Cartesi Integrates Chainlink Price Feeds to Increase the Reliability of Noether’s Delegated Staking System

Learn how this helps increase security, transparency, and more

Published in

Cartesi

5 min readOct 27, 2021

We recently announced that the Noether sidechain’s Delegated Staking system is live on the Ethereum network. Now, we are pleased to announce that we have integrated two Chainlink Price Feeds to support our Delegated Staking system. The first involves a Chainlink-powered decentralized price oracle for the current ETH/CTSI price, which we will use to calculate user staking rewards. The second involves the use of the Chainlink Fast Gas Oracle to accurately compensate the gas costs incurred by stakers.

By integrating these Chainlink decentralized oracles, we increase the reliability and fairness of our Delegated Staking systems while also hardening it against potential attack vectors such as flash crashes, exchange downtime, or data manipulation (via flash loans). Users now have even more transparency and security around the Delegated Staking system continually tracking global markets and executing as designed.

We decided to upgrade our ETH/CTSI oracle from Uniswap v3 TWAP to Chainlink Price Feeds because Chainlink provides several key optimizations such as:

Price Precision — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that are aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and suspicious volumes. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates more precise global market prices that are resistant to problems with a single or small set of data providers.
Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams and traditional enterprises with a strong track record for reliability, even during high gas prices and extreme network congestion.
Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or the oracle network.
Transparency — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical performance of node operators and oracle networks, as well as check the real-time prices being offered.

Additionally, we use the Chainlink Fast Gas oracle so that our gas-based fee model for staking pools takes into account the Ethereum gas costs of producing a block on Noether. If the Ethereum gas price at the moment of production is high, the pool fee will be higher. If the gas price is low, the pool fee will be lower. For more information on the gas-based fee model for Noether staking pools, see this article.

Why Chainlink oracles are important

Oracles are fundamental infrastructure for nearly all blockchain ecosystems because they grant smart contracts the ability to see beyond the blockchain they are deployed on. From data on other blockchains to events that take place in the real world, oracles are a necessary bridge to unlock the full capabilities of smart contracts. Oracles allow smart contracts to price assets on-chain assets and settle event-driven logic using external data, creating a hybrid smart contract infrastructure that combines the on-chain and off-chain worlds.

Chainlink is the industry leader in providing secure oracle solutions to leading blockchain applications, already helping secure tens of billions of dollars in on-chain value across numerous top blockchains and applications. Cartesi is pleased to have Chainlink be the Noether sidechain’s eyes, helping Noether staking pool operators be rewarded more securely and fairly during gas spikes and CTSI price fluctuations.

Following the development of Chainlink over the last several months, we believe that the protocol has a strong chance of becoming the standard for supplying off-chain data to blockchain-powered apps. Several large Ethereum decentralized financial projects have switched from running their own oracle implementations to using the Chainlink network, confirming our hypothesis. We plan to continue to use its Chainlink to collaborate with other teams on cutting-edge smart contract projects.

“We are thrilled to be a part of the Chainlink community and to contribute to the adoption of blockchain technology in the real world. Not only does Chainlink improve our Delegated Staking system through reliable price and gas data, but we look forward to implementing more Chainlink products seamlessly into Cartesi’s products, such as combining Chainlink oracles with Cartesi Rollups in the future.” — Colin Steil, COO at Cartesi

For full information on pool fees, service providers, and staking terms and conditions, please review our terms and conditions via https://explorer.cartesi.io
For any questions regarding delegating staking, join the channel on our Discord server!
If you would like to become a pool manager, please see our guide.
If you would like to delegate your stake and need a review of how it works, please go here.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or read the documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

About Cartesi

Cartesi is a multi-chain layer-2 infrastructure that enables any software developer to create smart contracts using standard software tools and languages while attaining huge scalability and massive cost savings. Cartesi combines a revolutionary virtual machine, optimistic rollups, and side-chains to transform the way developers build blockchain applications.

Follow Cartesi across official channels: