Free off-chain data feeds pt. 2

Expand our treasury fund to subsidize free oracle off-chain data feeds. This is a continuation of our previous proposal awarded in Fund7.

The Charli3.io team has been actively developing an Oracle ecosystem since May 2021. Our MVP successfully passed the IOHK audit program receiving a level 2 certification by CertiK. The team consists of 18 people, including a partnership with a haskell functioning programming lab.

[IMPACT]

Context:

This is an identical proposal and ask from Fund7. We want to expand our community treasury fund to subsidise free oracle data feeds expected to go live in May.

Since our initial proposal 3 months ago, we learned that the costs for subsidising data feeds is higher than initially expected. With more funds we intend to a) expand the number of feeds available for free, b) keep these feeds running for longer.

We are currently in discussions with the IOHK to have them match the 50K ADA funding from last round. Our own team put 50k into the fund. With our current estimates, the plan is to raise 200k+ for an entire year of community data feeds. For this reason, we're asking for another 50K.

Solution Overview from last fund:

S2 TL;DR What is this proposal?

This proposal is NOT funding to build an Oracle.

This proposal is NOT to provide funding to Charli3 to build their product or expand their company.

The funding DOES NOT GOTO Charli3.

TL;DR Vote "yes" = $50,000 goes into a public, fully transparent, community controlled fund, Charli3 matches $50,000 into that fund.

All funding goes towards running price feeds for the community. Charli3 will act on behalf of the community to use that community fund to pay for operational costs related exclusively to price feeds used by the community (not our paying customers).

S3 What is the plan?

This proposal is to fund the operational costs for providing some data feeds to the community at no cost. Funds go into a "charli3 community fund" that is public, transparent, and 100% goes to providing price feeds to the community. In fact, the Charli3 team will contribute the same amount of funding into the community fund generated by this proposal. With the voice of the community voting, the IOG has expressed interest in doing the same.

Where does the funding go?

Our proposal is to allocate 100% of the funding into a "Community Chest" that is only used towards maintaining a self-service set of community top crypto price feeds. We may employ a DAO like solution so voting members of the public can decide on what feeds are available while also making all transactions transparent. These data feeds will come from industry leading data partners, the exact same as you would get from other Oracle competitors.

As stated above, Charli3 will match the funding 1:1.

So, $50,000 becomes $100,000 for the community.

Why $50,000?

We provide data feeds from the top data providers in the world such that our node operators can pull from them (although node operators can pull from other resources too). These are expensive contracts to maintain.

Additionally, the costs of running our ecosystem of node operators can be quite expensive. For reference, take a look at job costs for Chain.link.

Costs = Data providers get paid, Node operators get paid, Minimal infrastructure maintenance costs to run the Charli3 Oracle

We believe $50,000 USD is enough to fund a reasonable large number of crypto feeds for 12 months. If we are wrong (and it is cheaper to run them), we will run MORE feeds and scale what's available to the community.

Building the self-service portal for the community DOES NOT come out these funds as well, this is something we will create out of our own pocket.

Developers need access to off-chain data feeds to build rich DApps.

Feeds are expensive. This could be a barrier for launching a solution.

Our solution provides developers (especially those with budgetary restraints) what they need to launch: off-chain data feeds.

By expanding our current treasury fund of $100,000 to 150,000, we will be able to provide more data feeds for longer. This will make it easier for developers to build on top of Cardano.

The biggest risk (apart from long term delays to Cardano projects launching on mainnet) is navigating throughput issues on the Cardano network and minimising the costs of running our ecosystem. We want to stretch the funding as far as possible for the community and that means us being able to provide data feeds for tens, hundreds, and potentially thousands of projects.

Right now, our team does not have all the details on the development roadmap for Cardano/IOHK which has a material impact on the cost of providing a data feed. So putting dollar values on a data feed is very difficult, let alone a set of community data feeds. There is a risk that $50,000 may not be enough to supply a worthwhile number of data feeds (or types of data feeds) to the community. We believe it is…. That said, there has been interest from other partners, including the Cardano Foundation and the IOHK to support this community project. So, our contingency plan is to raise more funds to scale these community feeds. Likewise, our private company partners have a vested interest in growing the ecosystem and may contribute as well – including the CDA (Cardano DeFi Alliance).

Additional risks include abuse of free data feeds (our team will need to monitor for high volume usage), feeds will also be available in individual UTXOs so there may be competition amongst the public to consume data... so scaling is not only an economic challenge but a technical one. Our team's hope is to get more partners supporting us to navigate these challenges to hopefully scale the service to as many Cardano projects as possible.

[FEASIBILITY]

We are on month 1 already of this plan... this proposal extends the timeline...

S4 Detailed Plan

Okay, we give you money… now what? What feeds will be available? How often will they update?

Step 1: Propose initial price feeds

As a team we will short-list a number of price feeds that we could reasonable sustain for 12 months with the funding, including the frequency of updates (e.g. every 30 minutes).

Step 2: Community Votes on feeds

C3 will create a vote to collect what the community finds the most desirable feeds.

Step 3: Charli3 sets up as many feeds

The Charli3 team will set up as many feeds as possible from the vote. Our goal is to provide self-service options to ANY project. There is no vetting system to decide who gets access and who doesn't. In fact, we will take measures to ensure that large projects do not abuse these feeds by limiting access to those who are high volume. We would want to work with the community to ensure this resource is accessible to all.

Step 4: Charli3 Maintains Price feeds for 12 months+

Step 5: Charli3****Fundraises from our partners for more funding

As an Oracle solution, we are integral part of the ecosystem and already have many partners in the space. We all believe in the Cardano ecosystem and want it to thrive… So our goal will be to expand the diversity of feeds available as well as the quality/frequency of them -- and to extend it past 12 months potentially forever.

Step 6: Repeat step 2

Step 7: Boost Cardano Ecosystem

Build a large library of freely available community price feeds, perhaps randomness, and other data sets. These feeds will enable Cardano projects (building new or porting over) to eliminate a key cost and barrier for launch.

S5 The Impact of Funding Charli3's Community Oracle Fund

Our team believes in Cardano and we intimately know the costs associated with consuming data (ask anyone on an ETH chain..) -- Our mission is to enable the successful launch of as many Cardano projects by eliminating data feeds as a potential blocker.

S6 Measuring Success

We will launch ASAP after the PAB can support the ecosystem.

1-3 month:

Success in 3 months is to provide some initial feeds to the community such that they aren't waiting to launch due to lack of data feeds. That means completing steps 1-3 as soon as possible after receiving funding.

4-6 months:

Sustain accurate and reliable feeds with minimal downtime to the community

6-12 months:

Expand our fund and add more feeds through community voting

12 months:

Be in a position to expand for another 12-24 months all current running feeds. We will strive as a company to keep the community price feeds alive for as long as possible. Success is a long term community service that is constantly expanding in quality and quantity of feeds.

RE: Can you provide specific details on price feeds? (Which ones, how many, when?)

Data feed specifications are determined by a number of factors currently unknown.

a. Since the community will vote on the price feeds they want, and the timeline for this vote is within the first month of projects going live on main net. Specific price feeds are not yet known.

b. How many price feeds and for how long are largely determined by the costs of running a data feed. Currently our team does not have a complete picture of those costs. I've shared a response to another CA about the challenges we have with providing specific details on costs below for context (see RE: Costs)

Why $50,000?

We provide data feeds from the top data providers in the world such that our node operators can pull from them (although node operators can pull from other resources too). These are expensive contracts to maintain.

Additionally, the costs of running our ecosystem of node operators can be quite expensive. For reference, take a look at job costs for Chain.link.

Costs = Data providers get paid, Node operators get paid, Minimal infrastructure maintenance costs to run the Charli3 Oracle

We believe $50,000 USD is enough to fund a reasonable large number of crypto feeds for 12 months. If we are wrong (and it is cheaper to run them), we will run MORE feeds and scale what's available to the community.

Building the self-service portal for the community DOES NOT come out these funds as well, this is something we will create out of our own pocket.

RE: Can you break down exactly your exact costs?

Estimating costs, right now, is a challenge. It is not like we need to hire X number of developers at Y price to work on the following tickets to complete functionality P (proposed). The cost per data feed depends on the data being provided, but more importantly the cost is dynamic. It is dynamic in the sense that there are factors that change over time that impact cost. At this current time, some factors are known, while other factors are unknown.

For example, our team knows the cost of having a set of world-class data providers (the exact same sources you'd find in other ETH oracle ecosystems etc). These data providers have clear costs for providing APIs. We also know how many node operators we will be including in our ecosystem through 2022 and the costs for providing them access to some of the APIs paid for by our team. We also know 95% of the cost of maintaining our part of the ecosystem (security, development, sustainment, team costs, etc.).

Yet other factors are unknown and may change over time. These include, but are not limited to... a. Cardano network transaction costs b. the volume of projects using the public feeds c. the development/technical progress by the IOHK to the network infrastructure that has a material impact on the costs of our ecosystem (e.g. what it will cost to scale to meet the demands of b), and lastly d. node operators can accept/reject data feed specifications if it does not make financial sense for them.

Ultimately, Charli3 represents a decentralized oracle solution which means the cost is in many respects determined by the ecosystem and the network it runs on. That said, our team will know before it is time for the community to vote on what we could reasonably sustain at that time for a 12 month period. In this way, we offer a "menu" to be voted on.

https://charli3.io/team

RE: Who is the team? Are you capable?

Yes, we are in the process of updating our team page on charli3.io to include our technical team. We hope that being the first project through the IOHK certification program and passing the level 2 audit by CertiK is a testament to our team's ability to the community and highlights the feasibility of our success. We are also partnered with most major Cardano projects and an active member of the Cardano DeFi Alliance. There is ample information on our website, in our 6K+ telegram group, and our weekly AMAs to get information on us, our team, and ask questions!

[AUDITABILITY]

RE: Can you provide more specific KPIs/ success metrics?

For all data feeds (paid and public feeds related to this proposal) we have internal KPIs that are, broadly construed, related to the following categories: a. accuracy (e.g. reported inaccuracies over a period of time), b. reliability (e.g. uptime), c. robustness (e.g. availability of nodes to meet the security standard of a feed), and d. security (e.g. maintaining zero breaches).

For this specific proposal, our most important KPI is the volume of projects successfully using our public feeds. We can track the number of times our feeds are used, including repeat users etc. Our team sees 100+ unique projects using the feeds on a recurring basis as a great milestone, perhaps in Q2' 2022. Of course, setting specific timelines is difficult. As noted above, it all depends when the ecosystem launches!

TL;DR

- the external/proposal north star metric is number of Cardano projects successfully using our public data feeds

- the internal technical metrics include accurate, reliable, robust, and secure data feeds

S6 Measuring Success

We will launch ASAP after the PAB can support the ecosystem.

1-3 month:

Success in 3 months is to provide some initial feeds to the community such that they aren't waiting to launch due to lack of data feeds. That means completing steps 1-3 as soon as possible after receiving funding.

4-6 months:

Sustain accurate and reliable feeds with minimal downtime to the community

6-12 months:

Expand our fund and add more feeds through community voting

12 months:

Be in a position to expand for another 12-24 months all current running feeds. We will strive as a company to keep the community price feeds alive for as long as possible. Success is a long term community service that is constantly expanding in quality and quantity of feeds.

It is identical to our fund7 proposal except that the Charli3 team will not be matching the funding this round. We believe we can run a healthy number of feeds with our previous funding and we are currently fundraising privately to get our treasury fund to 200k.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384686

Funded: 50K ADA -- boosting the DeFi ecosystem