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smart-contracts

The Missing Link: How Chainlink’s Pallet Aims to Deliver Greater Informational Access

08/04/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Missing Link: How Chainlink’s Pallet Aims to Deliver Greater Informational Access

As demand for smart contracts climbs, Chainlink’s modular oracle for the Substrate framework aims to power developers and defi applications with trusted off-chain information and pricing data needed to attract projects to Polkadot and Kusama.

Blistering Growth in Defi and Smart Contracts Beckon New Layer of Trust

As the smart contract revolution continues to gain traction, the fissures and flaws in existing infrastructure that supports these transactional protocols are becoming more apparent. Among the chief issues facing smart contracts, costs and security are the main factors in the spotlight.

To continue growing and scaling these unique protocols while not only addressing the accompanying shortcomings, smart contracts will effectively need to be “smarter.” Yet, given blockchains’ validation constraints, which are intended to preserve stability and security, there is a barrier to off-chain information by design.

Concerning smart contracts, satisfying contractual conditions may depend on external data (like pricing for instance), which may not be available on the corresponding blockchain hosting the contract itself. Besides creating a unique headache for developers, it corresponding restricts the use cases of smart contracts.

Chainlink stepped in with one answer among the pioneering solutions after introducing “oracles” to the blockchain universe. The main idea behind oracles involves connecting trusted external data sources to smart contracts, providing the missing link between the onchain and offchain worlds.

Smart Contract Adoption Depends on Data Access & Availability

Just like an API can connect two separate systems and share information, Chainlink can connect smart contracts to external data sources in the same manner. Akin to the premise that centralized sources of information can have a slant or bias, the idea behind Chainlink is to decentralize information inputs and outputs. This helps maintain a commitment to building open-source resources for developers that a single, controlling entity can’t compromise.

One of the main applications of Chainlink is pricing information, especially in the realm of decentralized finance (defi) applications. Borrowing and lending protocols like Aave already pull their rate pricing information from Chainlink, helping inform decisions and smart contract conditions. The architecture of oracles is such that they effectively provide another layer on top of existing blockchains, meaning they don’t compromise the integrity or security of the first layer.

Still, the oracle has many more applications besides defi. It can pull all manner of information, including weather conditions, sports results, and economic data changes, to name a few. To power these protocols and ensure greater adoption, smart contract access to off-chain data resources will be paramount.

Since Chainlink’s oracle was launched on Ethereum in 2019, it has been a mainstay among popular defi projects. Now the oracle is being adapted for other blockchains as the project attempts to maintain its agnostic stance. The latest iteration, designed for Polkadot and Kusama’s Substrate development framework, will act slightly differently from earlier versions.

The Pallet Module

Unlike the Ethereum version of Chainlink, which has nodes that report price information, Kusama and Polkadot parachains can individually determine whether they want to embrace Chainlink pricing data. By including their specific module, termed a “pallet,” developers can effectively bridge the Chainlink data into their respective smart contract applications.

For Polkadot Defi projects like Acala, this means that their parachain can choose to incorporate the oracle in a modular fashion. Yet, parachain projects that don’t need access to the data won’t be required to integrate the module. By extension, this means they won’t need to allocate any blockchain resources to Chainlink.

As defi projects seek greener pastures for more affordable cost structures and scalability, Polkadot and Kusama’s Chainlink integration will make it even easier for smart contract developers to make the leap. Meanwhile, a great number of alternative oracle-centric projects like Band, DIA, API3 are competing with Chainlink to offer similar services.

How do you see the oracles’ off-chain information impacting smart contracts usage? Let us know in the comments section below.

Filed Under: chainlink, defi, English, Ethereum, Kusama, News Bitcoin, Oracles, parachains, Polkadot, smart-contracts, technology

Interview: Bitcoin Smart Contracts With Ben Carman

06/04/2021 by Idelto Editor

Bitcoin developer Ben Carman joined the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast” to discuss his cutting-edge work in the Bitcoin smart contracting space.

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In this episode of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” host Christian Keroles sat down with rising Bitcoin developer Ben Carman to discuss his cutting-edge work in the Bitcoin smart contracting space, as well as controversy and disputes that Carman finds himself in as he trolls Bitcoin Twitter.

Carman and Keroles first met far before Carman’s rise to prominence in the Bitcoin community at the BitBlockBoom conference in 2019. Since then, Carman has joined SuredBits as a leader in discreet log contract (DLC) technology. DLCs show promise as the smart contracting and oracle layer for the Bitcoin financial stack. Carman has since built Krystal Bull, which is a wallet for hosting an oracle. Carm threw in his two cents on the Taproot activation discussion and educated Keroles about all of the benefits and features that Taproot enables.

Lastly, they dove into a recent confrontation between Eric July and Carman. July is a prominent libertarian pendent who does not really recommend or educate his following on Bitcoin. Carman and other Bitcoin plebs joined July’s podcast to call out the fact that he and other libertarians that do not take action are LARPS and he discussed the fallout from that confrontation.

Topics discussed include:

  • DLCs
  • The Bitcoiner and libertarian showdown
  • Suredbits
  • Krystal Bull
  • Why run an oracle?
  • Taproot
  • Lot=true versus =false
  • The future and nature of Bitcoin finance
  • Why are libertarians who deny bitcoin LARPs?
  • Eric July’s podcast

Filed Under: ben carman, Bitcoin Magazine, bitcoin magazine pocast, dlcs, English, Podcast, smart-contracts, technical, Video

The Power of ETH and BCH: Smart Bitcoin Cash Project Highlights Innovative Sidechain

02/04/2021 by Idelto Editor

The Power of ETH and BCH: Smart Bitcoin Cash Project Highlights Innovative Sidechain

On Thursday, Bitcoin Cash proponents were introduced to a new website that features a project called Smart Bitcoin Cash or Smartbch for short. Essentially, the project is a sidechain for Bitcoin Cash that is compatible with Ethereum’s EVM and Web3 API, which means people will soon be able to leverage decentralized applications (dapps) without paying lots of money for transaction fees.

Bitcoin Cash Fans Introduced to a Unique Ethereum and Web3-Compatible Sidechain

At the time of writing, Ethereum is the dominant chain when it comes to Web3 applications and decentralized finance. However, ethereum (ETH) fees to interact with a Web3 compatible dapp or some type of smart contract can be very expensive these days. The Smartbch project aims to change all that and the creators plan to make throughput as large as one billion gas every 15 seconds.

The Power of ETH and BCH: Smart Bitcoin Cash Project Highlights Innovative Sidechain

The new website called smartbch.org says the sidechain will essentially maximize throughput of EVM and Web3 tools. The website gives a person a comprehensive look at what Smart Bitcoin Cash aims to accomplish with a FAQ, documentation, community resources, and even jobs and bounties.

“Smart Bitcoin Cash’s innovation lies in libraries,” the core components mentioned in the project’s white paper notes. “Instead of inventing fancy consensus and cryptographic algorithms, we decided to adopt another methodology: to develop low-level libraries with an aim to fully uncover the hardware’s potential, especially its inherent parallelism. Ordinary users and developers are provided with a compatibility layer supporting EVM and Web3, so the optimized low-level “close to the metal” libraries themselves remain concealed by this layer of abstraction. During the implementation, we used the codename ‘Moeing,’ which is added to the libraries’ names as prefix.”

Five Tools and Many Benefits

Smartbch leveraged five tools that will be greatly beneficial to the sidechain’s ecosystem. MoeingADS single-layer architecture, the MoeingEVM parallelized execution engine, the MoeingDB application-specific database, MoeingKV storage, and the MoeingAOT compiler for the EVM. The project’s website notes that programmers can “build a new playground for Bitcoin Cash’s ecosystem and enlarge the user base.”

Smartbch will also offer:

  • EVM and Web3 compatible and has a short block interval to support defi-applications.
  • The throughput will be as large as one billion gas every 15 seconds to allow more users to practice defi at a very low cost.
  • Has been developed from scratch and is made of several low-level libraries which fully leverage the potential of hardware, especially its inherent parallelism.
  • Earn an extra reward for Bitcoin Cash’s miners and holders, who can elect Smart Bitcoin Cash’s validators with hashpower and locked coins, respectively.
  • Develop trustless non-custodian two-way pegged gateways, which can support any kinds of side chains of Bitcoin Cash for securely transferring BCH bidirectionally. This enables Bitcoin Cash to include more side chains for a richer ecosystem.

Bitcoin.com’s newsdesk was the first to report on the Ethereum and Web3-compatible sidechain coming to Bitcoin Cash during the first week of March. Of course, the BCH community on Reddit loved the idea and many supporters wrote a comment about the project on r/btc.

“We are working with the Smartbch team and have a test node running. Should have the Uniswap contract working this weekend,” one programmer wrote on the forum. The first release of version 0.1.0 of Smartbch is now available and developers can help test a dapp on Smartbch. Programmers can also download the source code and start a single node testnet. At the time of publication, bitcoin cash (BCH) is exchanging hands for $560 per unit, up 2.3% during the last 24 hours.

What do you think about the Smartbch project and the Ethereum and Web3-compatible sidechain coming to Bitcoin Cash? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Filed Under: BCH Miners, bitcoin cash BCH, dApps, defi, English, Ethereum, Ethereum (ETH), EVM, Moeing, MoeingEVM, News Bitcoin, sidechain, Smart Bitcoin Cash, smart-contracts, Smartbch, Smartbch website, technology, web3

Tezos Ties-Up with Wolfram Blockchain Labs to Simplify Smart Contract Deployment

02/03/2021 by Idelto Editor

Wolfram Blockchain Labs (WBL) and Tezos are forging a full integration of Tezos into Wolfram Language and Wolframalpha. The integration gives easy access to developers that want to interact with the Tezos blockchain and their smart contracts.

WBL-Designed Oracle Expands Tezos Developers’ Computational and Analytical Capabilities

Amid the accelerating race to simplify smart contract deployment, Tezos continues to build on its latest momentum after integrating Wolframalpha and the Wolfram Language via Wolfram’s blockchain.

Wolfram, a renowned computational technology provider, supplies computational languages and answer engines via its own distributed ledger technology. The two-way integration orchestrated by Wolfram Blockchain Labs (WBL) and the TQ Tezos is intended to allow both blockchains to pull and push data from each other.

This integration is made possible by a Wolfram-designed blockchain oracle that allows Tezos developers to tap into Wolframalpha data and computational facts while granting Wolfram users the ability to analyze Tezos blockchain data. An oracle essentially serves as a bridge between two blockchains, allowing a blockchain to pull data from an external source similar to an API via an off-chain transaction.

In the context of Tezos smart contracts, this oracle grants smart contracts the ability to pull computational data from Wolframalpha, like pricing data or other forms that might be needed to satisfy a contract condition or trigger an event. The analytical component of a smart contract can then be more readily automated without compromising security.

More Secure and Reliable Smart Contracts

The secure delivery of computational facts from Wolfram’s algorithmbase and knowledgebase via oracles perfectly complements the Tezos formal verification method, which corroborates smart contract properties’ correctness. Together, this means more shortcuts for developers as they seek to build more secure and reliable smart contracts.

By extension, this expanded functionality not only bolsters the Tezos development ecosystem but dovetails other moves like recent upgrades which have drastically reduced smart contract transaction fees. Moreover, the tie-up enlarges the potential for Wolfram Blockchain users to mine Tezos’ blockchain with statistical queries that effectively analyze smart contract activity.

The self-upgrading nature of Tezos and the constantly expanding toolkit marks another major milestone for this third-generation blockchain. Wolfram has also indicated that developers’ tools would continue to broaden as the collaboration grows amid reports that Wolfram is exploring a role as a “baker” in Tezos proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.

What’s next for smart contracts? Where else do you see them being implemented? Let us know in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Altcoins, Blockchain, English, mathematics, News Bitcoin, Proof of Stake (PoS), smart-contracts, Tezos, Wolfram, WolframAlpha

The Future Of Bitcoin Upgrades: Off-Chain Contract Execution

12/01/2021 by Idelto Editor

Taproot is currently the most likely next upgrade for Bitcoin. It is one of a few upgrades that are currently being worked on that users and developers would hope to eventually see activated on the network. 

All of these upgrades share a general theme that will likely be the theme of many future upgrades as well. This theme is making contracts unicast, or more simply put, moving contract logic off-chain, and leaving it up to the user, instead of the network, to validate and enforce their contract. Moving to a more unicast system will make Bitcoin much more private and scalable while still keeping Bitcoin’s more important properties intact.

These types of upgrades and systems are perfect for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is simply a monetary network, not a computation network. Being a monetary network, its primary function should be to validate that its monetary system is being correctly enforced. In Bitcoin terms, checking that users correctly signed the transaction and that they did not violate the monetary policy should be the primary function of the system, and anything more should be moved to higher layers and only done between the users that are using Bitcoin for more than financial settlement.

MuSig And Unicast Contracts

MuSig is one of the best understood applications of moving contract logic to be unicast. MuSig allows users to make a multisig output look like a standard user’s single sig output. This is done by having users construct keys and signatures off-chain and having them do some cryptographic operations that result in a single public key and signature. This is a huge improvement compared to a normal multisig, where the users need to broadcast all of their public keys and signatures. By doing a normal multisig, the users offload their contract validation to the network, requiring it to validate and store it indefinitely. Instead, with a MuSig, the users do the enforcement themselves by constructing signatures between themselves resulting in a single final signature that can only be valid if the correct amount of parties were honest, thus only requiring the network to validate and store a single signature.

Moving contract logic to be done in a unicast manner makes Bitcoin more private. Today, most contracts have their spending logic explicitly in the transaction’s output scripts. This means that an outside observer is able to see what the user’s exact spending conditions are. Having the user reveal their exact spending conditions not only harms the individual user but also affects the rest of the users on the network. By revealing all available spending paths, a user not only outs themselves as using them, but also reveals that they are not using other spending conditions. This seems obvious but has important implications. Because a user is revealing that they do not have certain spending conditions, it excludes them from sharing an anonymity set from users that use the other spending conditions. This means that the other users will not have our user in their anonymity set, giving them a smaller crowd to hide among. If the user moved their contract enforcement off-chain, then the user could make their transactions and outputs look the same as a standard user’s and thus share an anonymity set with a larger set of users, helping themselves as well as the other users.

Not only does making contract execution unicast make Bitcoin more private, it also makes it more scalable. Moving validation and execution logic off-chain, to be done by the individual users in the contract, ensures that they no longer need to broadcast their entire contract to the entire network. By doing so, the network will then no longer need to do the actual verification of what could be a complex contract and instead only do the minimal verification, likely being only a single signature check. Since the contract is no longer being broadcast to the network, the network will not be storing the required data for this contract either. Because of Bitcoin’s block weight limit, reducing the data needed for any transaction is a boon for the network as it will directly increase transaction throughput, allowing more to be done with the same amount of resources.

Tradeoffs

Removing the need to verify and store contract data can have significant impacts on how users use Bitcoin. With any Bitcoin transaction, the user will need to pay a miner fee to be included in a block. This miner fee is directly correlated to the resources needed to verify and store the transaction. Knowing this, we can conclude that users are disincentivized to use complex scripts and spending conditions. This can have bad implications — for example, a user who is trying to enhance their security by using something like multisig to distribute their keys is now being punished by the network for doing so by having them pay higher fees. Any improvements that can be made to this should be prescient to Bitcoin users and developers.

Using unicast-like contracts includes some other tradeoffs as well. Because the user is no longer offloading their contract validation and execution to the network, they will instead be required to do this themselves, or rather, the software they are using will be. This generally means that the user will need to send and store more data between their counterparties. Doing so requires more complex software and protocols for the user. It can make backups more critical and harder to do; if the user loses this data, their counterparty may be able to violate their contract or, at the very least, the user might not be able to execute their contract without their counterparty’s cooperation. However, these are well understood problems and clever solutions are being proposed to make loss of data safer and to even create ways to hide from a counterparty that there was a loss of data.

In conclusion, today, Bitcoin contracts primarily exist as a broadcast system, requiring the network to validate and store everyone’s contract execution logic. Upgrades that are likely coming to Bitcoin are able to give us an outlook that moves contracts to instead be enforced between individual users, since Bitcoin is a monetary network first and should primarily enforce its monetary properties. Things like Taproot, Lightning, DLCs and PTLCs all exemplify this perfectly and show that Bitcoiners are building the ecosystem to enhance Bitcoin’s privacy and scalability.

This is a guest post by Ben Carman. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

The post The Future Of Bitcoin Upgrades: Off-Chain Contract Execution appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Filed Under: Bitcoin Magazine, English, musig, smart-contracts, Taproot, technical, unicast contracts

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