Community AMA, April 2023

Here is a recap of the April 2023 Community AMA, a monthly session where the DIA Team answers community questions and suggestions in the DIA Telegram Community Chat.

DIA is hosting a monthly Telegram AMA session with the core team. The aim of this monthly event is to improve direct communication between DIA and it’s community, by collecting community concerns and suggestions and having the DIA core team answer them.

Below is a recap of the April 2023 Community AMA that took place on April 4th, 2023. In this Community AMA, we had with us Carl Bruns, Co-Founder & CMO, and Anze Noc, Community & DAO Lead at DIA. Lets take a look at what was discussed:

1. Really love the new Liquid Staking Map. What was the reasoning behind creating this resource and how can I contribute to support it?

Liquid staking has recently gained significant popularity, with more and more protocols being deployed across various blockchains. Liquid staking enables higher capital efficiency and yield for stakers, with no technical hardware and knowledge requirements. As Liquid Staking — LS is still a very new concept for the ecosystem, we realized that there is a significant lack of good resources to get an overview of the different ecosystems, both for users and developers. We created this map with the aim to help DeFi users navigate through this ecosystem by providing an open-source tool where users can contribute, in a Wikipedia fashion.

This map was produced by the DIA Community with help of the LS protocols themselves. Anyone can contribute — if you are interested, you can share your ideas with us on the DIA DAO Discord server.

You can check out the map here: https://diadao.notion.site/The-Ultimate-Liquid-Staking-Map-985ce39dc9b8490e9b3f37b4c00119bd

2. How is the DIA team planning to handle the Arbitrum airdrop? Will the tokens be airdropped to the DIA community or are there different plans for the usage of $ARB?

Arbitrum has indicated that they will include us in the airdrop with a total of 75.000 $ARB tokens. The usage of the tokens will be decided by way of a snapshot vote. The core team will make an initial proposal on how to use the funds and the community will be able to vote on it or propose an alternative solution on the DIA forum and open it for discussion. Any decision must be feasible to execute and be for the benefit of the DIA project.

Final decision will be made via vote on Snapshot.

More details to follow in the coming weeks. Note that as of now the tokens have not yet been received. This is the multisig wallet that has been communicated publicly as the wallet to receive the tokens: 0xA1Af3608f6D40BDC5F0d9AF60Ce429201F040673

3. What was the purpose of the recent Astar Network campaign?

Astar is an exciting ecosystem where a lot of innovation is happening right now, and we think it will continue like that, considering the upcoming hackathons with Toyota and Sony. Today, some of the most exciting features that make Astar a unique chain are the EVM + WASM compatibility, as well the cross-virtual machine communication.

We have supported Astar from its early days, being the first oracle deploying in the network and being designated the go-to randomness oracle on the network. Since then, our product stack available in the network has substantially grown, as well as the number of dApps and use cases we are enabling.

Therefore, we thought it was a great time to look back and compile all the dApp growth and innovation our oracles are powering on Astar. Have a look at the case study: https://www.diadata.org/case-studies/astar-network/

4. I noticed the WASM day on Astar and DIA being a part of it. Can you share a bit more details on WASM and how DIA is related to the topic?

WASM is a framework that promises to outperform EVM as a virtual machine for blockchains in terms of efficiency, portability, and speed. Currently, there are only a handful of blockchain networks natively supporting WASM and hence, a small number of WASM-based dApps. Some of the most popular networks are Solana, Near, Cosmos, and Substrate-based chains.

WASM native dApps require Web3 tools written in WASM to work with and unlock their full potential, so they also need WASM-native oracles in order to access data to really build a functioning DeFi ecosystem. DIA deployed its open-source oracle infrastructure on the Astar and Shiden networks quite early already to support WASM dApps. This is why we were invited to participate in a call for the launch day, where we will share a bit more about our activity and views on WASM.

If you are interested, check out what one of our core devs Nitin wrote about WASM in this blog post https://medium.com/dia-insights/the-importance-of-wasm-for-web3-development-9bf8231f7b5a

5. What is the usual process for closing a new client for DIA? Are these usually inbound requests or do these usually happen when DIA does the outreach?

We do not limit ourselves to either of course. On one hand, we are seeing more and more inbound requests as we increase our brand exposure in various ecosystems. As we deploy more services in new ecosystems, we are enabling these chains to flourish in terms of number of applications and utility of their native tokens. DIA’s flexible product architecture allows us to become the critical data stack for more and more exciting and innovative L1s and L2s quite early on in their cycle,, which naturally drives more inbound requests.

On the other hand we have a very active core BD team, which, as some of you might already know, operates the DIA DAO BD guild. This guild and its members are actively conducting market research, monitoring competitors and facilitating new partnerships through identification and outreach. In the past few months, DAO contributors have been playing a growing role in the development of new partnerships.

6. How does DIA ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data it provides and what measures are in place to prevent data manipulation and errors?

The question of accuracy is quite an interesting one, as it really depends on what the goal is and what the restrictions are. The short answer is that DIA is extremely accurate as we enable granular customisation of data feeds, so users can determine the parameters of their data feeds very precisely.

The more complicated answer is that it strongly depends on the availability of the data that a user needs. If you are looking for asset prices of an asset that is not traded frequently or has low liquidity, then there is also not much that the DIA architecture can do to change this. We do however make this very transparent and flag the risks whenever a user requires feeds that are not the top100 assets.

These scenarios are also where manipulation comes into play. As transparency lies in the nature of blockchains, it is quite easy to see which pairs have low liquidity, trading frequency etc. A malicious actor can use this to identify which markets are more easy to manipulate through individual or few trades. This in turn may affect the price feed and cause unwanted liquidations or other issues. These cases have occurred in the past and the oracles in the value stack functioned exactly as they were supposed to. The issue is more of a market issue. We tackle this issue in a number of ways, foremost by providing transparency about the associated risks. We are currently working on releases that will give dApp operators even more transparency and control over their deployed oracles.

In addition, we always try to leverage as many different sources and markets as sensible to ensure that we diversify our architecture and include many trades and high volumes in order to be able to build robust feeds that ideally have no single point of failure.

7. When there is a hack or fallout (like FTX), how does DIA handle its oracle operations? Are oracles deactivated automatically or is manual interference needed?

There is no single answer to this question. It really depends on the issue at hand and what the exposure is. When FTX failed, the event sent a lot of tokens into a downward spiral. These are actual market prices, so we do report them. However as stated in my previous answer, when there are manipulations of individual markets and any single market that is used as a source for a feed in an oracle deviates strongly from the others due to an attack, there are failsafe systems to ensure that the oracle reports prices as close to actual market prices across all sources as possible.

8. DIA clearly have been following the hotspots in Crypto with the xFloor for NFTs and more recently the xLSD as the LSD hype rose and now it seems there are developments around Arbitrum. Can you guys disclose what’s your current focus in terms of developments?

Web3 is rapidly developing and while we continue delivering our core products, we are focusing resources on adapting to the needs of the market. We are working on a range of initiatives at the moment:

- Expanding a self-service architecture that allows dApps to deploy, monitor and manage their oracles autonomously.

- Continuing work on feeds that cater to the cross-chain developments in the wider web3 ecosystem.

- Developing more capabilities for safe collaborative work with DAO contributors on elements closer to the core architecture.

- Improving decentralisation and the ability for third parties to participate in the provision of our product and service.

- Risk monitoring and management for users.

These are just some of the things we are working on. We also explore opportunities around new developments such as AI to improve our architecture on various fronts. We are still in the research phase here and it is too early to tell specifics.

9. What other digital service or product does DIA provide besides oracles?

Besides oracles, DIA also offers:

- APIs (off-chain data)

- Monitoring (i.e: LSD protocol collateral)

- Off-chain / On-chain automation

More products and services can be expected in the future. For more infromation on the tech side of our products, please visit our Documentation: https://docs.diadata.org/introduction/readme

10. Why isn’t the DIA token used as a reward token for the DAO contributors?

The number one reason is the legislation. Since $DIA is not a payment token, it shouldn’t be used in a context other than its intended use.

Also, making payments with the $DIA token could potentially create significant selling pressure on the DIA market. We see it as one of our primary responsibilities to ensure that the $DIA token can play a role in higher-value, more specific uses.

Primary use case of $DIA is to govern the DIA platform by voting on Snapshot proposals. DIA team is actively exploring various innovations for our tokenomics 2.0. Stay tuned for that.

Have questions for the DIA core team? Submit the questions here and get featured in the next AMA in April 2023: https://forms.gle/cUDRwuEDm6UUHPWe6

About DIA

DIA is a multi-chain, end-to-end, open-source data and oracle platform for Web3. DIA’s data is directly sourced from a broad array of on-chain and off-chain sources at individual trade-level. This allows DIA feeds to be fully customized regarding the mix of sources and methodologies, resulting in tailor-made, high-resilience feeds and thereby setting a new paradigm for oracles.

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