Project Showcase: SEDA

In this regular series, we showcase projects that are currently participating in the Interchain Builders Program. Today we are talking to Peter and Jasper, co-founders of SEDA. They bring a wealth of experience from their previous work building optimistic oracles and first party oracles to enable $150+ billion of value to be transferred on a suite of L1s. Pioneers of firsts, they previously founded EveryDapp.com, the first dApp store on Ethereum and Flux.Market, the first app for startup derivatives leveraging DeFi composability & more.

What is SEDA?

Peter & Jasper: SEDA aims to be the foundation for data in web3. SEDA gives smart contracts the capability to query and compute any data that would normally not be available from within their blockchain environment by building a fully permissionless, trust-minimized network that can transport any data to any chain with fast finality. The goal of the SEDA network is to fully unlock internet access for smart contracts while at the same time significantly increasing their computational capabilities through the delegation of computation to our network. We believe that this approach will power the next generation of smart contract applications.

Using the SEDA network, developers can build application-specific oracle modules. Currently, the modules that have gathered the most interest from developers include price feeds, real-world assets, verifiable randomness, and cross chain messaging. These modules would power a large range of applications like lending/borrowing, derivatives, NFT minting, cross-chain messaging/bridging, exploit prevention, and much more.

How does it work?

Peter & Jasper: In order to query data, a smart contract sends a transaction to a relay smart contract containing information on what sources are to be queried and how the data should be computed. This information comes in the form of a WASM binary which takes arguments defined by the contract as arguments.

A relayer then picks up on this request for data and notifies the SEDA chain of its existence. The SEDA chain validators then elect a secret committee consisting of a second set of validators, namely that of the overlay network. The overlay network is a subset of nodes, independent from the SEDA chain validators, that’s not restricted in size by Tendermint PoS. The secret committee executes the WASM binary in the SEDA WASM VM and proceeds with a round of commits/reveals. After the commit/reveal stage, the final outcome is aggregated and bridged back to the smart contract on the origin chain.

Why did you pick the Interchain Stack?

Peter & Jasper: Prior to building the SEDA chain, we launched two oracle products: an optimistic oracle built on NEAR, and a first-party oracle that we launched on four different networks. The first-party oracle has enabled over $152 billion of value transfers and, at the peak, was securing north of $3.5 billion dollars worth of value. The biggest problem we ran into was horizontal scaling; manually launching and monitoring all of these different networks has real scaling issues. We took all the learnings from scaling these products and bundled them into the next version of SEDA where the SEDA chain acts as a data hub connecting any blockchain network to any data source.

Figuring out what technology stack to build our network on was not an easy decision to make; the number of options to launch application-specific blockchains/rollups is rapidly increasing. The main reason for going with a Cosmos SDK blockchain for our settlement and checkpointing layer came down to the following reasons: the fact that you can launch a “vanilla” chain and build complicated business logic on top using cosmwasm hooks, permissioned/subsidized contracts fit our team’s background very well. Also, the fact that the ecosystem has been around for a while and is “battle tested” to a certain degree helped us get comfortable with the decision. The final reason was the rapid rate of innovation and growing developer ecosystem that you can find within the Cosmoverse.

What stage is your project in?

Peter & Jasper: The SEDA project has raised over $22m from leading investors like Coinbase Ventures, Distributed Global, Coinfund, Reciprocal Ventures, among many others. We’re currently working on fine tuning our MVP, which is running on a private, internal devnet. The next step will be to launch a semi-public testnet in Q4. Semi-public means that there will be a small set of whitelisted validators, which will help us test network stability and general transaction flow. At this point, developers that want to use our data can start testing data queries from other L1 testnets. The idea is to grow this set of whitelisted validators until the network is proven to be stable with our maximum-size validator set. Mainnet launch is planned for Q1 2024.

How is the Interchain Builders Program supporting you?

Peter & Jasper: When joining, it seemed we were a bit further along than most Builders Program participants. Our team has experience building from the application layer, all the way down to core compilers for L1s, and have launched multiple products at varying levels of the blockchain stack. We joined the Builders Program to become more familiar with the broad interchain ecosystem projects and utilize the program to receive technical guidance and best practices for developing with the Cosmos SDK. The Builders Program has been incredibly helpful in connecting us with strategic partners for our business growth needs within the interchain ecosystem and ensuring SEDA is built using the most advanced versions and standards.

What are you looking forward to?

Peter & Jasper: The broad scope of SEDA’s feature set is ushering in the next generation of smart contracts built with secure access to any form of data from the real world or any other blockchain network. We are excited to see the innovative modules built on top of the SEDA Network and the use cases for which developers will take advantage of this new data layer within the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. At the present, we are looking forward to seeing the first data requests being relayed and answered on our first open testnet.

The Interchain Builders Program provides mentorship and guidance for Web3 founders looking to navigate the Interchain. We help teams with incorporation strategies, fundraising, token economic design, technical support, validator bootstrapping and going to market. If you’re a founder looking to build on top of the Interchain Stack, we encourage you to apply to the program now!

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