[DRAFT] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal]Scry Protocol - Permissionless High Scale Oracles

đź“ś Grant Proposals Governance Fund: Phase 1
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1

Project name: Scry

Author name and contact info (please provide a reliable point of contact for the project):
PR0 pr0@keychain.me

L2 recipient address: 0x9D31e30003f253563Ff108BC60B16Fdf2c93abb5

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: 11

I confirm that I have read the landing pages for the Builders and Growth Experiments Sub-Committees and that I have determined my proposal is best suited to be reviewed by the Growth Experiments Sub-Committee: [Yes/No]:
Yes
I understand that Growth Experiments grants are subject to a “no sale rule,” as explained in this post, and I have read the terms of the rule: [Yes/No]:
Yes

What are you building?:
Scry is an open source, permissionless, flexible and robust framework for Oracle deployment with multifeed support, subscriptions and instant deployment. We are the ONLY permissionless oracle infra that allows anyone to run their own oracles and nodes with own signers and data.
Scry has deployed the Open Oracle Framework, an infrastructure for oracles for developers to access external data in a fully permissionless and decentralized way. The infrastructure allows devs to deploy high scale oracles for any API with the contracts, nodes and front end all ready to use in <15m. This allows devs to create oracles using their own reputable signers in their communities or use a reference oracle by the Scry team to request data to be brought onchain.

The factory allows easy oracle deployment by devs without even needing to deploy a contract using hardhat themselves.

The infrastructure is fully decentralized and the ONLY protocol in the space that allows devs to deploy their own oracles and control the oracle and feeds fully using their own security/signers/feed sources, as well as wrapping this into a very simple process to allow for rapid deployment and usability. The node/front end and contracts are all open source.

We also have built out Morpheus
Morpheus is a framework that allows developers to request any API from web2, directly onchain for their web3 apps. This tool enables real-time data requests, any API and data to be used, and can be used on any EVM network. Morpheus has been designed to make it easier for developers to build decentralized applications that can interact with the real world, thereby bridging the gap between web2 and web3.

One of the most significant advantages of Morpheus is its ability to access any API endpoint. This means that developers can now easily request data from sources such as social media platforms, weather APIs, and financial data APIs directly on the blockchain. This makes it possible to build applications that are more relevant to the real world such as insurance, synthetics, social dapps and that can provide more value to users.

HashRanCh, a VRF (Verifiable Random Function) from Scry comes in, providing a secure and verifiable method for generating random numbers in smart contracts. HashRanCh hashing process provides a secure and verifiable method for generating random numbers in smart contracts. By using the private key as the seed and computing a sequence of hashes, we can ensure that the data being used is tamper-proof and cannot be manipulated by the oracle aswell as being guaranteed random. This is crucial for applications that require randomness to function, and ensures that the integrity of the entire system is maintained while decentralized. Hash RanCh was custom designed by the Scry team through our RnD as a fully secure cryptographic base for any and all projects to use, with verifier open source.

Our key mssion
Data LPs (Data Liquidity Providers) are essentially decentralized marketplaces for data. They provide a way for developers to source data from a variety of different sources, while also providing incentives for individuals and entities to contribute their data to the marketplace. In a Data LP, anyone can contribute their data and earn rewards for doing so. Developers can then purchase the data they need from the signers they choose. Scry is a pioneering a decentralized and open market data approach with Morpheus that allows anyone to easily set up and operate their own oracle and node with no technical expertise.
By enabling anyone to fill requests for data, Scry allows developers and projects to choose where they source their data based on reputation for who they feel will be honest, as well as even source the data from their own community.

Why do you believe what you are building is going to succeed?:
Optimism is severly underserved by other oracle networks such as Link, with not even 50 feeds by the largest oracle providers, with all being provided by only a few signers, creating not only limited data for devs and projects but all being unable to be custom for projects with their own data sources to ensure security and ability to deploy new feeds and scale.
Oracles key features

  • Autonomous oracle system where devs can self deploy own feeds/oracles and use custom signers for permissionless, decentralized and secure deployment with self-controllable feed creation using custom APIs for rapid development
  • Use any API with a highly robust parse engine, the parse for the json to be expected and basic info and the feed will be ready to use and submitted on chain by all signers.
  • Data lookup for historical data for all feeds natively, allows for both immutable data access, TWAP construction and onchain analytics.
  • Allows for various monetization structures at a feed level, oracle providers can charge for certain feeds to earn revenue as well as provide others for public use, subscription models for data requests at the feed level and oracle level.
  • Anyone can run a data provider and earn fees from requests
    -Creates a data market and lets devs choose their oracle sources at the signer level and batch many for redundancy
  • Any API endpoint in realtime for any data
  • Custom highly secure VRF with simple verification
  • 0 Code setup and deployment, takes <60s to set up and have an operational node
  • Out of the box nodes, contract deployment and verifiers and front end

The data available to devs directly limits use cases which can be deployed, you can’t deploy insurance without data about whats being insured, you cant deploy financial markets thats not crypto exclusive without access to traditional finance data. By allowing high scale, easy to deply oracles that supports new feeds in real time, projects can scale not just the transactions with L2s but the capibilities.

How many users does your project have currently? Please include how you arrived at this estimate:
Unknown as we support testnets as we are not officially launch as well as having our framework and tools designed to be self deployable. We have confirmed multiple projects that are trying out the infrastructure for their projects. We support 7 networks currently.

How will receiving a grant enable you to further the mission of maximizing the number of users interacting with Optimism? Please include a step-by-step flow of how you imagine this grant can lead to a greater number of user interactions with Optimism:
The tokens will be used towards helping more data providers set up and operate oracles as well as help with gas costs for oracles and users. This allows for more data to enter the chain and so more tools and projects for users. This may be decentralized insurance, finance, social allowing them access to any web2 data they need either through requests or pull based oracles.

Tokens used to subsidise more data>more tools and use cases>more users able to use the tools and more use cases. If theres more data on Optimism and not on other chains devs will focus on Optimism and so there will be more tools that are only available on the platform.

Tell us about the users you plan to target with this grant. Include any defining characteristics that will help you identify and target them.:
Developers an projects, specifically those with need to access external data, specifically defi projects, insurance, analytics, but depends on the use case.

How would these users interact with Optimism? For how long?:
Developers build the tools you need to attract end users. Developers often stay for many cycles, even through bull and bear markets and are key to keeping users and growth.

Provide us with links to any of the following for the project:

Who are your competitors, and are they on Optimism?:
Optimism is severly underserved by other oracle networks such as Link, with not even 50 feeds by the largest oracle providers, with all being provided by only a few signers, creating not only limited data for devs and projects but all being unable to be custom for projects with their own data sources to ensure security and ability to deploy new feeds and scale. Alternatives are usually just Link forks or also have a token required in the model, cannot deploy own oracles, cannot access custom data or are not simple to use.

Team
Who are your founders?:
PR0

What makes your team well-suited to carry out the project described in this proposal?
We have already built it. Its operational. No vaporware. No BS. We show before we ask for funds.

Is this your first Web3 project?:
No

If not, what else have you built? (Share links, Github repository, or any other useful information.):

Grant Request
What is the size of the grant request? (250k OP max):
50k OP

How do you justify the size of the grant?:
The funds will be used to create a sustainable model for data and compensate for gas costs, developer support, expand tools, bring new data providers into the market, allow for subsidies for data and allow for feeds to be maintained reliably with stable nodes and high frequency.

Roadmap and Distribution Plan
Describe in discrete steps how you will successfully implement your grant plan:

  1. Deploy reference oracles and help new projects access data they need directly.
  2. Create data markets allowing anyone to create their own nodes and oracles to earn revenue and decentralize the data sources.
  3. Just keep building new tools and features.

How will the OP tokens be distributed? (please include % allocated to different initiatives such as user rewards/marketing/liquidity mining. Please also include a justification as to why each of these initiatives align with the problem statement this proposal is solving. Distribution should not include the sale of any tokens by the grantee or the use of tokens for compensation, protocol expenses, etc. See the no sale rule here):
75% Data feed subsidies for oracles and nodes to provide data. These will be used by allowing for gas compensation, dedicated allocation for new providers, allocations for key providers, allocations for reputable community members to be data providers. This is needed to allow for a large data market and as many players to enter as well as keep oracles maintained and operational.
25% Marketing incentives through giveaways to promote reach, partnership incentives for projects to use the oracles, hackathon prizes.

Please clearly define the milestones you expect to achieve in order to receive milestone based installments. Please consider how each milestone relates to incentivizing sustainable usage and liquidity on Optimism. Progress towards each milestone must be trackable: Rather than applying then creating milestones and building we have built as much as we can, with an operational oracle, factory and front end ready to show that we are both able to perform and that we can perform what we say. The front end is available at
https://optimism.dapp.scry.finance/

With contracts and framework ready for developers to self deploy.

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative?:
Will be based on opportunities, but targeting 1y, but if we are able to make it last based on market conditions then it will be used to continue
Please provide benchmark milestones for this project. These milestones should guide the Optimism community on the progress of your project throughout your work on the project. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

  • Oracle feeds available
  • Projects using Scry oracles
  • Feeds processed
  • Data Providers

Please define critical milestones for this project. Critical milestones are meant to show good-faith efforts to accomplish the project. Non-completion of these milestones could lead to revocation of remaining grant rewards. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

q2
Have atleast 50 feeds that are maintained to match Link. Based on requests by projects.
Have the framework for Morpheus and DataLink deployment by any devs and used
Have 5 signers for the reference oracle
Have atleast 20 feeds that are maintained by reference oracle based on dev needs.
q3
Have atleast 50 feeds that are maintained by reference oracle with high uptime
5 Projects using the infrastructure
5 Independant oracles using Morpheus
10 Projects using the infra
20 Projects using the infra

If the OP tokens are for direct distribution to users, why will incentivized users and liquidity on Optimism remain after incentives dry up?:
Because the projects will have users with their own uses and protocols, and will continue to need the data and oracles to allow for the contracts and use cases

Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability (smart contracts addresses relevant to the proposal, relevant organizational wallet addresses, etc.):

core oracles can be found there for optimism as well as non reference and core oracles and addresses.
Deployment address / oracle address
0x00f0000000F11a5380Da5A184F0C563B5995fee2

Optimism Relationship
Infrastructure

What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?:
Optimism is severly underserved by other oracle networks such as Link, with not even 50 feeds by the largest oracle providers, with all being provided by only a few signers, creating not only limited data for devs and projects but all being unable to be custom for projects with their own data sources to ensure security and ability to deploy new feeds and scale.

How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?:

  • Autonomous oracle system where devs can self deploy own feeds/oracles and use custom signers for permissionless, decentralized and secure deployment with self-controllable feed creation using custom APIs for rapid development.
  • 200+ different feed updates with 1 tx (high scale data). Scaled with Layer 2s.
  • Use any API with a highly robust parse engine, controlled by a simple spreadsheet, just put the URL, the parse for the json to be expected and basic info and the feed will be ready to use and submitted on chain by all signers.
  • Data lookup for historical data for all feeds natively, allows for both immutable data access, TWAP construction and onchain analytics.
  • Allows for various monetization structures at a feed level, oracle providers can charge for certain feeds to earn revenue as well as provide others for public use, subscription models for data requests at the feed level and oracle level.

Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?:
The data available to devs directly limits use cases which can be deployed, you can’t deploy insurance without data about whats being insured, you cant deploy financial markets thats not crypto exclusive without access to traditional finance data. By allowing high scale, easy to deply oracles that supports new feeds in real time, projects can scale not just the transactions with L2s but the capibilities.

Is your project Optimism Native?:
No

Confirmations

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: [Yes/No]:
Yes
I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: [Yes/No]:
Yes

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Does this entail that you would be selling the token to pay for development expenses?
If so, it would violate the no sale rule.

3

Nope does not, developments done, the oracles operational. This would be to subsidise deployed oracles with gas rebates and token allocations for other people to deploy and have their own oracles, creating multiple sources for devs to choose from for their data, creating a decentralized data market

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The tokens would not be sold, theyd be given to compensate the oracles for gas used and keeping the oracles up.

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Hey :wave: I hope you’re having a great day !
Thank you for your response so that way I can understand how your proposal works. Keep up the hard work. I saw your other proposal from the past topic you posted and appreciate your input on oracles.

6

Hey Pr0 this is Doug from the growth council, had some questions and suggestions for you. As it stands your grant request seems quite large given the age/size of the project in my view. Are there any analytics on the current number of projects utilizing your price feeds, this information would be useful.

Throughout the application process, this forum thread will be one of the official means of communication. Please be sure to monitor it for updates over the course of the review period.

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In regards to critical milestones, i feel you should target a certain number of quality protocols to utilize your price feeds, wouldn’t do much good to have 200 feeds with no utilization.

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So the amount was based on getting Optimisms feed levels to match ETH mainnet at the least which would be 250 feeds for devs to access using pull based requests to make feature match with ETH for devs. This would cost about 100k gas per feeds submit per signer which costs about $0.50 at current prices since most is data for accesing both historical values as well as current. for 250 feeds that would be about $50 per signer per h if all feeds are updated every 1h. We are targeting atleast 7 signers at launch from the community/team. This would be $350 an h. For 24h * 365 would be $8400 per d which would alone be $250k for just one reference oracle. If we want many people tom be able to run their own nodes and offset gas as well as some incentives at atleast 1/3 data available from the reference would be about $750k which alone would be 1.5x the requested op just to reach net 0 offset for gas.

We also want incentives for nodes based on gas and filled requests for Morpheus to get more oracles and create a data market. This project isnt just an oracle service its a framework to get other people to run their own custom oracles and create a data market in the space.

These may be useful to see what we’re trying to do, and why even the 250k allocation is under what we really probably need to get us to where the space should be where theres 100s of oracles providing data for people to choose who to source their data from.

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Updated with adoption / independant targets

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There is no doubt that this project is an ambitious one that was proposed to the Optimism
grant committee. The idea to solve the mentioned issue is considerable, and the link provided by the grantee leads to pages of information to read and understand the project profoundly. However, to better decide whether the requested token can be offered to the team or not, we should read the doc more carefully.

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Please be aware that while grant evaluations are being finalized, the grant distribution process will follow the subsequent steps:

Upon approval of your grant proposal, you will be awarded 40% of the total grant funds. However, it is imperative that you satisfy specific critical milestones to receive the remaining funds. We advise you to thoroughly review your milestones and make sure that they are easily confirmable. Furthermore, if applicable, please be prepared to furnish evidence proving that the milestones have been met. This will prevent any delays in releasing the remaining funds.

If you are confident that your milestones are attainable and verifiable, then no further action is needed at this point.

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I’ve spoken to multiple projects that aren’t deploying to Optimism because the Chainlink feeds they need aren’t present, or because there isn’t a general scalable oracle for the majority of erc20s, so this is very exciting. I played around with the contracts a bit and was impressed. Imo this is the exact type of thing that governance theoretically excels at for funding; a piece of technology that unlocks a lot of value for the network (allows many new projects to deploy, allows derivs/lending markets to list many new assets) but doesn’t have an obvious historically successful monetization model (You can probably argue that the current leader in oracles wouldn’t be here today if it didn’t get lucky by being able to subsidize operations via selling a mostly meaningless token to retail at very high valuations for years). Euler DAU + TVL growth metrics pre-hack are a good case study for what can happen when you have access to generalized scalable oracles. I think it’s hard to understate how impactful this could be if executed correctly.

My question would be: how big is the team, and do you have a way of incentivizing them? To build+establish confidence in your feeds I expect you’ll need at least two full time solidity devs, hard to afford that long term without raising VC money unfortunately.

A small nitpick would be that this product is catered towards developers so imo should be under Builders, and that I don’t believe generic marketing is a good spend because you want to win over dapp developers to have them integrate, which is unlikely to be achieved by giveaways/promotions etc.

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This will be very easy to verify as can show tweets from projects using the infra and the oracle targets will have onchain txs/signers/contracts

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Appreciate checking it out, yeah alot of time and effort went into the system design as it was a passion project at the start and has an open source spirit at its core before even being an independant project.

As for the team its just me for last 2y doing it as a passion project and even if dont get a grant will keep building. Tbh the solidity dev isnt that hard, was able to solo build out the Morpheus oracle, the VRFs, the verifiers, PoCs, deployment stacks, front end and node myself without any problem tbh, the primary problem has been adoption/use which this grant will hopefully help with through incentives/marketing hackathon prizes.

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