Announcing Cross-Chain Data Requests, a new format for truly decentralized oracles

A new tool in the Witnet suite of products that unleashes the ability to link together multiple smart contracts deployed on different blockchains, leveraged by the versatility and power of the Witnet Oracle.

Rokowski

Published in

The Witnet Oracle Blog

3 min readOct 4, 2023

What is Witnet?

Witnet is a public, permissionless, and fully decentralized layer 1 blockchain oracle network that is powered by its own native coin, the $WIT coin. Witnet does one thing very well, and that is to provide secure data input to all integrated chains in an efficient and fully decentralized manner. Because nodes are cryptoeconomically incentivized to remain honest, we don’t need to trust that they are telling the truth, but rather verify it’s in their best interest to do so.

Witnet operates on 28 different smart contract capable chains at the moment fulfilling over 300 unique data requests that independently require thousands of $WIT in collateral to ensure the data feeds are secure.

What are Cross-Chain data requests?

By using cross-chain data requests, developers can utilize the Witnet oracle to retrieve the state or any kind of historical data from any given smart contract capable chain. This means that developers can build smart contracts and essentially get a data request fulfilled into their project about data from a totally independent chain from the one they’re building on, and most importantly, it will be possible to do so without needing to run their own infrastructure nor search for any validation committee. For every data retrieval a new witnessing committee will be randomly selected from the thousands of Witnet nodes operating independently on Witnet.

Aside from being able to use HTTP/GET, HTTP/POST and Randomness in their smart contracts, this new tool will help to leverage the truely decentralized nature of the Witnet oracle and receive data from other blockchains without having to trust the relayers of such data. This can get to be very powerful capability in certain scenarios, opening up the doors for use cases that have yet to be thought of.

Potential Use-Cases

Here is a list of a few use-cases that we thought could be interesting to see developed using this technology.

Get up-to-date information about the lately finalized block number, or the minimum gas price being recently paid, in some remote chain.
Estimate the cost that would ultimately be required for running certain kind of transaction on some remote chain.
Get the balance that some remote externally owned address, or the value at some given storage location within a remote smart contract, at a certain block number in the past.
Verify the existence of certain transaction on a remote chain, even getting relevant data from it, like the sender, the recipient, eventual logs and/or the transferred value, if any.

Conclusion

This marks a big step in decentralized data input for blockchain oracle services like Witnet. Being able to communicate with other chains and execute functions on one chain based on what is happening on another, separate chain will open the door for a massive amount of innovation in the next few years as people onboard new users with new use cases.

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