DAPPCON 2025: The Oracle: Renaissance: Decentralized Data for a Trustless Future - Bianca Buzea

Transcript

Thank you so much. Hi everyone. Thank you for staying for the second part of the day. I hope you are enjoying Dapcon and Berlin blockchain week so far. With this presentation, we are continuing the conversation that Brenda started on oracles. We'll be talking about the Oracle Renaissance, decentralized data for a trustless future. So what exactly do I mean by that? In this presentation, I would love to cover how we are basically going to the next iteration of oracles from simple data feeds to real world interoperability layers.

Before that, I have a personal story I would love to share with you today. Two weeks ago, I found this in my building. Apparently, a water pipe broke and because of that, the whole building had no water. I tried to have a shower, but well, you need water for that. Brush teeth also not going to happen. Make coffee, you need water, too. This got me thinking. Suddenly, all the things that I took for granted were unavailable.

Data in decentralized application is a lot like water. It flows quietly in the background and most of the time we take it for granted but you really notice when it's gone. My name is Bianca Buzza. I'm head of deell at Chronicle. The team at Chronicle is the team behind the first oracle on Ethereum back in 2017 at Maker Dao. In 2023, it spun out of maker dao. It continues today to power maker as well as other protocols in the web free space.

So back to our Oracle renaissance. So we're moving away from simple data aggregators. What we're building now in terms of oracles are in is infrastructure for real world interoperability. So basically we are connecting real world with onchain and oracles nowadays help us answer questions which are a bit more complex such as is a tokenized assets actually backed is it appropriate for a financial contract to execute? Can users trust what they're interacting with?

In terms of data feeds or the main categories of data, we have three main uh categories. It's true that technically you can put any sort of data and get that delivered by an oracle, but I would argue that these are the top three most popular use cases for oracles and data. So number one, we have cryptoric data. Here we're talking about real time pricing for cryptocurrencies. Then we also have non-crypto price data such as prices for fiat stocks or commodities.

And finally, what I believe is the most interesting use case nowadays is a testable data. And I'm saying that because we are seeing a rise in terms of real world asset tokenization. When it comes to attestable data, here we're talking about any verifiable piece of information. Some very popular examples are proof of funds and proof of ownership. And now to kind of back my statement um earlier about the growth of uh real world assets uh tokenization. This is a screenshot I took in December last year and the total RWA value was at 13.9 billion.

I recommend this data is from rwa.xyz. It's a very good website if you're looking for insights about the real world asset market. You can see it broke down by chains by where the data is coming from and some other insights. I did a few days ago the same exercise. I went to check this source again and guess what the the value now is at 23.14 billion. Oh, if you do the math, that's a 66.5 increase in a bit less than 6 months.

That's a lot, I would say. However, we're just scratching the surface. If you look at the total market for gold, currencies, real estate, and commodities, that's over $40 trillion. What does it mean? This means that there is a great opportunity when it comes to tokenization, but also this comes with great responsibility. So why tokenize you would ask? What are the benefits?

Shared system of record. Using tokenization, you can get an unambiguous view of asset ownership. At any given point in time, you know where the asset resides and who owns it. and also it reduces information asymmetry. Then we have customizable asset custody. With tokenization, we can have various custody models ranging from self-custody all the way to institutional custody. Programmability is another benefit. And here we can achieve great operational efficiency via automation using smart contracts.

Asset fractionalization is another one. We can now have micro units of ownership. This basically reduces the barrier to entry. So if you think about a tokenized real estate for example, you can have units of a share of that. And this enables to have what we used to have as traditional illquid markets become more dynamic and bring additional liquidity. Lastly, composability. Now we can package and repackage different pieces of collateral, making a more efficient use of it and increasing liquidity.

However, as you can imagine, there are not only benefits. Uh we have some challenges as well. In fact, I recommend uh this report by the World Economic Forum. It gives a great overview on the benefits, challenges and how all this is evolving in in in currently. And here I noted some of the current challenges uh when it comes to tokenization. The first one is legacy infrastructure integration. Another important one is the fact that we have inconsistent global standards.

And probably in my opinion the trickiest one is that we need to ensure that we have compliance across different jurisdictions. However, while these challenges are definitely significant and we need to tackle them, I think as web free builders and people who are interested about the ethos of web free and uh decentralization, there is even a greater challenge we need to address and that's about transparency.

So the problem with tokenized assets is that unlike cryptonative assets, they're not inherently transparent and also they lack liquidity verifiability. So why is that happening? Well, the underlying assets resides in traditional financial systems and as we know those are off-chain, opaced and siloed. So basically now blockchains have the problem that they can't verify that these assets are fully backed and neither the protocols that are built on top of those blockchains around them.

Therefore users are forced to rely on the promises and the reputation of the protocols, the apps and exchanges they use. So we're kind of back to square one. So what's needed? How do we solve this? Real world assets will only reach their potential if the data behind them is verifiable. As builders and users in the web free space, we need to demand transparency by design and verifiability. It's also very important that we're not reintroducing the same systemic risk that currently we have in traditional finance.

However, there are some good news. We have oracles and as we know, oracles enable trust and transparency. They enable to verify off-chain creditworthiness and they provide key data such as purchase dates, yields and maturity dates. Also, another very important property is that they allow the syncing of the life cycle to the onchain. So basically you can still clearly track how an asset goes through the different stages such as issuance, transfer and settlement.

That's why at Chronicle we're building the verified asset oracle. This is our oracle for the real world assets and the way it works is that it connects directly to the custodian. So there is no middleman and it provides real time independent temperproof attestation of the data with what it puts on chain. This means that basically we empower defy protocols to handle tokenized assets in a risk appropriate way. And I'm sure now you are going to ask me okay what's a risk appropriate way? What I mean by that imagine for example a D5 protocol that wants to check the underlying assets. it's actually there

and if the asset is not there or if the volume of the asset is less than what it expects then they can take certain measures. It can do a circuit breaker or it can do a liquidation or some other measure. What is important here is that builders have verifiable data that they can trust and make decisions based on that data. That's it on my end. Um, I hope you found something interesting today. I would like to invite you to check the documentation portal if you want to learn more about the verified asset oracle. Also, in about uh two weeks, we're launching the dashboard for the

verified asset oracle. It's going to be a good uh visualization of all the data the verified asset oracle puts on chain. So, definitely something to to check out uh when the time comes. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy DevCon and Berlin Blockchain Week. [Applause] Thank you. Uh let's open it up for questions. One there.

Uh thank you. I have a question about custodians. What are those? uh and what happens if they go bust basically? That's a good question. So the custodian is the one basically that has the the assets. So the idea is that uh you don't have the middleman. So you connect directly where the assets are such that you can have like an independent third party third party assessment that okay the the assets are actually there. when it comes to what happens if they're they're not there like you you verify you have this sync so you verify all the time that the assets are there but yeah

this is like the this is the the promise basically you have like this continuous syncing of the offchain and onchain and you say like okay at this point is time the asset is here and so on more questions No, we're good. Okay. Thank you so much. [Applause]