API3 Core Technical Team Report, May 2022
We did something uncommon this month, and revealed QRNG without any prior mention. A first-party oracle service being provided on 13 mainnets and 4 testnets, and this being launched on all chains simultaneously is a first, and foreshadows what Airnode will do in the future. There are two main reasons why we were able to do this:
- The single Airnode that ANU Quantum Numbers deployed is serving all of these chains simultaneously, in an isolated way. This allows us to provide the same service on more chains with no additional cost or maintenance requirement.
- The Airnode protocol allows the requester to cover all gas costs, which is one of the things that makes it set-and-forget. This is especially beneficial if the chain has limited infrastructure and getting a hold of some native currency that is used for gas costs is relatively difficult.
As you can imagine, these advantages translate to all use-cases when it comes to serving under-served chains, and not only QRNG.
One important benefit of working on QRNG was that we had to do some R&D to make it possible, which provided important insights about API response caching, stateful authentication methods such as OAuth2 and a way to implement them with a stateless Airnode, without having to resort to custom builds or external dependencies. In this regard, we got much more out of QRNG than the time that we put into developing it.
We have continued focusing the majority of our attention on building Beacons and dAPIs. As you may know, we have been operating 25 Beacons each on 4 testnets since January. We also started operating Beacons on 4 mainnets since the end of April, with over 30,000 Beacon updates! One of these Beacons was UST/USD on Avalanche, which has proven to be the perfect stress test (see below). Overall, we’re happy to say that our Beacons have performed excellently during these trying market and chain conditions, and we can’t wait to allow projects to start using them
