Applying Oracle Performance Metrics

Background

The team was thankful for the support shown by the Cardano community during Fund 5 and has swiftly delivered on those proposal deliverables.

A summary of these deliverables can be found here: https://croesus-blockchain.github.io

The rudimentary user interface for our Oracle assessment tool - which we are aiming to extend with this proposal - can be found here:  https://www.croesus-blockchain.com 

The Plan

Now that we have the means and capability to assess services in the Cardano ecosystem through on-chain metadata, we want to showcase just how powerful this can be with a set of real-world use cases.

Price Oracles

Commonly used to determine exchange rates for on-chain applications and smart contracts.

These oracles can be assessed via a peer analysis. The reported exchange rate compared to other Oracles, or Oracle Pools which are published within the same time period.

Random Oracles

Commonly used in lottery, gambling and NFT applications to assign a probability to an event.

These oracles can be assessed through analysis of the spread of results

Service Oracles

Bespoke services commonly used to facilitate off-chain processing which may be contingent on large amount of computation or time to determine a result.

The Team

Each team member brings over a decade of experience as Data Science professionals responsible for building, assessing, deploying and monitoring credit risk, fraud, sentiment analysis, graph analytics and propensity models.

This is the team's second Catalyst proposal. Team members have sufficient experience to deliver all proposal deliverables within two calendar months without sourcing additional developer cost.

Team Members

Michael - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hodder-417a4ba7

Thushare - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thushare

Steve - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-pirois-8b373593

Each team member has experience standing up Cardano testnet/mainnet nodes and submitting metadata transactions.

Team members have been part of Alonzo Purple Testnet and Plutus Pioneers cohorts - checkout https://pool.pm/d068fe47123ec4c86460eeb74c7d7765c67d2df295a3ac86d664ed45.PlutusFirstClassPhoto192

The Deliverables

User Friendly Meta Data Creation

Current implementation of the protocol is achieved through scripting and while useful for demonstration purposes, further development is required to make meta data submission easy to submit.

There are a few different options to pursue:

* create the protocol as a set of smart contracts after smart contracts become possible in early September

* expand on the scripts current in-use

* source a better tool from the community or other proposal groups

Start Reporting on Three Different  Real-World Oracle Use Cases

* seek out current Cardano oracles ( eg https://nut.link )

*  report on at least one price oracle, one random oracle and one service oracle using both testnet and mainnet prior to the end of October 2021.

Budget

The requested funds will be spent on:

* Incentives and payment for tools that make meta data submission easier (eg as payment to other development groups)

* Incentives to allow Oracles and Oracle Pools to make use of the Croesus Protocol

* Remuneration for two months of development effort, continuing to stand up development infrastructure for testnet and the https://www.croesus-blockchain.com/ demonstration application.

* Development of a Proof-of-Concept to submit protocol transactions via a smart contract