Project Update April 2022 (Part 1): Web3, Enterprise, Tech Developments, Products
Crypto companies have traditionally conveyed direction and vision using whitepapers. iExec is no different — we outlined a plan in our whitepaper and spent the last few years building it out. Sometimes we evolved our strategy from what was originally written to incorporate new feedback. But one thing has always remained constant: the importance of communication between our team and our community.
Which brings us back to the whitepaper. One of the most common questions we hear from our community is if we’ll be updating our whitepaper. This question is presumably grounded in the desire to stay updated on what iExec is working on and where we intend to go.
Although whitepapers have their advantages, writing another one is of a lesser priority. Crypto has changed much since Gilles and Haiwu first wrote about “Decentralized Cloud Computing” back in 2017. Heck, crypto has changed a lot since last week. There’s an optimal way to communicate a long-term strategy while retaining the flexibility to pivot. As we move in this direction, we’ve written this article to give a broad overview of what the iExec team has been working on over the past few months. If you don’t see a project on here, it’s not because it’s not important or it’s been scrapped or anything like that. It’s just impossible to capture everything we’ve done and will do going forward.
This update gives an insight on iExec’s recent work on Web3, iExec tech stack upgrades, iExec Enterprise efforts and product developments.
- This article in split into 2 parts. Read part 2 here.
Towards Web3
Today one of our priorities is to power Web3. For iExec, this new version of the Internet offers an opportunity to make it better, in a more distributed and democratic way.
Web1.0 or the early days of the Internet were based on static web pages and users being mostly content consumers. This first version was quite decentralized. Then came Web 2.0. Web technologies made the Internet more interactive which then led to social media platforms, streaming platforms, web browsers, and so on. All these platforms made Web 2.0 a modern centralized version of the Internet allowing anyone to create and publish content. The fact of not needing how to code was a game-changer. User-generated content became the core of the business model of Web 2.0. and the creation of tech giants. The common denominator is data being traded in exchange for services while at the same time being collected, saved, and tracked for targeted ads.
Today, the Web3 world is emerging, offering an opportunity to make the Internet more democratic, by giving users more control over their privacy and data. And it is simply part of iExec’s DNA, and the goal we want to reach when building our decentralized marketplace for computing assets. We see iExec’s marketplace as a platform where Web3 services can find the resources needed to provide new business and social models.
The road ahead is exciting, the emerging opportunities on the Metaverse, NFT’s, DeFi, DID, and putting users in control of their data are shaping our vision and the products we are building. Our goal is to push the boundaries of technology and facilitate the use of the iExec stack to thrive in the era of Web3.
iExec for Enterprise
As mentioned above, our goal continues to be for iExec to be a leader in the era of Web3. We took a major step towards this goal via a partnership with H7, a startup incubator associated with the government supported “French Tech” label. Together, we have launched the “Web3 Program by iExec and H7”, aiming to support various startups by helping them understand how Web3 technology can be applied in their respective sectors. The H7 partnership revolves around 2 streams: experimentation & incubation.
In the experimentation stream, we provide our expertise to help companies understand the business challenges and the opportunities offered by decentralization, blockchain, and the notion of digital sovereignty. For that, iExec will run workshops and conferences throughout the year with various companies. Connecting with these startups will allow us to identify some interesting use cases that can be addressed with iExec’s technology stack.
As far as Incubation is concerned, a second goal of the program is to help drive adoption of iExec. Collaboration with H7 will allow us to yield 2–3 projects that will build on iExec while H7 assists them on their operational and go-to-market strategies (should the project require such support).
The Enterprise team also continues its work of providing consulting and support to non crypto-companies in the development of Blockchain projects, from ideation to implementation. Among other projects, the team will conduct a proof of concept for Cetim, the French Technical Centre for Mechanical Industry, that represents 6000+ companies in the industrial sector. The objective of this PoC is to demonstrate how blockchain can bring more trust in the data produced by IoT devices, manufacturing machines, testbeds, and operators. This project is a great opportunity to demonstrate iExec’s expertise and the possibilities offered by the protocol to major industrial actors.
On the technical front
Offering the best decentralized and privacy-preserving marketplace for computing assets requires a robust and high-performance stack. So bull or bear market, our dev team continues to build. We finished and released V7 (December 2021) and kicked off V8 (January 2022). As you know if you are familiar with iExec (or are about to learn if you are new to the project), at iExec, we think that the best technology to use to provide our users with confidentiality and trust is Confidential Computing.
Today, our platform enables us to monetize confidential computing by providing the necessary services and protocols to sell technology (such as Intel SGX) based on the Scontain solution. In order to extend our confidential computing offering, we are currently working on integrating the Gramine solution. We also want to make the protocol easier for the developers to use, especially by improving the tools we offer to them. Among the continuous improvements we are working on, two main projects come to mind:
The first project pertains to iExec SDK. This SDK is a CLI and a JavaScript library that allows easy interactions with iExec decentralized marketplace in order to run off-chain computations. In SDK v7.1.0, we’ve added TypeScript support, to improve the existing library.
What’s the reasoning behind this effort? A growing number of teams are choosing TypeScript over plain Javascript for their new project for the strong type check that enables them to spot errors before they occur. For starters, adding Typescript becomes attractive to Typescript developers who previously had a hard time integrating the iExec SDK in their project. The first pilot user to benefit from it will be KnowledgeX, the startup we are working with. They’re now our beta user. TypeScript developers are not the only party to benefit from this improvement. Modern development tools leverage the TypeScript types to give more hints to the developer. TypeScript support is expected to improve the devX and speed up the iExec integration in products. To access the SDK v7.1.0 on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/iexec
The second project we’ve been focusing on is the iExec PoCo subgraph. This is based on The Graph, which is an excellent tool for browsing blockchains’ data through a convenient graphql API. The release of this subgraph allows us to replace our homemade indexation service used by the iExec explorer, upgrading it for a more flexible and open sourced one. The graphql API will also benefit developers wanting to programatically explore the protocol.
The iExec Oracle Factory
Within the first weeks of the launch of the Oracle Factory, around 2000 oracles were created. We’ve also gathered 200+ pieces of feedback that we’ve used for R&D. This feedback has been invaluable in crafting a vision and direction for future releases of the Oracle Factory.
The overall goal is to connect the Oracle Factory to the outside world. Currently, the Oracle Factory is only on testnet. This makes it completely isolated from the outside world. There’s no bridge, so even if people build oracles on our testnet, they can’t use these oracles for dAPPS. Our use cases are limited, and there’s no way to monetize oracles at present.
We’re going to connect the Oracle Factory to the outside — to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon. This way the oracles can be used and monetized. The iExec team is working on solving this cross-chain issue. We’re also looking at what it takes to send data to other chains.
The way we’ll do this is by migrating the Oracle Factory to V7 (which means to update the SDK version to the latest) and also to migrate to our sidechain Bellecour. Then we will proceed with the cross-chain oracles in the next versions. The target for this cross-chain solution is V2.1. As for which chain comes first (Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or any other chain), we are researching the best fit and open to your feedback. Make your voice heard via Discord to express your opinions and suggestions.
Another of our focus is to address any bugs in the Oracle Factory. For this product to perform as expected and designed, we need to take care of anything that impedes performance. The iExec team is also working on improving the Oracle Factory design (for example, improving the pagination design). Finally, we are adding features, including a “filter/sort by” function and a search bar. And finally — automatic updates. This isn’t as exciting as multi-chain, but it’s still important. Currently, the Oracle Factory needs to be updated manually. We are working on automating these updates so users don’t have to trigger updates manually.
iExec, NFTs, and Confidential Computing
When we created the iExec Marketplace, the concept of ‘‘Computing Assets as a Commodity” became a reality. With iExec V5, any assets, be they computing power, datasets or applications, could technically be deployed as stand-alone NFTs visible on Opensea and Etherscan.
iExec is looking to evolve the concept of ERC721 NFT technology by incorporating iExec Confidential Computing. We’ve hired an NFT Product manager and product squad. They’ve been conducting research around monetization and governance. Currently NFTs are public; everyone can access the details on its ownership and its metadata. We’re focused on solving the question of how confidential computing intersects with NFTs. At the moment, our research is proprietary. We thought long and hard about what we could share, but unfortunately came to the conclusion that if we revealed our findings, that’d put us at a competitive disadvantage. But we want to extend an invitation to our community to contribute in product development. iExec is interested in your expertise in NFTs; specifically, we’re looking for input from you on how we build a valuable user-friendly product. Reach out to your local CM for more details on how to get involved.
Public Workerpools for individuals
Since the original tests of iExec workerpools a couple of years back, the iExec stack has been mostly rewritten. By including a confidential computing solution, we achieved our goal of being one of the pioneers in confidential computing with blockchain. Over the past year, iExec has advanced significantly on R&D in the field of security, scalability, and reliability. These areas are of paramount importance. We’ve been making sure we get these right before moving forward with public workerpools. The beta release of the public workerpool will use machines that are enabled with Intel SGX hardware enclaves and will execute confidential computing tasks. Why Intel SGX machines? Well, public worker pools are, at their core, a distributed network that anyone can join, made of multiple remote machines from all over the globe. This implies that the ‘workers’ in the network are in essence an ‘untrusted machine.’ Using Intel SGX technology for confidential or ‘trusted’ computing allows us to execute code on these remote or ‘untrusted’ machines, due to the code being executed within a dedicated piece of hardware (the Intel SGX enclave). This means that even the host machine cannot access or tamper with the data it is executing. Confidential computing is also one of the most interesting technology for business use cases, which is why iExec wants to make them its key to public worker pools.
At first, iExec’s public worker pools will likely limited to a certain number of workers. The iExec team is crafting a strategy about introducing the first workers on the network. From there, iExec will gradually increase the number of authorized workers. The first workload to be executed on the public workerpool will most likely be from the iExec Oracle Factory, providing a continuous and sustainable stream of tasks to execute. iExec is currently hiring profiles to join a team that will be dedicated to workerpool products.
As we said, the road ahead is exciting and one of iExec’s priorities is to power Web3. Emerging opportunities in the Metaverse, NFTs, DeFi, and DID, and user-controlled-data users shape our vision, our technology and the products we are building. The above describes our current efforts on how to get there. And this is not all.
Read part 2 of the Apri 2022 Project Update here:
