Witnet AMA Recap：Integration with KCC
On 10th January 2022, KCC and Witnet had an Ask-Me-Anything session on the KCC main Telegram group with 9000+ members. The main topic was “Integration on KCC”. If you missed the AMA, you can check the recap as follow.
Venue: KCC Official English Community
Time: 2 PM, Jan 10th, 2022, (UTC)
Host: William
Guests:
Adan SDPC, Chairman of Witnet Foundation
[ William ]
First of all, thank you all for being here today
This is Will. The ambassador of KCC
Hope you all have a good time during the weekend. Now, this is the first AMA we have for 2022
And we have a very speacial guest today! The very first Oracle project that deployed on KCC!
I am excited about their integration, and looking forward to the AMA today!
Without further do, I will give it to our guest today @adansdpc ,the chairman of Witnet foundation!
Please go ahead and introduce yourself
[ Adan]
I have been into programming and software engineering ever since I realized as a teen that it allowed me to create stuff that enabled other people to do their job, live new experiences and model the world. With blockchain technology, the same thing happened — as soon as I realized the potential that crypto had to change the economy and the world forever, I knew I needed to work full-time on it.
[ William ]
Awesome, please tell us how do you guys get started!
[Adan]
The idea of Witnet came out of a former startup by the same group of founders called Stampery. We started this company in 2014, inspired by Bitcoin’s core principle of removing trust in 3rd parties out of the equation, and rather relying on cryptography. When we started to use Ethereum, we noticed that smart contracts suffered from a problem that we had been trying to solve for a while — how to relay data from external information providers without introducing a “single point of failure”. We immediately started devoting more and more time to imagining the best solution for this “oracle problem”, and ended up publishing a whitepaper in November 2017 that described the technical and economical mechanism for secure and decentralized data input that Witnet uses today.
Right after that, in the beginning of 2018, we raised enough money to set up the project and immediately started to hire our team of rockstar devs. They deserve all the credit. It took us almost 3 years to build the whole system, but the challenge of solving the oracle problem was not trivial at all, and our goal was always to make Witnet as secure and decentralized as Ethereum or Bitcoin. To fulfill this goal, we had to engineer a lot of components from scratch, and to fine-tune everything to match the requirements of the kind of high-value smart contracts that we see in DeFi.
[William]
I see, very detail introduction
But can you share more interms of function? Like what is the Witnet about?
[ Adan]
Witnet is a decentralized oracle protocol that focuses on providing reliable data to “autonomous” smart contracts — those that require a high degree of tamper resistance and should not leave space for manipulation.
Long story short, Witnet can power and secure most DeFi primitives and protocols like price feeds, stablecoins, synthetics, etc., as well as acting as a reliable source of randomness for creating uniqueness in NFTs.
[ William ]
As you mentioned that you are a decentralized oracle protocol. And there is one of the most well known one named Chainlink. What is the difference between Witnet and Chainlink?
Or What are the advantages your guys have?
[Adan]
Usually I like to divide the differences into 3 areas: ecosystem, technical and business differences.
Starting with ecosystem differences: the Witnet approach to oracles has a stronger focus on decentralization and securing the data through crypto incentives. As a result, Witnet is a totally permissionless network in which anyone can run their own node and participate in this “crowd-witnessing” task of resolving oracle queries, without having to go through any KYC bullshit. The network is secure not because of curation, but rather because of pure cryptoeconomic design.
Another side effect of that is that the data consumer (the smart contract developer) doesn’t need to pick a specific set of nodes to report the data, the reporters are secretly and randomly selected by the protocol, and only once they have cryptographically committed to the result of the query, they reveal their reports and their identities (it’s a mixture of a commitment scheme with a Schelling Point game)
Regarding more technical aspects, a strong point of Witnet is that it supports querying virtually any public API out there, and all data types (numbers, strings, bytes, etc.). In general, queries to Witnet are super flexible and customizable, both from the data source picking side, and the incentives side.
The most obvious difference with other popular oracles is again that in Witnet, nodes are rewarded if they perform well, or immediately slashed if they report a fake result or is an outlier
Then, for the “business” selling points, it is worth stressing the point that, as Witnet runs on its own chain, it is not tied to the fate of a specific smart contracts platform, and not limited by the long term viability of their software, ecosystem or token.
This means that Witnet is being sidechained to multiple smart contract platforms. If Witnet serves crucial contracts from all of them, it will potentially capture more value and become something bigger than any of those platforms separately.
Then the WIT coin, that is native to the Witnet chain, is mineable. Mineable coins are awesome for bootstrapping of a project, because they generate a big ecosystem and network effects around them. As WIT is not an ERC20 but rather native to our chain, well, that’s not great for liquidity in the early days, but we’re playing the long game. Historicllly, Layer 1 coins have more upside than tokens: out of the 15 cryptos with the biggest market cap, 12 are coins and only 3 are tokens.
Finally, from a user perspective, the nice thing is that the dev don’t strictly need to use the WIT token to query the oracle, because the queries are paid in the native token of the chain where they are at, in this case, with KCC. However, their usage drives demand towards the WIT coin, because the bridge nodes that relay the queries and the results back and forth between both networks still need to spend an equivalent amount of WIT coins on the Witnet side. The more the Witnet oracle will be used on KCC, the better for the economics of both projects, it’s an absolute win-win
[William]
100%
Wow, that is a lot of information!
But very good explaination!
You mentioned that everyone could become node. How can users become one of the nodes of Witnet? What is the requirement?
[Adan]
The Witnet mainnet is a totally permissionless and open network. Everyone is free to join and run their own validator node on equal terms. There exist no requirements other than very little technical requirements.
Witnet mining uses a probabilistic BFT-alike consensus algorithm, so no Proof-of-Work is necessary. The hardware requirements for running a full node are therefore incredibly low. Obviously, the more resources you spare when provisioning your machine, the better it will perform and the less likely it will be to run into issues.
Here’s more info about the requirements: https://docs.witnet.io/node-operators/hardware-requirements/
[William]
Good to know that! I will definitely dig more into that.
For next question, can you share with us what is the current focus of Witnet? And what do you guys plan to achieve?
[Adan ]
Our current focus is on expanding the availability of the Witnet set of oracle tools to as many L1 and L2 chains as possible. This strategy is not only a matter of user acquisition, but also a strong bet for platforms in which innovation is happening at an incredible pace because of the lesser scalability and cost concerns.
A second line of work today is on fostering the Witnet community. As of today, the community is quite modest, geeky and close-knit, but it is growing consistently, and there’s an increasing number of independent individuals and companies contributing for the good of the ecosystem. In our never-ending quest for decentralization, the role of Witnet Foundation is now to educate about the need for decentralized oracles, push for the advancement and adoption of the protocol, and fund initiatives that add value to the Witnet ecosystem and to our partners.
Another milestone in our most immediate roadmap is to improve access and liquidity to the Witnet coin ($WIT). Beyond the obvious reasons on why the market availability and liquidity of the Wit coin is an important milestone for the project, we would like to highlight that for the strong cryptoeconomic incentives that underpin and secure the Witnet oracle to work at scale, it is crucial that the node operators can liquidate their rewards, and in doing so, create the opportunity for new miners to take those coins from the market and stake them in their own nodes. This healthy hand-swapping is only possible in a liquid and accessible market.
Finally, we are devoting as much time as possible to keep an eye on the space and remain vigilant of everything going on out there to make sure that — in the same way as DeFi needs price feeds and NFTs needs randomness — whatever is the next big thing in crypto and smart contracts, we will be the oracle of reference supporting the leading innovators who are building the future of Web3.
[William]
Again, a lot of information. Thank you for sharing all of that
And you mentioned WIT coins. Can you share with us the tokenomic of WIT?
[Adan]
Long story short, there’s a premine of 30% of the supply, and then the remaining 70% are independently mineable by node operators through block proposing and participating in resolving oracle queries.
Here’s more info about the token distribution:
https://medium.com/witnet/wit-witnet-blockchains-native-tokenomics-4559084073c5
[William]
Now, we have one of the most important questions for today
How is Witnet going to help the KCC ecosystem?
[Adan]
The Witnet decentralized network of oracle nodes will immediately start to trustlessly provide data to smart contracts on KCC in an accurate, transparent, and censorship-resistant way.
The integration — which is already live on the KCC Stardust and will go live on Andromeda really soon, makes all the components in the Witnet oracle suite available to every KCC developer, including:
- Public price feeds that are completely free to read from, starting with ( KCS/USDT, BTC/USD and ETH/USD ), and adding new pairs on demand.
- The Witnet Random Number Generator, which is an efficient and secure way to source randomness and uniqueness into NFT and gaming use cases.
- The Witnet Request Board — which enables KCC developers to benefit from Witnet’s internal filtering and aggregation capabilities to have external data securely retrieved and attested from multiple data sources at once, thus reducing reliance on specific data providers, and eliminating any single point of failure.
[William]
Okay, but how will these tools or components be implemented specifically?
[ Adan ]
We believe that the availability of these oracle solutions is a key milestone for the broader adoption of KCC, as it will open the door to more sophisticated and reliable DeFi and NFT use cases.
This is only a first step in a cooperation roadmap between the Witnet and KCC communities that began barely 1 month ago but has already yielded impressive results in record time. This has only been possible thanks to the fluent communication and collaboration between the developers of both projects — which is expected to continue to be a win-win for many years to come.
As part of this long-term collaboration, a dedicated team of Witnet developers will also be working side by side with several projects in the KCC ecosystem to assist them in integrating the oracle into their contracts.
We are completely sure that this integration and a strong long-term relationship between our communities will guarantee that whatever is the next big thing in crypto, KCC and Witnet will be together in the forefront.
[William]
Thank Adan for answering the questions. Witnet has delivered some really good content today
Do you have any link to share with us? So that people can keep up with your project
[Adan]
- Website: https://witnet.io
- Telegram: https://t.me/witnetio
- Discord: https://discord.gg/X4uurfP
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/witnet_io
- GitHub: https://github.com/witnet
[William]
Awesome. That is all for today! Thank you all for joining us
Thank you @adansdpc
[Adan]
thank you all!
