Empiric Network: The ZK-Native Oracle
The Oracle Problem
Smart contracts are powerful because they are permissionless, automatic reactions to states of the world. This has given rise to the paradigm-shifting phenomenons we know today: DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and many more. But we tend to forget that smart contracts alone cannot disrupt anything. For web3 to achieve mass adoption, you need secure smart contracts plus a good oracle.
Oracles are the backbone of smart contracts because smart contracts are blind without them: they have no way of connecting with the outside world. How do you find out the price of an asset, the temperature in Berlin or who won an election? Smart contracts have to use oracles to access off-chain data — without them, trillion-dollar industries like DeFi could not exist.
While we have invested billions in making smart contracts robust and trustless, it’s almost a dirty secret that today’s most successful oracles are permissioned, trusted black boxes. They run off-chain infrastructure that comes up with a magical final answer that is impossible to audit, and protocols have to trust. This is extremely dangerous because smart contracts can become stuck in a “garbage in, garbage out” trap, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars as we have seen frequently in the past.
If blockchains are to live up to their promise, then it is necessary to create reliable oracles that are decentralized and transparent, and as a result, secure like smart contracts. To do this, we have to move oracles on-chain, which up until recently has been far too costly. But the modern rise of zero-knowledge (zk) rollups introduces cheap, verifiable on-chain computation (a mind-boggling 3–4 orders of magnitude improvement) that finally makes it possible to build an entirely on-chain oracle!
Introducing Empiric Network
And that’s where we come in to unlock the future of blockchain: Empiric is the zk-native oracle that brings the principles of DeFi to data infrastructure:
Decentralized: Empiric Network receives proprietary data from some of the world’s largest market markers and exchanges. Empiric’s Founding Data Partners include Jane Street, Alameda Research, Gemini, FTX, CMT Digital and Flow Traders.
Transparent: Anyone can verify any data point from origin through transformation to destination.
Composable: For the first time, anyone can compose verified data to go beyond mere price feeds. TradFi runs on advanced computational feeds, such as dynamic yield curves, risk metrics, and volatility surfaces. Empiric Network creates these feeds entirely on-chain by leveraging zk-computation — all without sacrificing security or transparency. We are working with leading protocols to create these computational feeds that will serve as the foundation for a new generation of more sophisticated and user-friendly protocols.
Empiric has been live in stealth for the last few months (on StarkNet testnet) and already integrated with leading protocols such as ZKLend, Magnety, Serity, CurveZero, Canvas, and FujiDAO.
Now, we’re thrilled to announce a $7M Seed round led by Variant to build the oracle for the zk-future of blockchain. Variant is joined by an amazing group of founding data partners including Alameda, CMT Digital, Flow Traders, FTX and Gemini, as well as ecosystem partners such as StarkWare and Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon), and a stellar group of investors such as Thomas Bailey (Road Capital), Marc Bhagarva (Tagomi), Luke Pearson (Polychain), Max Kleiman-Weiner (Sequoia), Tekin Salimi (DAO5), Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet) and Robert Leshner (Compound).
Today, Empiric is reinventing the data infrastructure for DeFi. But our mission is much broader: We are building the crucial decentralized infrastructure for all data, from the weather (parametric insurance) to sports (betting and fantasy sports) to news (prediction markets) and beyond. We’ve assembled an exceptional team from places such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, who built data infrastructure at Palantir, created tokenized real estate with DLA Piper and have been building on zk-rollups since day one.
We believe in a world where society’s crucial applications are accessible to anyone, where transparency replaces backroom dealings and trustless software has made middlemen obsolete. With our deep knowledge of zk-technology and the ecosystem, we’re here to build the decentralized data infrastructure our industry needs to make this vision a reality.
Want to join the team? We’re actively hiring across technical and ecosystem roles! If you’re interested, please email us at hello@42labs.xyz.
Have high-quality market data? We are partnering with data providers to make reliable, composable data feeds available to cutting-edge zk protocols. If you’re interested, please email us at hello@42labs.xyz.
Are you a protocol? We have a track record of reliably providing accurate data feeds, both price feeds and more advanced computational feeds. If you’re interested, please email us at hello@42labs.xyz.
Follow @EmpiricNetwork to stay up to date!
PS — We will be at the EthCC, the Encode hackathon and StarkNetCC in Paris July 18–22, with some surprises in store. Reach out if you want to meet up!
