to get the data your application needs on-chain.
Looking around…
Let’s take this moment to look around us, the support from the community, protocols and many others is heartwarming. Thanks to each and every one of you, we’ve managed to accomplish all of this within our first year:
May 25, 2021 — First oracle on Solana main-net (Article)
June 23, 2021 — Third prize in Solana’s 2nd hackathon for the DeFi track (Article)
August 2021 — First verifiable randomness implementation on Solana
January 27, 2022 — First permission-less oracle network on Solana (V2 Announcement)
February 2022 — First fully on-chain VRF implementation on Solana
June 2022 — First decentralized data catalog on Solana (Publisher Announcement)
This is only the tip of the ice berg.
Switchboard strongly believes in a developer first approach (evident on our Publisher’s UI). Hence, the biggest compliment to us is seeing new developers choosing to tap into Switchboard to learn, explore and build new incredible products. Check out the Switchboard Ecosystem to see a list of our amazing partners! If you’re building with Switchboard fill out the form to get your project added.
Great, now what?
Looking forward…
Introducing our Switchboard roadmap, as part of building a permission-less, decentralized protocol there’s 3 key features the Switchboard protocol needs:
Decentralized Governance
The Switchboard protocol has a network of decentralized node operators and application developers. Anyone can run a node but it’s important that decisions to modify the protocol, particularly with regards to value transfer, staking, slashing and other crypto-economic questions are taken together by the community.
In the next few months we will start rolling out the initial implementation of the Switchboard DAO and look to the community to shape the protocol going forward.
Decentralized Curation
Currently, developers can use any public endpoint / job definition to publish a decentralized feed using Switchboard.
How do we get to 420,069+ feeds available on-chain?
We need a way to incentivize the community to curate quality jobs while also providing a convenient UI for developers to easily tap into.
Enter Publisher. Over the coming months we will finalize the curation incentives and allow you, the community, to contribute to the catalog and get rewarded for growing the network.
Crosschain Data & Publishing
As we have seen over the last few years the future is multi-chain. This means developers will need a way to publish feeds referencing data on multiple chains, while also publishing the feed itself on multiple chains.
For those following the rumors this should come as no surprise. Without further ado:
Switchboard is going multi-chain!
We will share more specifics soon! For now, we look forward to work with new developers to help fulfill their vision. Solana will continue to be our “home chain” moving forward and where we will launch our initial governance modules.
Conclusion
This is only the beginning of Switchboard, we’ve come a long way but we’re not done yet.
As we look to expand, we’re looking for rockstars to join us in building a great infrastructure building block for developers just like yourself and empower them to build the next generation of technology, the Web 3.
All types of contributors across the board (such as marketing, community, smart contract development, etc) are welcomed! If this sounds interesting to you, reach out to us on Discord or send your resume to jobs@switchboard.xyz!
Check out our links here!
Join our community today and stay tuned to our upcoming events!