Welcome to the fifth edition of our update series which keeps the Orcfax community informed about our latest technological, business, and community developments.
If you want to receive even more current information about Orcfax, please follow our Twitter and join our Discord.
Technical Developments
The new year has started off with a bang! The Orcfax team has been working on a series of new tech developments to further enhance and optimize our oracle solution, and we’re excited to share them with our community.
The Orcfax Oracle Vision
The start of the year saw a number of new projects tackling aspects of the oracle problem. This is encouraging as Cardano DeFi protocols and their users should be looking more critically at how they are sourcing their external data and addressing the many complex issues relating to trusting that data. However, we at Orcfax believe that using the term “oracle” should be reserved for those services that are explicitly tackling all aspects of the oracle problem in a comprehensive way.
Orcfax believes that solving the oracle problem means designing a solution from the bottom up, with a focus on addressing decentralization, data authenticity and accuracy, as well as the audit-ability of data sourcing and publishing workflows. To better explain our convictions and self-imposed design constraints we drafted The Orcfax Oracle Vision. Our vision enumerates the critical design principles that separate ad hoc data services from robust oracle solutions like Orcfax, and dives into how we continue to develop in alignment with those principles.
As Cardano continues to prepare for its next growth phase of DeFi, the need for integrating oracle solutions will become increasingly relevant, with serious financial and project risks to those that do not take this seriously. We hope that by sharing our Orcfax oracle vision that we can provide more criteria for DeFi protocol developers and their community of end-users to consider, as they will be the ones most affected by falsified data attacks.
If you have a favorite Cardano protocol that could benefit from decentralized Orcfax feeds, feel free to introduce us. The Cardano community continues to be the driving force towards further decentralization– let’s do this together!
New developer hire!
As the Orcfax project continues to mature, we are adding talent to aid in our development of Cardano’s first truly decentralized oracle solution; in mid-March we added a new developer with Cardano experience to help the team develop and manage Orcfax’s on-chain components. We’ll give him some time to settle and introduce himself to the Orcfax community at his pace. We’re excited to include another visionary Web3 talent to our motivated and focused dev team.
COOP V1
The initial version of Cardano Open Oracle Protocol (COOP) was developed in collaboration with MLabs consultancy. The protocol constitutes a set of technical guidelines that specify an efficient and cost-effective process for the publication and consumption of on-chain data by smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. These guidelines and specifications in the initial COOP version are free, open-source, and can be implemented by any other project seeking to develop their own Cardano oracle feeds.
We’ve been continuing R&D on COOP as our team continues to look for new ways to bring value to Orcfax products and feed offerings. Our new in-house Plutus developer will be working with our MLabs partners on COOP upgrades and expansion over the coming two months; this work includes, among other things, an improved datum structure to further increase cost efficiency and ease of integration for dApps!
On-demand & CNT feeds
The exciting work happening in COOP has had trickle down effects on some of the other projects we’ve been working on; on February 26th, we published a Medium article unveiling the new Orcfax Cardano Native Token (CNT) feeds alongside a new publication model for integrators!
Our new on-demand publication model takes all the hard work put into our heartbeat model and adds complete flexibility for our integrators. The new model gives dApps even more control of data use by allowing them to request data collection, validation and publication whenever it’s needed by their smart contracts, in between regularly scheduled heartbeats.
More information on our publication models can be found in our docs where we have expanded on their differences and use cases.
Our development team has already launched our CNT feed service on The Cardano Preprod test network and has started inviting potential integrators to begin testing and providing valuable feedback on the needs of Orcfax data feed consumers.
Docs content refresh
As we collaborate with more feed integrators we’ve been updating our technical reference documentation as well as our high-level architecture and design assumptions. Head over to our Docs site to catch up on this new content. We’ll continue with Docs updates in parallel to the COOP upgrades and our upcoming CNT feeds launch.
Business & Token Developments
All ISPO rewards have distributed
We launched our Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO) in Cardano’s 400th epoch, concluding successfully in epoch 413, with the Orcfax pool retiring in epoch 424. Through this ISPO, we distributed 100 million $FACT tokens (10% of the total supply) to our early supporters, following a 6-month vesting schedule.
The final portion of these rewards was distributed in epoch 467 (Feb 14th, 2024). Eligible participants can claim their rewards until Epoch 510. Learn more about the ISPO and how to claim your tokens here.
Thank you all for your support!
Orcfax Economic Model Visualized
$FACT is not only crucial for on-chain governance and becoming a validator but, importantly, dApps utilizing our decentralized data feeds will also pay in FACT!
This will boost the demand for $FACT as the adoption of our feeds increases. To understand how this upward demand spiral works, we have introduced a new section in our documentation page and included a diagram. You can learn more about the economic model here.
Orcfax Validator License Reservation
As Orcfax works toward a fully decentralized architecture, where all fact statements are collected, validated, and published by community validators, a crucial step towards this milestone is the distribution of licenses for the 100 available validator slots. For more information on the validator licenses, you can refer to our detailed Medium article.
Orcfax validator licenses will be represented in the form of NFTs. To mint a license NFT, interested community members first needed to reserve a license. We are pleased to confirm that, at this moment, all validator licenses have been reserved. Those with valid reservations will soon be able to mint their validator license NFTs. Keep a close eye on our next announcement for the mint date.
Once the licenses are minted, we can proceed to the next step in achieving our fully decentralized architecture: the Incentivized Test Net (ITN).
Orcfax proposal: the implementation of rewards for all FACT holders
Orcfax recently unveiled the specifics of the initial Orcfax Validator Network (V1) and associated $FACT rewards for validators. As the initial version does not include a delegation model for non-validators, the community expressed interest in a proposal enabling them to earn rewards by locking FACT tokens. Responding to community input, we crafted a proposal and conducted a $FACT-based on-chain voting poll on the Summon platform. More than 30m $FACT was used to vote for this proposal. With over 28 million $FACT votes in favor of rewarding FACT holders, this proposal has clearly passed. Orcfax is now exploring ways to implement non-validator staking in the initial version (V1) of the validator network.
$FACT being listed on various DeFi platforms
As we are building out our amazing community, more and more DeFi platforms start to list the FACT token. In the last couple of weeks we have seen Cerra, Levvy, Cherrylend and Lenfi list the FACT token on their platforms. You can use your $FACT on these platforms as collateral to borrow against or supply it for others to borrow.
Community Update
End of Pioneer campaign
The Orcfax Pioneer campaign officially ended on January 31 — a huge thank you to all pioneers for your incredible support and enthusiasm. All the pioneers that ended up in the top 500 Pioneers, are eligible for a $FACT reward. The campaign was a huge success for Orcfax, many community members had the chance to learn more about Orcfax. But we also welcomed a lot of new members to our community.
If you’re eligible for the rewards but haven’t claimed them, check the article below for all the necessary information.
Interview Dapp central
Our CEO, Peter van Garderen, was invited to do an interview with Farid from Dapp Central. Farid and Peter discussed our upcoming CNT feeds, the on-demand feeds, the ITN license reservation and more! Make sure to check the interview below!
And that wraps up the fifth edition of our update series! To stay in the loop with all things Orcfax on a daily basis, be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord community. We’re eager to hear your feedback and we can’t wait to share more with you in our next update!
Until next time!
Website: https://orcfax.io/
Docs: https://docs.orcfax.io/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UbAeRuNzDu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/orcfax
