On the 24th of June, 2021, Paul Claudius, the Co-Founder of DIA was live on Seascape Seaside Talk #9, to provide the community with insights on their recent partnership with Seascape, and also attend to the questions and queries provided by Community members. The session was moderated by Kerel Verwaerde, CMO of Seascape Network.
SEGMENT 1 : Interview with AMA Moderator
Kerel — Today we are joined by Paul Claudius from the DIA Team to explain a bit more about their project and how it benefits Seascape. So first Paul could you tell us a bit more about yourself and DIA?
Paul —
Yes, sure! Pleasure to be here. My name is Paul and I am one of the co-founders of DIA.
I have a background in management and finance, investment banking, private equity and e-commerce. I first got in touch with the space in 2013, like many of us, when by pure coincidence buying my first Bitcoin.
Back then, I still could not completely understand the core technology and the implications it would have in finance. In 2016–2017, after some research, clarity and interest, I decided to leave e-commerce and fully focus on blockchain.
At that time, together with current co-founders, we were setting up smart contracts holding different assets, so what today we would call DeFi :). When setting up those smart contracts, the first problem we identified was the absence of transparent data. We needed data on and off-chain. We could not find sources where we could understand where the ETH/USD price data came from, which exchanges or the methodology behind. So that’s how DIA was born, out of a product need we had back then.
Kerel — Could I ask what made you want to leave e-commerce for blockchain? was there a specific trigger?
Paul —
Did e-commerce for some time. Was really done with my learning curve and achieved stuff I wanted in the industry. Blockchain was sneaking up and becoming more and more an interest. Was hard not to jump for full time Urge to go into the industry increased with my understanding of the tech and its possible impact.
Kerel — Paul could you also tell us a bit more as to why those oracles are s important?
Paul —
Yes, oracles are very integral infrastructure to dApps. Smart contracts are not able to access outside information, not even unchain info in most cases. Oracles for this reason provide information to a smart contract that can range from asset price data to weather data or NFT specific data such as benchmarks or indices. Also for example randomness is something oracles provide that is often used in unchain games.
The integrity of the data provided is key to not abuse the product. In DeFi we saw a lot of vulnerabilities exploited, so called oracle attacks and sandwich attacks in specific. We provide the stack to mitigate these vulnerabilities.
But we also are needed to have smart contracts work that require i.e. data which is distributed in different environments specific to NFTs which have a lot of off chain and unchain data based on the issuer, marketplaces, dApps to name a few.
Kerel — How are you different from some of your competitors that also provide oracles?
Paul —
DIA’s approach on how data is sourced, computed and delivered is very different to the rest of the oracles in the market. DIA works in a completely decentralized and open-source structure where market actors supply, validate, use and share financial data.
By leveraging the power of the crowd through decentral governance and incentivization, the community gets rewarded by connecting new data source scrapers to the DIA platform. This results in a very efficient and scalable approach to source data.
Kerel — Also what does a sandwhich attack do? do you replace mayo with hot sauce? Maybe rephrase the last message a bit?
Paul —
Yummy… It is an attack that abuses usually liquid markets to manipulate the price that is broadcasted by the oracle. The fewer markets used by the oracle to determine a price the easier the attack.
All used sources and methodologies are fully transparent and publicly accessible. Finally, the data points are made publicly accessible and delivered through an API or oracles to smart contracts on all major blockchains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Polygon, Moonbeam, and more.
Kerel — You mentioned the community being rewarded and you know we’re very big on community rewards, could you tell us a bit more about that?
Paul —
We as A DAO rely on the community very much. So the product and gov decisions are really sth driven jointly. We provide bounties and fund tickets for new data sources being added. Sth worth to check out if you are a developer to jump to our gitcoin.
Kerel — Now the last question and we wrap it up. How did the partnership with seascape came about?I know it but i’m sure some of our fellow Scapers would be interested in knowing that.
Paul —
Expanding a bit on the already discussed, DIA has integrated Seascape’s Crowns token into its broad set of data feeds, which will allow 3rd party dApps, such as Wowswap and others to utilise Crowns to provide use cases such as leveraged trading.
This collaboration not only expands our library of on-chain price points, but enables dApps to accurately integrate Crowns price data to their platforms. Read more here.
SEGMENT 2 : Community Questions
Community Question 1 (Alex) — Hi Paul, how exactly DIA will help Seascape?
Paul —
Let me just give a quick overview what DIA does and some background to answer the question in a second step. DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is an open-source, financial information platform that leverages crypto economic incentives to source and validate data and oracles. The DIA platform provides the infrastructure for market actors to supply, validate, use and share financial data.
Founded in 2018 as a Swiss-based non-profit association, DIA’s mission is to democratise access to financial data, similar to what Wikipedia has done in the broader information space with regard to central encyclopaedias.
The connection with Seascape is very concrete. We are providing a feed for the pCWS pair and are able to push this to multiple chains. This feed can be used by Dapps such as i.e. leverage trading on wow swap to name an example.
But as DIA is going much further in not only aggregating asset prices but NFT data we see additional collars coming up. Here is a link on our NFT approach of aggregating and sanitizing data.
Community Question 2 (Climineah Borja) — What core improvement when it comes to developers approach can DIA offer to Seascape community?
Paul —
DIA is the most open oracle. Anyone can request and define a feed. So with Seascape expanding further DIA will be able to provide different feeds, also NFT specific that are a foundation for new development.