Introducing byog

Providing an oracle service requires changing the chain state, which is only achievable through a transaction. This raises the question: Who pays for the gas of that transaction? The answer to this used to be a univocal “The oracle pays for the gas as a part of the service.” One of the revolutionary aspects of Airnode is turning this on its head, enabling anyone to be able to sponsor the transactions made to fulfill requests.

Airnode’s sponsorship scheme proved its capabilities through QRNG in two ways:

• ANU Quantum Numbers operates a first-party oracle on 14 chains simultaneously. This would have been practically impossible without the sponsorship scheme.
• The service is provided as a free, public utility, which is only possible because the oracle operation cost does not include any gas cost.

QRNG has been used by many projects across many chains with praise, indicating that the developers are receptive to the novel sponsorship scheme. This was only a pilot, however.

byog (short for “bring-your-own-gas”) is an independent group within the API3 ecosystem dedicated to build similarly high-impact oracle services leveraging Airnode and specifically the sponsorship scheme. The leading one of these is their Beacons, and differently from the existing Beacons operated by API3, the users are responsible for funding the sponsor wallets that power them. Just like in QRNG, this sponsorship scheme allows byog to roll out these data feeds at a scale that was never achieved before by any oracle solution. At the time that this is being written, byog has 120 crypto asset price Beacons live on 13 testnets, adding up to a whopping number of 1560 unique data feeds. The same Beacons will be deployed on the respective mainnets later and remain free to use for the foreseeable future. Visit byog.io to learn more and try them out.

It’s not difficult to imagine what this will enable; chains that used to not have any kind of an oracle service now have 120 unique data feeds to boot. Moreover, after an evaluation period, these Beacons will be onboarded to the API3 Market as single-source dAPIs. The users will either use these as-is for free, or sponsor their upgrade to the level of decentralization they require, which will also grant service coverage. This means that there will be a frictionless path to adoption from deploying your contract on an obscure testnet for a hackathon, to replicating the same setup on the respective mainnet for free, to upgrading the data feeds to use multiple first-party oracles as the project gains traction.

byog will also act in a consulting capacity to the API3 technical teams and external clients with implementing integrations and rolling out byog services on new platforms. Being able to act independently from API3 and adopting a guerilla-style approach will allow byog to trailblaze aggressively, expanding the API3 ecosystem in a cost-efficient way.