Joshua Tobkin on SupraOracles connecting blockchain to the real world

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have joshua topkin ceo and co-founder of supra oracles joshua welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on great to be your ashton likewise i am really excited to dive into this a lot of people don't know a lot about

0:23oracle's and there's you guys are doing so much in this space that i think more people need to become familiar with as they sort of learn the intricacies of the cryptocurrency space let's just kick off our conversation by hearing a little bit about super oracles from you and then we'll sort of dive into those details sure yeah so uh super oracles is a next

0:44generation oracle um we have heard of you know blockchains and smart contracts but many people don't realize that the capacity and capabilities of smart contracts are kind of limited to the uh you know on-chain data but when you can bring external data from the real world in then because you know what you can do with these blocks blockchain smart contracts are much much more uh the the

1:06excuse me of the assembling of my words here but the utility is much greater right and we can do so many more so this is a very common theme that um developers kind of come in from the web 2 world they they start thinking okay i got this really great idea they jump to web3 blockchain development and then they realize halfway through oh wait actually i can't build that without

1:28getting external data from the real world into a blockchain so we have a mechanism and a strategy and a technology that brings cryptographic guarantees to any data that we enter a blockchain and we do this at scale so we have uh you know a lot of throughput and fundamentally also we're kind of positioned as a middleware network in the middle of multiple blockchains

1:50servicing this external data to multiple ecosystems very cool joshua thanks for that intro and yeah i'd love to dive into that a little bit more just for the people that are watching that you know they they hold bitcoin and ethereum they're trying to get interested in defy they sort of don't understand the back end too much um you know oracles you often hear like you know without

2:12oracles like chain link or like these other oracles you know d5 wouldn't exist but like what does that really mean you know why does it not exist why is super oracles necessary uh for d5 or for these price feeds maybe you could just explain that a little bit more yeah so you know once again a lot of these uh like use cases for smart contract platforms they're limited in scope

2:37because they can't they have to act off of some information so if this information is purely just data that's on chain or historical information then the like the the kind of range of what can be done is limited so uh you know there's many kind of use cases and products that can be created including synthetic products so this means might be like you know different

2:58other tokens from other ecosystems on chain it could be digital assets represented on chain it could be um insurance products be a wide variety of different um you know services in including uh like getting analytic and performance data on and like non-fungible tokens nfts so uh there's a there's actually a lot of things that can be done um with oracle's that you otherwise just

3:23really simply cannot do uh with blockchain's oracles definitely and you know there as defy sort of exploded throughout 2020 and 2021 there's this increasing need for oracles for price data feeds and getting the pricing information to the exchange because as you know those prices aren't encoded on the blockchain it's sort of like the external demand of the exchanges and

3:50where the prices are coming from and the smart contract can't have that programmed into it when it was written because the prices are always changing um right but there there are other uh functions besides defy as well that have really tangible use in the real world you know i hear about these farmers insurance crops auto paying out determining payouts in a smart contract

4:16depending on the weather or some other kind of external information where do you see oracle's at right now you know it seems like we need prices for d5 we need prices for these digital assets on the exchanges is that really the main use case for super oracles or these oracles or are you actually working into other industries and other approaches for oracle's as

4:39well right so we are working into multiple different industries and approaches um actually i do have a background in iot myself and uh you know we built uh some early prototypes for a publicly traded company in taiwan called avontec we also did prototypes and and entered a kind of food safety challenge by walmart china and we're particular one of the teams

5:01that were like chosen as to present our solution prompter table uh that was that's a solution that included iot as well as blockchains now there are um many use cases of course but defy is like the kind of low-hanging fruit it's the most obvious and also it's just clear product market fit in the in terms of where blockchains can can kind of create a solution

5:25peer-to-peer lending peer-to-peer kind of like banking so to speak and services financial services is in that realm um the you know whether it is you know d5 or if it's uh you know related to iot or you know um uh supply chains the true truth of the matter is the quality of the data and the security of the data really really matters it it's the whole

5:48entire game the date integrity is the whole entire game that you know so uh what we're doing that's different than the others are um we're we just reply additional rigor more than our competition so much so that we especially when it comes to cryptocurrency pricing um our methodology has a security guarantee of 100 times more uh data correctness guarantees than the incumbents now i say

6:12that because of some uh solutions have a small cluster of nodes right and those nodes are not changing and when i'm saying that's pretty much one of the major issues um when those nodes are not changing or rotating those nodes and give enough time and give enough incentive they will collude we've seen this in the physical like real world as well with the kind of

6:32light libor scandal in the 2008 instance this is where like trusted institutions majors like banks and central banks were actually colluding on the insurance rates or the interest rates rather and this was having kind of global ramifications across financial markets if it can happen in that setting it's definitely happening across like anonymous node operators

6:53now what we do in our model is we're bringing blockchain level security guarantees we're bringing blockchain principles applying it to the oracle layer and we leverage more nodes and we have more random selection and random rotation this is a part of our security mechanism and we also our proof of stake network so the nodes have to bond our token so we do have a

7:16cryptographically secure network we also layer that with economic security through the staking so yeah this is kind of what brings us our differentiating factor it's basically the inability to cheat very cool and yeah that's a great point you make there joshua because it seems odd that in the decentralized finance world uh you're trying to get price feeds for a decentralized exchange

7:41and the whole thing's supposed to be decentralized for the most part but the oracles rely on price feeds and those price feeds have to come from somewhere in the real world how do you ensure that that information that you're getting is not changed or manipulated by some kind of centralized entity absolutely and even a little bit less like aggressive than that is small

8:04things like reading the data first trading against the data before you publish it uh so front running it or you know delaying the publishing of it if you notice that it's not beneficial to your position or that kind of situation um if you do that that's not as obvious as actually changing the value now um it's also hard to prove whether or not some of these solutions

8:26are adjusting the the reported values by a couple basis points to their favor you know so really what you want to do once again is you want to make it virtually impossible for the type of behavior to occur in the first place and you also want to kind of uh organize the economics such that there you create a racing condition to get the first node to publish the correct information uh

8:47it's the uh the reward so that's kind of these are the types of things that we're thinking about definitely good point and with super oracles how deep are you guys into the d5 space or in business right now sort of where's the platform at with the oracles so we are still in this kind of early stages so we have a proof of concept that's effectively a private test net

9:12right um we have select partners that we're working with and we're introducing our solution to uh we're moving uh from this alpha test so to speak into our test phase in the next few months and then we're going to go through a series of rigorous audits that period is going to be you know it could be three or more months right we're going to invite multiple ecosystem multiple

9:34audit firms from a variety of ecosystems to kind of make sure that our model is is actually secure and furthermore we're going to create a like a large bounty program where we'll actually invite um you know anyone to attack our system and kind of really fortified it before you ever mean it we take security very seriously right this is this whole system um you know this isn't

9:58the real world where if like bad data enters you know some system you can just roll it back these have like cascading consequences because smart contracts themselves compose with each other they interact with each other so really the the level of security and the data correctness guarantees need to be as strong as the blockchains that are underlying you know these these

10:19ecosystems in the first place so that's kind of what we're doing and that's our focus that's why while we want to move fast and we are moving fast we're moving fast without breaking things so that's kind of our attitude yeah cool and i was looking at you know through super oracles and um from what i understand and i don't know if people that are just getting into d5

10:41fully understand is that it's not it doesn't seem like the end user actually you know was clicking a button like you know check oracle for price you know it's all really in the back end um so who ideally are you partnering with to sort of make use of the oracle so that the the front end users get to use it through through their software you know what are those partners that you partner

11:04with already or ideally are you looking at partnering with going forward oh yeah so we actually have 400 partners uh partnerships already in the works so we've done a lot of you know early discussions with a lot of projects a lot of them are defy a lot of them are game five and some of them are you know most of them do kind of have a financial component to it

11:24some of them might be sports sports related right some of them them might be predictive in markets um but a lot of them are defy and a lot of them recently are gamefi so um you know the the the way that it works is these protocols themselves actually will be calling our data periodically uh one thing i want to mention is that we're building into super oracles and

11:47automation service so this will take some time to roll out but what this means is it's kind of a decentralized if this then that scenario so if price drops a certain certain threshold triggered this type of behavior or and remember we're positioning ourselves as a cross-chain oracle so we're in the middle of multiple ecosystems so if some behavior happens in one ecosystem have

12:09some sort of reaction on another or triggers the transaction this is the type of scenario that we're you know bringing to market that doesn't exactly um exist yet in the oracle space like an all-in-one kind of solution to facilitate cross-chain d5 very cool and with 2021 you know d5 just continued to explode and the more d5 explodes the more they need oracles for the prices as well

12:37where do you see you know supra fitting in to d5 and by the end of 2022 and even two years beyond that i'm sure d5 trend will continue do you see that as one of the main focal points of just bringing those price feeds in or are there other goals as well yeah so you know um i do want to mention these things called constant function market makers for automatic market

13:02makers ammms like the uni swaps of the world they're really interesting uh innovation for the space and uh they're very much responsible for a large large amount of this uh kind of uh this boom now um some of those some some most of those actually like uni swabs don't use a traditional oracle like ours or any others now what we're interested however

13:25to bring to market are like the next generation of these amms that do use oracle data this actually can mitigate what's called the permanent loss where there's some value loss in these trades because um because the liquidity and such like this as well as slippage where there's um you know when you do these trades you might not be getting the best deal

13:45because of the the way that these these uh these uh these products are priced we think that there's going to be some new innovations in that area using oracle data and we think that uh it's going to be very exciting because um you know ultimately we can we can basically get better accuracy you know you know so while i do have a tremendous amount of respect for uh that innovation i think

14:11that that space in and of itself will evolve and using oracle's in unique ways will like prove to do some very interesting things very cool joshua i didn't know that actually about unit swap i know the amm is revolutionary but there's definitely iterations and reiterations as we continue to grow and the user experience and everything is only going to get

14:34better as it gets more mainstream adoption so i'm looking forward to hearing about that uh and you did mention earlier you touched on a couple things like the upcoming main net launch and some of the goals that your team is working on maybe you could talk about you know in the first half of 2022 what are the main things that you're looking to achieve and get out

14:55from super oracles yeah we're we're we're trying to get to market as quickly as possible you know of course in a sustainable and in secure manner we have a couple of initiatives in in you know in the works that includes both of course oracle service as well as an automation network as well as a you know a verifiable random function vrf this is a very important service and

15:17actually i have a pretty deep history in vrfs myself that i can get into maybe some other time but um you know uh what this can do is you know there's there's things like generative art and and non-fungible tokens like uh that use randomness in order to to like do a fair election um we we have a very unique approach to this basically we do use cryptographic

15:40primitives and signature schemes threshold signature schemes as well as we leverage uh the butterfly effect and the the idea that you know a butterfly flapping a swing in mexico can cause a tornado in texas that small things in in uh the course of uh you know um you know uh kind of at global scale can have massive massive uh like differences and what we'll do is we we bring this

16:06like the idea of like chaos theory like chaotic systems like weather data and you know prices of bitcoin knowing i've heard knows really what the current price is going to be we take this information as added entropy into our randomness so uh very unique things can be done i mean you know for example we had that uh you know uh that it was i think it was

16:26like tonga uh volcano you know uh imagine like if you had you were able to like track back your generative art to that like like that natural you know event you know it'd be very interesting kind of new ideas that we've heard hearing about recently um these types of things you know uh do require oracle's and um yeah as far as our timeline we are moving from our

16:51alpha tester to tesla fairly soon maybe a couple of months and then we'll be opening up and we're actually starting to communicate to node operators already and we'll be opening up our doors to kind of variety of different ecosystems the wonderful thing about the blockchain ecosystem right now is that node operators are very open to run nodes across multiple

17:12uh projects so it's been um quite welcoming you know uh to in and they've been quite open to to work with us uh we're going to slowly but surely decentralize this uh this is a during the test period it will take three to six months or whatever it might be plus the audits but uh we we intend to get to market as quickly as possible so if we're lucky we're talking about maybe

17:34the summer time very cool joshua and for you know more partnerships more ecosystems and just end users that are interested as well in learning more about super oracles and following along as you head towards the mainnet launch what's the best way for them to stay involved and to learn more yeah so definitely you know connect with us at superoracles on twitter um also on

18:01instagram uh uh assuming meant telegram we don't use instagram for this but uh more recently we are making a big push towards our discord so we actually have some interesting initiatives going on there we have some incredible announcements um we're going to be kind of building up our community there uh we're we have an ambassador program going on and um yeah so i would say you

18:24know look us up on twitter look us up on you know telegram not instagram and telegram and then also discord awesome amazing thank you so much joshua i will leave all those social links as well in the description box below for the viewers i appreciate you taking the time to come on all the best with the current trajectory towards the uh the test net in the main net and let's follow up in

18:47the near future yeah ashland great uh thanks for having us and uh you know feel free to invite us time you