State oracles: Absolute interoperability
States oracles bring a solution of interoperability and can be considered to be part of “layer 2” scaling solutions for blockchains together with state channels and other technologies.
Please read also a big picture, there is also a Telegram channel for a further discussion and Twitter.
State oracles are microservices that may interface any existing resource — smart contracts, any features saved all over the internet, tangible objects or any other things. They can be executed on a personal device or remotely. With state oracles, resources become reusable. In short, state oracles bring “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) principle in the global scope.
Interesting things are happening with combining of state oracles. By combining single purpose state oracles, existing features living on networks can be linked together into new decentralized services (instead of developing new complex software platforms). A decentralized service becomes an equivalent of multi-hop state change path and new services are then created by discovering of new possible state change paths.
Interoperability is not only about enabling things to interact with each other (by creating new state change paths). It is also about making things to understand each other. There are (at least) 2 ways how to achieve the interoperability in that terms:
- We push everybody to agree on a same standard or…
- …we make various standards convertible between each other.
I believe in the second approach. There is a parallel with languages. Should all the people in the world use one rigid language? Or a language that evolves? “Language that evolves” means that anybody can invent new words (e.g. buidl) and influence others. Users of the language use a translator if they don’t understand new words or rules.
In the same way we can use state oracles to translate one standard to another. Anynody can invent his own standard (language) and still be understood by all other things. For instance, I can invent my own “emoji language” and translate it on fly to Gitcoin bounty. As a result, we get self-evolving languages for humans, machines and software: Everything will be able to seamlessly communicate with each other.
More theory
We can imagine any activity (and a service for this activity) like a combination of states starting with an initial state and ending with a final state (solution). State oracles are microservices executing transitions from one state to another.
State oracles interface various standards, smart contracts, state channels, software and other resources. Every state is represented (digitized) as a message. Depending on its purpose, a state oracle accepts a particular message representing semantic meaning of an initial state -> conducts state change in cooperation with a resource (smart contract, storage, another software) -> returns a message representing a new state.
With state oracles Dapps become protocol agnostic.
There are advantages in using state oracles over dapps that are directly linked to software platforms and resources. With state oracles dapps are protocol agnostic: The single dapp can offer functions of any resource regardless a platform or protocol of the resource.
Different resources use messages in different standards. The dependency on particular standards always leads to centralization and fragmentation. It forces developers to use a particular platform, technology or approach. It even limits possible future use cases.
Specific kind of a state change is a change of a format and standard of messages that represent states. State oracles conducting this kind of change are like translators: they add an ability of transition between different standards.
As a result, anybody can introduce a new kind of state in arbitrary format that is still understandable by other parts of the system through state oracles.
Community
Unframework is a community focused on research, development and designing in areas of the state oracles infrastructure, common languages and token economies.
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