Witnet Community AMA: December 2020
On 23 December, the Witnet community held the 1st of a series of Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) events.
Contents:
1. Could you elaborate on an extension to the roadmap and a marketing plan to attract new projects?
2. What are the greatest differentiators (and thus strengths) compared to other oracle projects such as Chainlink, Band, Tellor, DIA, API3, …?
3. When will Witnet be on an exchange?
4. How is Witnet related to Aragon?
5. How you know there are 1 million Witnet Nodes in the Network?
6. Are there any plans to wrap the WIT token to the Ethereum network and create a Wrapped WIT token?
7. In an article you said you’re looking for integration with Eth2.0, Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos, Oasis etc .. when does this happen?
8. There are different solutions for different needs. That’s why you guys created ADO? When does this EIP integrations/tests with the ADO members start?
1. Could you elaborate on an extension to the roadmap and a marketing plan to attract new projects?
A: You can find some initial ideas, expectations and goals for the future of Witnet in this article.
There’s been a lot of discussion within the community regarding partnerships and integrations since this is the bread-and-butter for Witnet moving forward, and the most powerful marketing campaign we can run as a community.
One of the core missions of the Witnet Foundation is, alongside the rest of the community, to educate other projects about the protocol, and to strengthen ties between this community and other crypto projects that could benefit from using Witnet as an oracle, including helping to establish easy-to-use structures and templates.
Several Witnet community members are talking with projects to collaborate with regards to adoption and integration. The Witnet Foundation will continue to encourage participation from the community, and will be launching Phase 3 of the Incentive Program in early 2021, which will include bounties for participation.
2. In your opinion, what are the greatest differentiators (and thus strengths) compared to other oracle projects such as Chainlink, Band, Tellor, DIA, API3, …?
- Anyone can run a node, and the protocol is completely permissionless. This will, in the long-term, enable true decentralization as more and more node operators choose to run nodes and mine WIT.
- Witnet’s “crowd-witnessing” architecture is the only oracle mechanism that will work for totally trustless and autonomous smart contracts. While for many smart contract use cases, Witnet is interchangeable with other oracle solutions, there’s are some use cases that require radical trustlessness, and that’s where Witnet shines, and where no other protocol can reach.
- Witnet data requests are fully parameterizable, with a custom DSL (witnet-rust). The protocol gives full control over to the smart contract developer, which leaves space for some very interesting (and as of yet to be discovered) options. These requests can be deployed by anyone, any time.
- Witnet has been built with decentralization at its core. For those projects looking for a truly decentralized solution, Witnet is a great choice.
- Since Witnet is on its own chain, the protocol is chain agnostic. Furthermore, once the Ethereum <> Witnet bridge mechanism has been finalized and fully optimized, it will get increasingly easier to bridge to other chains through templating.
- The Witnet blockchain has already shown itself to be robust and fast, with over 1,000,000 nodes on the network in its nascent months.
- Unlike other protocols, the majority of WITs supply is yet to be minted through the mining mechanism. There is therefore a very clear incentive to run nodes, which will be for the forseeable future.
3. When will Witnet be on an exchange?
A: This question comes up a lot, and I assure you that we do agree that for the incentives to work inside the network the token needs to have a value, and exchanges are important for that. But we really don’t know if or when WIT will be listed on an exchange, because this is not something the Witnet Foundation is actively pursuing or managing.
As far as we know there are currently (Dec 2020) OTC trades going on between community members/miners, but the Witnet Foundation has not been involved in that.
4. How is Witnet related to Aragon?
A: Luis Cuende, Aragon’s co-founder, Adán and Daniele co-founded Stampery in 2014. Luis also co-authored the first version of the Witnet whitepaper, published in 2017.
5. How you know there are 1 million Witnet Nodes in the Network?
A: Getting an accurate estimate on the number of nodes in an extensive, decentralized network is much harder than you might imagine. For example, nobody knows for certain how many Bitcoin or Ethereum nodes exist today.
However, given the characteristics of the cryptographic sortition mechanism that Witnet uses for selecting miners and witnesses, we can get a rough idea.
Here’s some more info about the eligibility mechanism, which is called VRF.
By observing how “powerful” eligibility proofs are, we can know how probable is for 1 node to produce a valid VRF like that (we call that “mining difficulty”). Then, the fact that such a mathematically unlikely proof does exist tells us how many nodes in the network must be operating out there.
It might be helpful if the people who are the most knowledgeable about the math behind it to elaborate in a future blog post, and start publishing periodic updates on how the number evolves over time.
Then, in terms of diversity, we know for certain that those nodes are run at least by hundreds of individuals and organizations of very diverse profiles — you have the amateur miner who runs a node on their Raspberry Pi at home, and also the staking/PoS delegation services who plan to make business off running thousands of Witnet nodes as a service.
6. Are there any plans to wrap the WIT token to the Ethereum network and create a Wrapped WIT token?
A: We know it feels clunky when you have to buy some project’s token just for using their protocol on top of Ethereum. So we have always stood by the idea that Ethereum developers should pay the Witnet oracle using ETH.
That’s why, so far, Witnet’s integration with Ethereum totally abstracts away the usage of WIT tokens. All fees are paid in ETH, simply because ETH is the one and only sound money of the Ethereum ecosystem.
However, this bridging scheme has also some downsides in term of volatility of ETH vs. WIT, which could be especially high in this nascent period.
At this point, it would make a lot of sense if the Ethereum bridge also accepted an ERC20 token that wraps WIT and is pegged 1:1 to it.
This is an idea that has been floating around in the community for a while. Personally, it’s something I’d love to see worked on by the broader community. I believe it could be great for the ecosystem because it gives a higher degree of freedom for Ethereum smart contract developers to decide what token to use when paying for data requests, depending on trade-offs that are specific to their own use cases.
7. In an article you said you’re looking for integration with Eth2.0, Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos, Oasis etc .. when does this happen?
A: For now, the community effort is focussing on improving and optimizing the bridge to Ethereum. There are many security and crypto-economic assumptions that need to be tested and validated. As soon as the Ethereum bridge is fully optimized and ready for prime-time, integrations with other layer-1 networks will probably follow.
8. There are different solutions for different needs. That’s why you guys created ADO? When does this EIP integrations/tests with the ADO members start?
A: That’s exactly the point of ADO. Sourcing data from multiple oracles at once will always be safer than using only one of them separately, as you would need to hack systems that rely on very different security mechanisms.
The EIP we’re pushing for makes it super easy for developers not only to switch from one oracle provider to another in a plug-and-play manner but also to create “compound oracles”, i.e. aggregator contracts that make the most of the strongest points of each oracle network.
The second half of 2020 has been quite hectic for all the projects in the ADO (and probably for everyone in the world), so things have been moving slower than we wanted. However, work on the EIP and other initiatives will be resumed soon so that potential users can start adopting it in 2021.
