API3 Core Technical Team Report, March–May 2023
Nodary has introduced self-funded data feeds back in October 2022, and these are thoroughly tested and optimized on a large number of chains since then. In March 2023, the dAPIs team have delivered the Phase 1 of their roadmap, self-funded dAPIs, which essentially consists of a market interface that greatly streamlines the usage of dAPIs, which are currently pointed to Nodary’s self-funded data feeds. The upcoming Phase 2 enables users to frictionlessly upgrade these entry-level dAPIs to use multiple data sources and not require self-funding.
Nodary is an API provider that builds an oracle-centric API, just as API3 builds API provider-centric oracles. In addition to the obvious synergy between these two approaches, this also implies a separation. A good example is Nodary providing self-funded data feeds on both zkSync Era mainnet and testnet (follow the example here), yet the API3 Market only providing dAPIs on zkSync Era testnet. This is because the zkSync team hasn’t released their node yet, which means any oracle service on that chain will have to depend on only the public RPC endpoint. If this is satisfactory is subjective — it is for Nodary but not for the dAPIs team of API3.
The core technical team is done with the development of QRNG, and it is now handed over to the ecosystem team for the onboarding of new providers and ecosystem building efforts. The core technical team still collects requirements (e.g., dynamically estimating the gas requirements of fulfillments, higher bandwidth for consecutive requests) and will continue addressing them in upcoming Airnode releases, which will not only benefit QRNG but all RRP services built using Airnode.
We released Airnode v0.11 this cycle. Most importantly, this version supports OEV and ChainAPI’s current proposal. As the OEV litepaper describes, our implementation of OEV includes an OEV Relay, which communicates with Airnodes operated by API providers to create tamper-proof data feed updates to be auctioned off. Therefore, this release pertains to Airnode doing the relevant validations and signing the data in the format that the OEV Relay expects, and is not the complete OEV implementation. That being said, the development of other OEV components is on track and we’ll share updates as necessary.
API3 has multiple technical teams working on different products, and one thing they have in common is that they require purpose-specific smart contracts to be developed. Core technical team is responsible for the development and/or auditing of all of these contracts, and this cycle was an especially busy one. A total of four audits were completed (one about ChainAPI/Airnode, two about OEV, one about API3 token burns), and the audit reports will be released as the respective products are launched. In addition, we have finalized the payment contract that API3 Market will use to receive payment for the data feed upgrades that will be implemented in Phase 2, as mentioned above.
Finally, there are a few points from the last cycle’s report that I want to amend. It mentioned that “byog” will have API providers run self-funded feeds. While we still find self-funded feeds to be useful to reduce friction in onboarding new users, we decided against utilizing it for multi-source data feeds, at least for the time being. This is also related to this post that hints at byog being rebranded as Nodary also implying a change in direction. In simple terms, we’ll introduce an architecture that we believe will provide trust-minimization in a much more practical way. The second point to amend is that ChainAPI’s next proposal will likely not be about Omnimarket, but this new direction instead. As usual, we’ll share more information once these come to fruition.
