Community AMA, December 2022

Here is a recap of the 14th Community AMA, a monthly session where the DIA Team will answer DIA’s community questions and suggestions on 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 its community, by collecting community concerns and suggestions and having the DIA core team answer them.

Here is a recap of the 14th Community AMA:

In this 14th Community AMA, we had with us members Mikel Garcia Zabala, Content Manager at DIA and Samuel Brack, CTO at DIA. Please, welcome to this new session!

1. Can you highlight the main achievements in terms of product in 2022?

As we’re doing the last community AMA of 2022, an overview of DIA’s product launches makes sense! Let’s dig in:
This year we launched DIA xFloor, the transparent and customizable NFT floor price oracle. DIA xFloor is capable of determining NFT price by pulling historical sales data directly from the NFT marketplace’s smart contracts on its respective network and applying fully transparent data processing methodologies.
By directly listening to the blockchain transaction and fetching data from the origin, DIA xFloor ensures full data accuracy and transparency. Multiple dApps have already integrated DIA xFloor to power NFTfi use cases such as NFT liquidity protocols, lending & borrowing, Peer2Pool, and many more. Check out our latest NFT case study to learn more: https://medium.com/dia-insights/building-a-decentralised-capital-market-for-nfts-with-dia-f527a56e01a2
The following addition to the DIA oracle suite is DIA xRandom — verifiable and distributed multi-chain randomness oracle. In close collaboration with drand (Protocol Labs), DIA xRandom provides dApps with an distributed, immutable and auditable random number via oracle smart contract.
Throughout 2022, we deployed DIA xRandom in 6 different L1/L2s including Evmos, Polygon, Moonbeam and Astar. Multiple dApps are also using DIA xRandom to power various on-chain use cases.
Learn how the regarded NFT community Orbital Apes is using xRandom to run a decentralised raffle protocol on Evmos: https://medium.com/dia-insights/building-a-decentralised-raffle-platform-on-evmos-with-dia-xrandom-f10d8a09a3a5
Additionally, throughout 2022, we have relentlessly integrated +30 CEXs, DEXs and NFT marketplaces into the DIA Platform. This allows us to improve our product stack in two ways:
1) adding support for more assets and
2) making the oracles more resilient to malicious attackers.

2. DIA announced a lot of partnerships lately. What’s the most up-to-date number of partners?

Currently, the number of partners is sitting around 100+ dApps and growing! If you are interested in the full list of users, you can find it under our ecosystem page’s dApp section: https://www.diadata.org/ecosystem
During this year, a number of dApps have integrated DIA’s data and oracles to run their protocols on-chain. Most of the partnerships were processed via DIA CDRs and we count 30 CDRs up to date.
In case you are wondering, CDR are mechanisms that allow any market actor to independently request any data feeds with fully customized specifications regarding sources and methodologies.
Additionally, in the next weeks, we will release via our Twitter account a series of compilations of DIA’s achievements in 2022, which will include partnerships, product updates, oracle integrations, DAO updates and many more.
Stay tuned for those!

3. Are there any new oracle or data products coming up in the near term?

In the last weeks, the team has been focused on building a new oracle product that will go live during the first quarter of 2023. This new product will respond to a growing demand in the DeFi market for a new type of asset price feeds.
These feeds represent a rather more technical type of asset data that as a result, requires a completely new type of design and architecture for sourcing and processing.
We believe that the need for these types of feeds will increase in demand in the next months as their adoption keeps growing and its integration in DeFi will be very important!
When it comes to our oracle product, we are very excited to share more news very soon. This product has been already validated by key industry players and a few protocols are already using this data type in their applications.

4. Compared to other oracles, which areas of product or tech do you believe DIA is a better one and why?

On the product side of things, compared to other oracles, DIA provides fully transparent and customizable oracles, as DIA covers the whole data journey. What does this mean?
Most oracles aggregate pre-built data feeds from premium data providers and hence, provide little or no information on how these feeds were actually created. So there is no transparency on where the data originates from and what calculation has been applied. It also makes customisation of feeds for individual use cases impossible.
DIA on the other hand is integrated directly with a number of markets on a multitude of chains, CEX APIs and NFT marketplaces. This enables us to source data at the individual trade level, making us capable of delivering fully customized price feeds in regards to sources, methodologies, update mechanisms and more — specific to each use case.
As DIA covers the whole data journey from direct sourcing to delivery, it enables us to provide transparency on the creation of the oracles that will secure the dApps’ transactions.

5. How does DIA work with gaming projects?

Unpredictable random number generation has become an essential building block for Web3. Decentralised applications, ranging from Web3 games to NFT collections or prediction markets, rely on random numbers to operate. For instance, a random number can grant a game with a lottery mechanism to reward players fairly or provide unpredictable attributes to a collection of NFT artworks.
DIA, via its randomness oracle xRandom, provides dApps with an auditable random number via oracle smart contract. DIA xRandom can power a variety of on-chain use cases such as:
- On-chain lottery: due to the deterministic nature of blockchains, decentralised applications require trustless and tamper-proof on-chain random numbers to execute lotteries.
- Randomized NFTs: a random number generator can enable the randomised assignment of characteristics and attributes for non-fungible tokens
- On-chain gaming: xRandom can be used to generate unpredictable scenarios and rewards, creating engaging experiences for on-chain games. also many more applications can be imagined here
To offer distributed and verifiable randomness on-chain, DIA leverages drand’s distributed randomness beacon, enabling verifiable, unpredictable and unbiased random numbers. Learn more in our latest developer tutorial: https://youtu.be/7HALDJr8V3g

6. How expensive is it to use DIA oracles for our dApp?

As you already might know, DIA deploys dedicated oracles for every user, offering the protocol an end-to-end feed and oracle customizabilty. The user can define the oracle’s sources, methodologies, update mechanism and frequency and more. The deployment of the oracle is free for the user, but they will need to take care of funding the oracle wallet to cover the gas costs to required to update the oracle.
Are you looking for a token, NFT or randomness oracle? Request it via DIA xStream or by getting in touch with us on Discord:
DIA xStream: Custom Feed Builder: https://app.diadata.org/feed-builder
DIA on Discord: https://discord.gg/dia-dao

7. What roles does WASM play in Web3 and how can DIA make a difference here?

Fast, efficient and portable, with near-native speed, WASM’s promise is the capability to outperform EVM as a virtual machine for blockchains. 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 supporting WASM 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. Therefore, infrastructure providers are required to redeploy their services in WASM to be able to be integrated with WASM smart contracts. Without WASM-native blockchain oracles, WASM smart contracts can’t access off-chain, real-world data, hence limiting the use cases and capabilities that dApps can perform.
DIA identified this issue early on and deployed its open-source oracle infrastructure on the Shiden network. Shiden Network is the first live parachain in the Kusama network natively offering, alongside EVM, smart support for WASM smart contracts. By leveraging DIA’s WASM-based oracles, dApps on Shiden can connect their WASM-based smart contracts to ingest data feeds on-chain to enable a variety of use cases such as on-chain lending and borrowing, staking, options, stablecoins and many more.
You can learn more about the importance of WASM for Web3 Development: https://medium.com/dia-insights/the-importance-of-wasm-for-web3-development-9bf8231f7b5a

8. Is there a staking platform where I can stake my DIA tokens? And if yes, what is the APR?

As stated in the previous AMA, we are exploring additional opportunities for staking models around the DIA token and the data validation operation. These are intricate operations that need to tie in well with the product and add value for all stakeholders, so nothing to roll out hastily. We welcome the discussion and invite everyone with thoughts on staking architecture to participate in the discussion on our DAO forum: https://forum.diadata.org/
Additionally, There is currently a Flexible Binance Campaign running where DIA holders on Binance have the opportunity to generate yield with their DIA tokens. This is not a locked campaign, meaning there is no maximum amount of DIA tokens users can subscribe to the campaign. You can access it via this link: https://www.binance.com/en/savings

9. What are the main achievements on the side of the DIA community so far?

2022 has been a very productive and interactive year for DIA’s community. The biggest tangible achievement was of course the work framework of the DIA DAO. At the DIA DAO, which we started working on in January 2022, we launched the pre-alpha at the beginning of the 2nd quarter and completed the pre-tests with 20+ participants from our community.
It was an incredible experience to learn while building with the community. After completing all the tests and integrations and creating the general structure, we launched alpha at the beginning of the 3rd quarter.
In 6 months, DIA DAO received 1000+ applications and 100+ contributors were onboarded for 7 different guilds.
More than 700 tasks were completed and a total of $32,194 was paid out to contributors for completed tasks.
We believe that one of the cornerstones of decentralization is governance. It has always been very valuable for DIA that different ideas contribute to the building and give new shapes.This is not just a concept limited to DIA community voting on data sources and methodologies with “Community Approval Requests”. It is also a value that aims to create a public feedback process and bridge the gap between the community and the project through constructive criticism.

10. What is the current involvement of the DIA DAO contributors in the daily ops?

The DIA DAO framework is currently organized into 6 different guilds: BizDev, Copywriting, Design, Operations, Tech and Growth & Promo. Each guild has different responsibilities and purposes according to its nature.
While Copywriting and Design Guild contributors work on the creation of written and visual content, especially announcements, case studies, tweets, Ops Guild contributors distribute the content to social media channels and different communities.
Tech guild contributors code DEX/CEX Scrapers to meet data source needs of oracle platform alongside other technical implementation. Recently, a DIA DAO contributors built a NFT sales tracking Discord bot using DIA data. Its super cool! Check it out! https://docs.diadata.org/extra/discord-nft-sales-tracker-beta
Also, Ops contributors take charge of moderation on DIA’s community channels including this one! And last but not least, The BD Guild contributors monitors the entire ecosystem on a weekly basis, sharing competitive developments and identifying potential partnerships.
There are many opportunities for roles and responsibilities at DIA DAO and our task range is expanding every day. You can check all active task on DIA DAO Dework: https://app.dework.xyz/dia-dao

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.