4 posts tagged with "introduction"

Switchboard is a community-driven, decentralized oracle network built on Solana that allows anyone to publish on-chain data for smart contract developers to reliably build upon.

What is an Oracle?​

Smart contracts are the building blocks of web3 and can be thought of as the logic behind programmable money, although their use cases extend well beyond just monetary transactions. A smart contract encapsulates some pre-defined logic allowing anonymous participants to interact without a trusted intermediary. More complex smart contracts might rely on external data from the web but blockchains do not have the capability of directly relaying this information. Enter oracles.

Oracles are the gateway between a blockchain and the real world, providing the mechanisms to arrive at a reliable consensus for a single data point when given multiple sources. Oracles can then determine the most reliable value of the data point after examining the provided answer of each data source. In this way, oracles increase information integrity by removing the risk of a single point of failure or outlier. Oracle services have many applicable uses in blockchain based applications today, such as:

• Determining the current price of an asset for collateralized lending

• Determining the state of a tracking number to auto settle funds on arrival

• Determining the current standings of the MLB for fantasy sports rankings

Oracles can be used for a variety of data sets as long as there is a reliable way to source the information.

We’re excited to announce a partnership with Genesis Volatility, the leading provider of crypto options data, to provide volatility data on-chain. Options data has been one of the most requested feeds from projects building on Solana and we’re proud to work with Genesis Volatility, to bring it to Solana’s mainnet — starting today with BTC and ETH Implied Volatilities.

Developers looking to build on top of Switchboard can learn more about building on top of Switchboard with our getting started guide or dive straight in with our feeds explorer. If you’re building an application relying on on-chain data feeds or would like to see a certain type of data on-chain, we’d love to hear from you! Stay connected on our Discord / Telegram communities and follow us on twitter to stay on top of Switchboard’s latest developments!

We’re excited to share that Switchboard has raised a $3.5MM seed round led by Lemniscap to build out our community curated oracle network on Solana. This round of funding allows us to continue our mission to bring support for the long tail of data feeds on-chain in a decentralized, high-performance manner.

Participating investors included CMS Holdings, Taureon, Alameda Research, MGNR, Collab + Currency, Divergence Ventures, Zeal Capital, SCC Investments, JST Capital as well as angel investors Chris McCann, former Solana General Counsel Ryon Nixon and Recur executive Paul J Martin among others.

Switchboard is building community curated oracle feeds on Solana.

We want to enable anyone in the SOL community to push any form of data, whether financial time series or non-financial event-based data, on-chain and to help power the next generation of decentralized applications.

Why Switchboard & Why Solana​

• Oracles are a critical component of DeFi infrastructure that enable smart contracts to interact with real world data. Too many solutions have focused on financial and time series data rather than generalizing to all forms of data.

• Data on-chain isn’t free and there needs to be a sustainable curation & incentive mechanism to determine what data will be maintained on-chain.

• Data integrity and incentive mechanisms need to be driven by the market and community. Scaling these sorts of decisions and supporting a broader set of data feeds requires a high performance, shared state chain.

• By focusing on community and market driven curation, Switchboard enables a much broader set of data providers and consumers to decide what they would like to see on-chain. The long tail of data is much more than just price feeds!