API3 Core Technical Team Report, July 2022
We’ve been running testnet Beacons since January and mainnet Beacons since the end of April. We encountered some exciting chain and market conditions during this period, yet Airnode performed as intended without any surprises. As a result, we finally decided to ship our data feeds. Note that we not only provide our data feeds as Beacons, but also dAPIs. Currently, the dAPIs are pointed to individual Beacons by a 3 of 6 multisig controlled by members of the core technical team (more documentation about this is coming). In the near future, we will set up Beacon sets and point the dAPIs to them where appropriate.
The API3 whitepaper proposes that service level guarantees in the form of an insurance-like product is the ideal security mechanism for oracles (and that this wouldn’t be optimally cost-efficient with non-first-party oracles). Even though we haven’t released this product yet (and the data feeds will be free to use until then), the fact that we’re planning to do so in the near future caused us to consider it at every step of designing the data feeds and deciding if they are ready to be used yet. “Would we want to insure this at scale?” was a question that we frequently asked ourselves and made decisions accordingly, which validates the idea that oracle services should not only come with coverage, but that should ideally be by the provider of that service — in this case, API3.
The second major product we launched this month is API3 Market. We had been working on this with Protofire for the last three months, with significant contribution from our team due to the importance of the project. The result is very slick and pretty, so check it out if you haven’t already. The core technical team has fully taken it over from here and have already started improving it based on the user feedback.
The main difference between API3 Market and data feed pages built by other oracle projects is obvious from the name: API3 Market is an interactive platform where you would go to buy access and coverage for oracle services (rather than the typical one that is designed to prove token holders that the project has working data feeds). This is directly related to our vision for API monetization on Web3, and you can consider API3 Market to be one of the foundations that we will build this on.
