RedStone: The Oracle Pioneering the Future of DeFi - Marcin Kaźmierczak. Ep. 581
8 Jan 2025 · 1:04:42
Marcin Kazmierczak of RedStone joins Epicenter to explain how the oracle secures over $6.6 billion in assets across more than 60 chains without a single mispricing event. He covers RedStone's modular data aggregation and node operator architecture, the tradeoffs between push and pull oracle designs, and how growth in liquid staking and restaking has driven demand for more customizable oracle infrastructure.
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chain link the biggest player on the Oracle Market is naturally like positive to the growth of the ecosystem but it's definitely not supporting all the use cases we wanted to create delivering data to blockchain ecosystems and daps is a very very broad term the most important is to create a system that is scalable and also sustainable long term the biggest problem of oracles at that time of them was the gas cost on ethereum and also the cost of adding a new feed so we tried to create a model where both of those challenges are solved that's the reason we started Redstone out of the rwe blockchain the storage chain incubation program with the promise of creating more modular
approach that can be tweaked and upgraded as the progress in technology is achieved welcome to episode of the show which talks about the Technologies process and people driving decentralization and bl Revolution I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with Marsen who's the co-founder of red Stone Redstone is uh an oracle project they've getting a lot of traction recently so I'm excited to dive in M Marson on uh Redstone and Oracles in general and just before we get dive in with Marson we would like to share a few words about our sponsors this week if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further
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Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio thanks so much for coming on Marson it's really great to having you on hey everyone thank you for having me I'm excited epicenter is OG and I'm super happy to be over here yeah absolutely so let's start at the beginning how did you get into crypto all right it's an interesting one so 2017 I was writing my bachelor teases about blockchain and Bitcoin and then I got all into the weeds of you know early Ico white papers and how the ecosystem was structured by then um I joined one of the startups called polish accelerator of blockchain Technology because I live in waro Poland I was working on a project to create
something that nowadays resembles chain analysis or elliptic so we were working with Polish poit national one to track ransomware attacks that asked the victims to send Bitcoins to a specific wallet and then polish police at that time in 2017 2018 had zero tooling to track such a a criminalist like a crime person so basically we I was coordinating such a product back then but the startup went bust I didn't get fre month for salary so that was a hard start uh then I went to work in a couple of startups at Google cloud and in 20120 together with Jacob roosi the technical founder of redstone we kicked off Redstone so that's how I got here
and so how did you decide to focus on oracles what was the what was the reason to focus on this particular area well oracles as a concept is super interesting in a sense like delivering data to blockchain ecosystems and daps is a very very broad term the most important is to create a system that is scalable and also sustainable long term especially as the crypto uh technology is evolving all the time like The Innovation cycle is probably I don't know three maybe six months that you have to keep upgrading and be on the lookout on the most effective Technologies to implement and in late 2020 early 21 we acknowledged that chain link the biggest player on the Oracle
Market is naturally like positive to the growth of the ecosystem but it's definitely not supporting all the use cases we wanted to create for example when we ask them about some price feeds around interest rates at the time or something that is more sophisticated than the Blue Chips uh the queue was super long like we were waiting couple of months to get something simple that made us realize the biggest problem of oracles at that time of a then was the gas cost on ethereum and also the cost of adding a new feed so we tried to create a model where both of those challenges are solved that's the reason we started Redstone out of the rwe blockchain the storage chain incubation
program with the promise of creating more modular approach that can be tweaked and upgraded as the progress in technology is achieved AEV so whenever there's like something new that can improve the technology we don't have to recreate the whole end to end pipeline like chain has uh nowadays and so far it's been going pretty good right so basically if chain link you saw as the biggest issue was the basically sort of the time and flexibility to adding different feeds supporting different types of uh data Maybe different chains uh and the gas cost of oracles I we've been running at course mve been running Chain Lake for many years and I think
it's gotten a lot better than uh now but at the time I think the amount of uh gas it was cosing was absolutely bananas uh so I definitely can can relate to this this challenge back then aside from chain link how else did the Oracle landscape look like back then uh that's an interesting question so 2017 2018 is naturally the period of iOS so some people just gathered quite uh interesting amount of money to create some uh projects and protocols that ended up not working extremely well uh some oracles I remember from back then are Taylor or band and I think there was also oracul or something like this
majority of those didn't get traction and there are a couple of reasons for that the major one is Oracles have a kind of like economics of scale so the more Protocols are using you it's it's easier to get the new to join the network and share the cost so when you have a such a dominant player chain link back then and also the market in 2020 and 21 was a bit smaller it was expanding but it was still like fairly Niche then there were there was not enough probably space for many oracles that were fairly similar to each other I would say many of them were just trying to copy cut chaining and then try to do it like cheaper right so not much of an innovation uh so in 2021 chaining was only the dominant player right now I
would say it's not a monopoly anymore in 2024 and 2025 and all the market like the top three players right now are chain link H there's piff that started in Solana and then went cross chain with Wormhole bridge that is trying to innovate as well and Redstone is in the top three oracles when we talk about number of clients so right now we have over 130 clients and when it comes to number of chains supported so right now Support over 70 chains in both uh push and pull model and we've pushed specifically so the chaining one we support right now over 30 chains already more than chain so the ecosystem is evolving and I would say as crypto right now is truly like getting proper
acceleration this nebility of an oracle is going to be super crucial so let's talk a little bit about um you know how does um Redstone work like what the technical architecture and what what does the solution look like okay that's a good question uh we created uh four modules in the Oracle and three out of four modules can be used on all the networks we expand to so we don't have to redeploy the whole node architecture on every single chain we try to launch it as chaining does that's the reason for them a cost for going to a new ecosystem is very high and they need to create enormous contracts with
some of those chains like we've heard stories uh paying uh not even Millions but dozens of millions of dollars to to get that with redstone the modules are the data sourcing module so we pull from right now over 180 sources the uh data uh node operators module where data providers run nodes sourcing from those uh sources the uh the data and then aggregate that data aggregation module which we call data distribution layer which is an offchain component that you can think of as a decentralized cache so anyone can join it there is no like token based consensus but it's like an open architecture that everyone can join
with a Gateway note and pass signed data packages from those data providers so it's available for anyone and early in the day uh the biggest challer was to create a solution over here that is uh protected against DS so we did extensive work to make sure that crash tests are held and no one can actually spam the network um so those signed data packages go to the third module which is this data distribution layer and from there it's transparent it's public anyone can pick up a sign data package is delivered to the onchain environment with data delivery layer and for evm networks is a standard package which we call evm Connector so in the pool model that we
have every single evm chain can use Redstone almost right away as long as it's evm compatible in fact because some of the networks claim they are and then the need degrees turn out that it's not necessarily the case and with the push model we create data delivery service so like a pushing infrastructure to every single ecosystem that would like to also have the chaining compatible interface and here for example we can give kudos to chain link for standardizing the interface with chaining aggregator V free that people just like and they use and we also adapted over here in the push model itself when we go to non evm ecosystems all the three components they started with so the sourcing node operators and data aggregation can be reused so all of
that is kept off chain so it can be utilized on any blockchain that we go to and the data delivery layer this evm connector can be adjusted to tone connector for example we were the first Oracle to launch on T Network a stark net connector a fuel connector to connector Solana connector and so on so forth so the piece that we have to adjust for a new ecosystem is way smaller than in comparison to chain link to redeploy the whole architecture okay so let let's go into this a little bit in detail so you say first of all the data sourcing module how does that work so each data provider operating a redstone node can choose one of the two
paths either adopt a li that we prepared and utilize all the data sources that we identified such as onchain sources in example curve Unis swap balancer and so on so many of the decentralized exchanges and this is super important for yield bringing assets for example lsts lrts etina and other uh you bearing collateral because those assets are not traded on centralized exchanges they are usually traded on decentralized exchanges so those sourcing is really important historically both chaining a piff struggled a lot to call directly the onchain source to create a a price feed second types of price Fe of source are the centralized exchanges so regular
binance coinbase buy bid okx and so on and the third type are the aggregators such as H Kao coin Geo uh coin market cap and so on that aggregate data from many of the uh other sources the second option for the data provider node so the node operator is to implement their own sourcing module so for example one of the operators of a data node is kico or oros or uh fairly soon Alchemy as well those can Implement their own pricing methodology if they have so and the reason we allow that is we have not only redundancy on the level of the nodes that we have many notes but we have also
redundancy in the methodology so if our methodology that we share with the data providers for any reason Has a Glitch all of them will follow that glitch but the guys that come with their own sourcing methodology there's a high chance are not going to replicate that and this is one of the problems with not operators of chain link because all of them are following literally the same methodology so if there's a problem with the methodology even though there's redundancy in the number of notes the outcome is going to be skewed because there's no redundancy in that form okay and then how do you I mean I imagine there can also be some issue with people just implementing their own methodology because I don't know maybe there's flawed or maybe
there's some sort of conflict of interest or like is there some how do you kind of manage with people and then also what's the incentive for someone to because I imagine it's quite a bit of work to develop your own methodology there well the entities that come with their own methodology us usually don't do it specifically for Redstone it's rather they have the methodology either way like Kao for example is a company that creates a methodology for pricing assets anyway and delivered that to many of the traditional uh markets uh we also work with market makers that have all the data about uh people trading on virus venues so it's usually more like
if a data provider comes in and they have already the methodology they're comfortable uh utilizing that to add redundancy to the flow the incentivization right now uh with early data providers we give out grants in the future uh Redstone toas so that they operate uh the node itself in a uh let's say redundant way uh since the beginning of the network we have had zero downtime issues or even like price queuing issues because we run autonomous Checker that verifies if the data delivered is a lot outside of the boundary from other providers so if there's this qess in for example BTC price the Checker is going to panelize
that data provider um once the Redstone token is launched that should happen soon uh we are preparing for that uh preparing the new version of white paper and all the necessary steps to further decentralize the network uh there's going to be a staking contract where all the data providers will need to stake Redstone tokens and the moment they are they have either downtime or huge negligence in terms of uh the accuracy of the data they will be automatically slashed and also there's going to be a module for people to vote if the price feed was outside of the reasonable boundary but still not caught by the Checker so imagine there's Bitcoin USD
price feed and it trades at $100,000 is a reporting of $98,000 a wrong price hard to tell depending on the asset and depending on the market that are utilizing that price so for each single asset from the Blue Chip ones we have specific uh boundary within which it's still deemed acceptable price but if anyone thinks that within this boundary the acceptable price was actually incorrect can raise a dispute against a specific data provider that hey this was actually fragant price it shouldn't be accepted as the correct one and then token holders can vote whether that was true or not okay okay so that's the that's the data sourcing module and then the second
module he said there was some something about the node node operator so the thing I mod the thing I explained here were the two both of the modules so data sourcing you can either use redstones or your own as you wish and data providers module is they aggregate from those sources the data and then deliver to the data aggregation module which is data distribution layer and if they deliver this the package they deliver is skewed as mentioned they are going to get slashed the moment they have Redstone token used as the collateral okay so the data aggregation module then basically says okay we have some kind of algorithm to say okay we
are going to take the median or some kind of statistical thing and remove out lers and try to um and this is happening onchain or offchain offchain like the part that I explained over here is happening offchain but we are also introducing right now an alternative module H the reaking one on top of uh reaking protocols like igen layer and symbiotic we have the test that on igen layer running right now and we are also exploring symbiotic for that to allow this aggregation to also happen on the reaking notes so that the ATT testers attest that the data was delivered ins signed and it's within this bound so this this flow that I explained right
now can also happen on the risk taking flow itself okay so so Danny do basically be that the this ads You' basically have some kind of checks happening on there to verify the data that that's then distributed on any only if any of the Redstone chains are supported or is it specifically for data that's related to reaking it will be for the the most used assets that people care about because adding raking just for raking let's call it doesn't bring much value like raking costs this is something that people usually don't uh mention but running a
raking flow also requires to give out the incentives and making sure the infrastructure is running so there is a cost Associated so there should be also like a gain in terms of like a business and go to market and we are not going to run this module for the coins that people don't care about like longtail most likely it's going to be for Blue Chips such as Eve or Bitcoin on the networks people have a lot of tvl at stake so that they are sure that the reaking can also scale up uh with the amount of tvl that we are protecting for example on base on arbitrum or even it main okay okay so we we talked about um so first of all we have the data
sourcing right where there's like a lot of different places where people pull the data they can either use your libraries or they can have some sort of own methodology and then so not operator module I mean in in the chaining case right they they basically you know choose um operators for the different feeds and then you know you have um specific amount of um you know operators that will report the data for this particular feed for some particular Network uh do you have a similar model there or is so you guys choose basically a bunch of operators to do this or is it
like in a more open system where kind of anyone can come in uh it's it's not open in the sense that everyone can come in because creating a truly open system for data sourcing in Oracles in my opinion is impossible the reason is because then you can sophisticatedly create like an attack on an oracle so there should be a sort of an authority or reputation system and in our case right now we are wh listing the data providers so you have to apply as a data provider with redstone then we review the application we put you on staging for at least two months and we analyze the the quality of the data that you deliver so becoming a data provider is not like out of like on
the moments it takes time but we are onboarding like new data providers regularly to make sure that the system H keeps growing and one thing that you said that is super important over here is that all the node operators have to choose which network they support so again you can see the Matrix of uh the complexity of chain link is growing so not only have many node operators not only you have many assets they have to subscribe to but there's also many networks they have to support and we abstracted those away especially when it comes to the networks they support so they just have to dedicate which assets they support and run the node so the Network's part is fully abstracted away because of this data distribution layer uh because they
send it not onchain but to this cache environment that is offchain so they don't have to necessarily subscribe to a specific uh chain ecosystem okay so basically the node operators they they provide this data to this offchain module and then the data is basically delivered to different places exactly so the same data the same signed packages are transparent are visible anyone the code is open source so can check it out and then those signed data packages are delivered to a destination blockchain and imagine this package is delivered to let's call it ethereum and Avalanche the same package on both of
those networks the smart contract that is receiving the package has a number of uh validated uh signatures that are uh acceptable in the uh flow itself so if anyone tampered with the price package before it got to the smart contract the signature is not going to match and the price package is going to be reverted as as long as the signature matches on the destination chain then it can be utilized in the context of a smart contract or a specific dab so thanks to that we can literally tap into the security of the destination chain with this verification of the signature but it means that for example uh the smart contract on Avalanche or onur and stuff it has to
basically be updated to say okay um this is the signature I accept so then you you're basically going to uh update this for each of the each of the node operators to say okay uh this node operator is a part of it so that's their that's their signature and now the packets or the the data they sign can be sort of distributed to all these different chains and and verify natively there exactly and on the destination chain if for ex because we support both models the pull Oracle model and the push Oracle model those are the two most popular ones uh in blockchain right now ecosystems and in the pool model when
it's more like dap specific for example gearbox is using that right now Delta PR Kean cence they can even specify which data providers they want to access and which one they want to exclude so they can specify which of the wh listed signatures they want to still utilize so imagine they don't like one of the providers or they just deem this provider can have a shake up imagine back in the days FTX H and the whole let's say the crash so when someone already smelled that hey there's a chance it can collapse I mean they put a lot of Leverage on it and I just don't want to play that game because it it doesn't add much to my ecosystem I can just use all the other ones and not lose much they would just exclude FTX as the
data provider and utilize all the other ones so we want to also give the builders a lot of flexibility and in general our motto with redstone is BU builders for Builders so we always try to focus on the engineers because they are the ones that are integrating the Oracle at the end can you explain this pull model and push model a bit more like how do this two work of course so the push model is the one that was the most popularized by chain link so you take the packet and then you throw it onchain to the onchain storage and all the protocols that are on a given Network let's call it Avalanche can just read that data and the updates are happening based on the
deviation threshold and the hardbeat so in example if USD price feed on Avalanche or etherum mainnet can have 0.5% deviation threshold and 24hour heartbeat so by Design the users of that data accept that the data on chain is going to diverge from the real price on centralized exchanges and all the sources by at least by maximum in theory 0.5% but we also checked the historical performance on chaning and many times due to the consensus mechanism it's even more than half perc so by Design with the push model you accept it's going going to be inaccurate
and then it's just a question of how inaccurate you're going to go and the reason for that is the gas c as you mentioned each update with the push model requires the the Oracle to spend gas on the update itself and on etherum Main it can go as high as even thousands of dollars uh with one update when the um the network gets crazy with uh for example tripto kitties back in the day or even igen layer airr drop campaign then the gas was uh going very high then all of those updates are crazy expensive in the pool model as a contrast it's more like dab first so the push model is chain first it delivers it to the chain and every dab on the Chain can use it
the pull model is more like a dab specific a specific project take gearbox as an example gearbox is using right now Redstone pool model in a way that they fetch a packet from this data distribution layer so offchain environment aign data packet Whenever there is a transaction from a user to use Gbox so imagine Brian you're using Gbox and you're signing a transaction in metamask or Ledger whatever and then gearbox quickly with their front end would fetch a signed data packet from Redstone take your transaction to call data of your transaction attach a signed data packet then your transaction is delivering it on chain on chain in a smart contract a signatures are verified
whether it comes from a accept the data provider if it is then the transaction is executed so essentially what is happening over here you as a user cover the gas so there is a small margin we are adding on top of the gas that you would pay so instead of paying for example $3 for a transaction you're paying 3.02 H we optimize the gas a lot so it's pretty marginal for the user and also you're updating the price feeds with every user interaction because what matters for the apps is not like what what's the price on chain what matters for the daps is what is the price when the user is taking an action or a liquidation is happening so one user interaction Can Be You creating a new
position as I explained but another uh user can just run a liquidation bot and the moment it sees a position that is underwater they can fetch this sign data package from Redstone data distribution layer and liquidate the position together within a single transaction so for this Redstone distribution layer like where you go and you fetch that uh that update is that kind of like a central like basically one calls like the Redstone API server or like how does that work so those are gateways uh we as Redstone are running I believe right now five gateways so you can choose from you
can run your own Gateway we have people from our community also running a Gateway and for redundancy we are also utilizing some anti-dos um Solutions such as streamer Network to ensure those packets are available for anyone to pick up so essentially you are just utilizing a specific gateway to fetch that packet whichever you like okay okay and so basically the Gateway now if someone were to run this gateway then uh basically by default if you have a node operator and you sign some package then you just have send it to all the gateways and they have some kind of pdpr network ex change to keep them updated
exactly and imagine you're a protocol and you're afraid that you know the gateways might blow up at one point or whatever you can run your own Gateway or you can run your own free gateways the cost of running one is fairly small uh because we also optimize to make sure the gateways are lightweight so there you can add as many layers of redundancy as you like yeah okay now that seems like an now solution where basically okay whenever a protocol someone interacts with a protocol they just sort of Supply along uh the current state and then update it and then of course you you basically have the latest data whenever that
happens exactly so in this data distribution layer right now we update the price Feats every 3 seconds so instead of getting 24-hour hardbeat and half perc deviation threshold you get free second latency and we are about to upgrade those gateways to also offer fast gateways so even faster so for people that do not care that much about decentralization and usually those are like perpetual dexes and highly optimized Solutions there is always this trait of a new Bri I know it more than anyone else probably if you go faster and more uh accurate then the decentralization usually has to be traded off the more decentralized you are you also have to
add some latency component to that so we also are right now publishing new uh gateways that would allow for subsecond Price delivery so that for per dexas it's not too uh old I see there's obviously advantages to this pool model what what are the biggest trade-offs between the push and pull model what's what are some of the advantages of the push model for example I would say the biggest advantage of the push model is that it's already widely known so chain link did a good job as mentioned with chain link V free interface so people are just familiar with that with the pool model you have to do some code updates to make
sure your smart contracts are capable of receiving this signed packet extracting the data and checking the signatures so there is some need for updating the smart contract so you what we see there is a very um I would say common path that The Old Pro older protocols so Forks of AA V3 compound V2 or any protocol that was designed in 202022 they usually prefer the push model because they're already audited they don't want to change the code and you know want to be very much along along the older infrastructure but all the new protocols they try to optimize with the pool model because they still
have some plasticity in the design that they are creating and one big beauty that people don't recognize in the pool model once you integrate pool model from Redstone you can utilize on any evm network so for example if you're a protocol that cares a lot about cross chain availability and you want to deploy to 10 or 50 networks quickly once you integrated it on one evm chain you can go to Every almost evm chain as long as the evm compatibility is hold end to end yeah yeah no I can see that so there's basically a little bit more of like development overhead in the pool model but then you have you know you have the advantages that you have faster updates
it's uh it's kind of cheaper and the cost is born by the actual users who are calling this contract and it could sort of easily scales then to you know just wherever you deploy the smart contract any evm chain it it will sort of just support it out of the box exactly and maybe one important aspect is all the price feeds that we configured in a sense of like purse are available for anyone in the pool model so with the push model on many of the networks only like five or 10 price feets are supported uh you can go to app.
redstone. finance and check out the push model um portal so you can see on some networks we push 20 p but on some we push only three purs right because it's very much dependent on who is going to pay for the gas of those updates in the pool model the gas is not a problem anymore because the user is incentivized to pay for this additional payload to execute the transaction or a liquidator thanks to that you can utilize right now over 200 price fees that are in the production mode and we have over 1,200 assets in the demo mode and whenever you need to bring from demo to action you can just ask our team to bring it in the pool model it's very simple
process okay okay uh I'm curious what is the business model for Redstone what is the business model for chain link this is the question they are the leader no I mean uh this is a good question I would say for the Oracle as the category right because yeah yeah the moment you push data on chain it's a available for anyone so you have no way to let's say monetize on that because anyone can just query it because it's in the onchain storage in a public Ledger on ethereum Avalanche arbitro and so on so how we Monet how we create a business model um in the push model we usually ask the ecosystem to cover the
development cost and the gas of pushing data on chain and with new ecosystems they are very willing to cooperate with us because we do it out would say in a reasonable scale H in contrast to to the leader h on the market whenever you're a protocol that issue a new coin imagine etina ether fire Renzo and you would like your coin to be integrated into defi you need Oracle for that and the process of chain link usually takes weeks if not month and is also fairly expensive that's the reason we were the first Oracle to create LRT price feeds for example eeri Renzo puffer kelp then we were the first Oracle to create a price feet for etina usde and sde we're the first Oracle to create a price feet
for symbiotic pz from Renzo as well on the Evol operator and now we are the first and still only Oracle to create lbtc from Lombard it's a Bitcoin liquid staking protocol and right now only Redstone offers that price fee so for that development work also with those protocols we are discussing like contracts and last but not least the protocols that are utilizing the pool model usually we add like a small margin uh to some of the protocols when they are calling our feeds right now it's marginal for some it's even like turned off the reason is we want to scale we are still in the growth phase but in the future you can also add a small margin on top of the gas feed gas price that
the user has to pay can you explain like the Redstone token cuz like with the those extra fees then end up in some sort of Treasury that's like on each chain that's kind of controlled by the Redstone token or like how do you how will that be managed that's a really good question especially that we are getting closer and closer uh to uh decentral decentralizing the Redstone ecosystem further uh the node operators will be getting a portion of the fees collected by the pool model so essentially it's going to go to the smart contract that later is going to distribute those fees uh to the node operators and very interestingly when we were designing this architecture reaking
was not present so we were designing that in 2022 early 23 and then igen layer came into place and symbiotic as well so right now we are considering also utilizing this reaking flow so that people can restake red as the token itself but also other lsts like Eve and the major lsts on the uh raking infr structure but essentially all the fees collected should be distributed to The Operators themselves okay so the fees get distributed to The Operators so and then the operators have to stake red correct they have to stay gred to make sure they are eligible for delivering the price
feeds and if they have downtime or with misreport they get slashed okay okay and so I iose one mechanism here is that well if there's a lot of revenues that node operators can generate then it sort of makes them more willing to maybe buy so they would have to acquire red tokens then to stake them exactly so in the early days naturally we'll be giving out like some uh incentivization programs to make sure the early adapters are there like you know the no operators but in the long term uh they will be also able to acquire the token on U you know on the
market to get into the system and also increase the portion of the stake that they're going to get the fees that they're going to get okay do you is there also going to be let's say someone has red tokens and they let's say course one runs some uh as a no operator then uh okay one thing is we course itself could like stake some tokens do you also have some system where people can delegate and stake with different operators or yes this is right now uh being like finalized whether we are going to utilize fully the
restating uh contract for that so the reaking flow where people can easily like uh you know restake on specific operators or we are going to create our own infrastructure to do so but there will be a capability for regular users to also delegate to a specific operators would they then earn some portion of the fees that the operator okay what else is there to are there any other functions for the token uh well as we will progressing with redstone natur new functions can be added but the major one is going to make sure that the data providers are reporting correct data because this is the essence of an oracle H and also this
delegation so for now those are the major utility aspects that are planned for the token itself in Curious you mentioned like the biggest player today being you know chain link piff and you guys uh so I think for chain link we kind of talked a little bit about like what their approach is and how it differs from Redstone what about piff how how do you see piff and how do you see how they compare with redstone this is an interesting one so piff started in the Solana ecosystem so essentially what they did they forked Solana and called it piffet and then uh they ask the data providers that they call Publishers to publish the data
feeds to PNET and from piffet Wormhole is utilized as the bridge to deliver the data cross chain and while this approach can work pretty nice on Solana itself uh we believe there are a couple of drawbacks in the cross chain expansion uh one important one being the gas cost so with every packet that they deliver cross chain they also have to verify signatures of Wormhole uh which is fairly expensive for example in main it I I don't know exact numbers but it's orders of magnitudes higher than Redstone so for each Network that the gas is not so optimized so ethereum Bitcoin l2s many of them have no have no optimized gas or other networks with
high demand for the block space and the possibility for the gas to go up this is a big problem like Solana itself is fairly cheap when in terms in terms of gas so it's it's not such an issue but for many networks it is second thing is they cannot Source data from onchain sources so for example when there is a new yield bearing asset usually the majority of liquidity is on curve balancer value drop Unis Swap and so on and we have all of those sources pluged already in the data sourcing mod module so if we want to create a price for them we can do it within hours like very quickly but for PF they need the Publishers to deliver that data to PNET
and those Publishers are usually either centralized exchanges or market makers or bigger players that care about centralized exchange uh trading volume not the liquidity on chain rather the trading volume so they struggle to create uh such price feeds in a timely manner third uh aspect that we differ is that don't support doesn't support the push model we as Redstone started with the pull model but then we quickly realized that for the OG protocols the push model matters a lot because they don't want to interfere in the smart contracts that are already well audited that's the reason we made a strategic decision to also offer both the push and the pull model so whenever there is a new network
imagine for example un chain we are a launch partner over there Inc we are a launch partner and many others that are coming like bar chain Mona and so on they think about their ecosystem okay I want to have both push and pull model for the protocols building on top of me I can go to chaining for the push model I can go to P to for the pull model or I can go to Redstone and get both of them so I would say the value proposition for all the new ecosystem is barly visible uh when it comes to choosing uh redone itself and last but not least I would say the mechanics of piff is they are Traders so they are X Quant and from jump crypto like the big Market maker in the world so the origin of the piff as a
company is that they started as an incubated entity from jump and that's the reason the major characteristics of people in the organization are Traders not developers whereas with redstone right now 75% of our team members are Engineers Jacob who used to be smart contract auditor with open Zeppelin in the past and has been in the etherum microsystem since 2016 makes sure that all the engineers that are coming to Redstone are also very seasoned on so the average number of years of experience right now I think for an engineer is 13 right now at Redstone so we make sure that the pipes let's say the infrastructure is very very much
solid okay okay but then the P model is also this pool model and then you basically say hey uh I'm going to call some contract on some chain and then I basically receive the feed via Wormhole and that also works in the same kind of latency as with the Redstone model or uh I I'm not sure what's the latency now I believe it depends on the network with piff with some networks they have seconds uh with some they can go already subc as far as I know so it's similar to Redstone approach in the sense we are going to give a a decision to the integrator integrating protocol whether
they want to have H more distributed gateways but higher latency or more centralized gateways with lower lency with piff the issue is they all have to pull from the piff net and piff net is governed by piff like there's no token that is you know like governing the piff net like the piff token itself is used for I think staking or some other capabilities but not for the PNET itself like PNET is a centralized blockchain that they're running for The Operators itself so there is no let's say choosing you always have to pull from that one source okay one question you guys decided to build a an ABS uh I think I layer secured ABS why did you guys
decide to go down that route and what were maybe some of the alternative designs you considered well when we started designing RTO in 21 and then the uh final main it was launched in January 2023 up until then reaking wasn't a big thing it wasn't a Hot Topic right like I would say end of 23 and beginning of 24 was when reaking started to Boom but as mentioned we made sure that the architecture we have is modular and we can Implement new Solutions as they appear on the market I met shiram for the first time I believe end of 23 at def connect in Istanbul as far as I
remember correctly and over then I already knew that the RIS taking game is going to be important for the systems that care about decentralization and econ cryptoeconomic security at large so we decided to create an alternative module to all the flow that we I presented where raking is utilized to secure the most important price feeds over there we already created the tested with the help of authentic which is a um infrastructure provider on top of igen layer to make sure the all the modules that you create in the reaking flow are easier to implement and we are also experimenting with symbiotic to uh
check out like how their infrastructure is operating so it's still not finally decided like uh which path we're going to go but the reason we do that is we believe at large especially with those blue chip assets for big protocols they are going to care about the cryptoeconomic security of how much value someone would have to have to skew the price feed and create an attack that can end up being a profitable one so we were very much aligned with the reaking flow and that's the reason we started to build that direction as well so one topic that I think has gotten like some attention uh in the last years or maybe
more recent is the topic of Oracle extractable value can you explain what that is and what the significance is so Oracle extractable value is a value that uh appears in the blockchain ecosystem when an oracle update is delivered and causes a liquidation say it can be on the lending Market on a CDP stable coin perss protocol and others the way it works is whenever the update is delivered on chain in the push model and it's available for anyone the Liquidators uh bribes the N Searchers to make sure their liquidation is included in the U next block and that they are
the party that's going to liquidate a specific position let's take for example Venus protocol the biggest Landing protocol on BNB chain that we work very close with they decided to work with redstone to implement a solution where we create a very flush act auction before the price fit is delivered so let me explain that imagine there is BNB USD price feed which is the most important one on B&B Network and and next liquid next price update on chain in the push model is going to cause the liquidation we partnered with flash Lane that created a protocol called Atlas for very quick auction when the data is being
delivered to a next block before it happens to be delivered on the blog itself there is a 500 100 millisecond auction created for Liquidators to bid for the price feed to get a privilege access to this price feed and liquidate the transaction so essentially what is happening instead of paying for example 5% uh liquidation bonus to the Liquidators that ended up being eaten by me Bots this Liquidator is paying in example 2% of the position of the value of the position to get the priority passed for liquidating of this asset very much in the same block that the price Fe is updated and then this 2% is
being redistributed back to the protocol itself so less value is leaking outside of the system and the beauty of the Redstone implementation there are three major ones the first one it doesn't add additional DeLay So the auction lasts for half a second so 500 milliseconds which is negligible even for like Fast networks uh maybe on Mega E it's going to be a bit different because Mega if tries to be like 10c 10 millisecond block size so we'll see how it's going to play out over there but for majority of the networks it's negligible the second thing is the protocol doesn't have to do any code changes so we learned it very much in our own by our own experience that people don't like to
change smart contracts once they are delivered and once they are audited which we also appreciate because it tampers with the potential security of the ecosystem so we created a flow that is interchangeable with chaining interface so you can use just Redstone and then tap into o right away and the third benefit of this solution is that if for whatever reason the auction within this Atlas protocol fails so there's a glitch or for whatever reason the auction didn't pass through or there was no beers then the price fit is updated as regularly and the regular liquidation flow can happen so the worst case scenario what can happen is the actual outcome of the system and it's
running right now this is run already in production on Venus protocol and couple of other protocols that we cannot announce yet H but they're implementing that and the results are very s very satisfaction with about 90% of oev opportunities being captured okay okay okay so is is the oracal extractable value does it specifically apply to liquidations or there other other cases where this also comes into play there will be some other uh moments where o can play a mother but right now the biggest opportunity is in liquidations themselves so whenever there is liquidation there's always this liquidation bonus so to make sure the
Liquidators are incentivized to you know actually take the position and sell it on the market and repay the debt in The Lending or CDP protocol um and right now the biggest opportunity is there we run analysis with Venus and if they had implemented Redstone oev in the beginning of Venus at launch they would have captured approximately $100 million by today which is like a pretty sizable amount of money uh to put in mly that's a lot yeah yeah yeah for sure I'm curious what kind of uh synergies or effect you see between oracles and more institutional use cases
of crypto it's a brilliant question for 2025 especially that Trump is going to be uh you know uh officially put into the White House on the 20th of January as far as I know uh it's going to spark a lot of uh excitement within the institutions that want to try out blockchain ecosystems so the inflow of new players on the market that are not So Sophisticated with blockchain technology is going to be pretty large and we as Redstone strategically next year are going to create a division to on board those institutions so there is going to be needed a lot of educational work to tell what makes sense what
doesn't and where blockchain technology can actually bring value what I Envision is going to happen are three things one we are going to see way more traditional companies launching their own L2 or network similar to to Sony and launch sonum this year and op stack being so standard right now on the ecosystem that more and more companies are going to launch their own l2s h i I really would like to see uh the botes like Uber or Airbnb launching their own chain and then like settling transactions uh on its own ecosystem itself and then also utilizing the token to incentivize the users to keep using their platform instead of competitors that can be huge
at Large and we as an oracle want to support those kind of use cases the second area are tokenization of assets so right now we are cooperating with one of the largest players in uh tokenization of Assets in the US we are supporting them in the cross chain expansion and utilization of tokenized Fund in the D5 protocols themselves and I believe especially with black rock uh releasing the short video clip promoting Bitcoin I'm not sure if you've seen it because it was released yesterday today it's three minute video that black rock literally promotes Bitcoin as an asset I believe it's going to be a signal for a lot of uh institutions interested in tokenization to actually explore either
pilot or go full force and we is an oracle as Redstone are ready to support them because we already learned a lot with this first client that we onboarded and the first thing that is going to happen in Europe uh we are going to have new players following Mika because I wouldn't say mik is ultimately good for the whole ecosystem because there are some uh rules that are not necessarily so clear or beneficial for the crypto Builders but the very important aspect is it gives Clarity the biggest problem for institutions and corporates in Europe to engage with crypto so far was there was no Clarity like there was no there were no rules so they really weren't aware what's uh possible what's uh according
to the book and what's against the book and right now with maika especially after the first quarter when it's going to be already tested I believe there are going to be more and more players engaging with that just looking at yeah what's ahead for like 2025 2026 like how do you see the whole Oracle landscape evolving I believe it will be opening up further so one thing I I really like about is they try to expand the pie in terms of like new players and institutions so they try to educate the banks and uh many of the big players uh in globally that crypto in general is a technology is a very uh interesting
implementation that they should engage with that so I believe this is positive to the whole ecosystem H what I'm another big fan of with uh chaining specifically are some of the tactics about monopolistic approaches and uh some of the less elegant place let's say on the market and I get information from many of the protocols that cooperating with them that they are more and more tired with them trying to make sure that they are the only dominant player um so in 2025 I expect the market to open up even further there are two reasons for that one new players that are going to come over to the market chaining will have no capacity to support them because of the design as I mentioned if there's
a new chain it takes them very long time and a lot of cost to deploy over there and we are here to support with new assets it's the same so we are always the first Oracle to support all of those new assets that people are excited about in def5 and also there there's a pretty large uh Legacy in terms of like the Technic technical implementation in chaining that they will have to repay over time and it's going to H imp impact their pipeline of new Integrations uh with redstone our bet is there are going to be way more spe specified app chains either evm or non evm networks we want to expand further to potential non evm ecosystems H we are launching on uh sui soon probably Solana
Aptos and other move language ecosystems uh movement2 as well it's already uh confirmed and as we will be progressing in the next year I expect chain link piff and Redstone become even more like dominant because as mentioned there are economics of scale so a lot of new entrance success to secure for example one or two clients or three clients but then that they realize it's very hard to go over a barrier of let's say 10 clients so the cost of choosing an early Oracle provider is pretty high because you don't know whether they're going to sustain or not Redstone since uh January 2023 when we launch Manet had zero I
repeat zero price manipulations or down times which is not the case with both piff and chaining both of those players had either smaller uh price uh misreporting like for example a pretty big one with chaining was V stake e in December 2023 when chaining reported skewed price by 25% which is very much like it's a lot for such a big asset or when PF had problem H when Wormhole was struggling to reach consensus I believe that was beginning of 2024 H then they stopped delivering pricing cross chain right because they rely 100% on the bridge itself so if the bridge is down they stop deliver in it cross chain and one
narrative we are going to nail as Redstone next year and we are very close to the ecosystem as BTC F so programmability applications on top of Bitcoin Bitcoin as an asset has no ceiling right now it's over 100k dollars and we believe it's going to keep growing and expanding and we are super close with the Babylon Lombard PM BDC Lorenzo solve and the whole ecosystem of BTC F and will be supporting uh their expansion with proof of reserves as we delivered already for Lombard but also other use cases that will allow them to go to new networks and create more sophisticated use cases based on bitcoin itself cool fantastic anything else you want to touch
on well I am super positive about 2025 to be honest uh when I was entering 24 hour was fairly optimistic but with 25 I I truly believe it's going to be a year of redstone we have the number of clients and big Partnerships we have lined up we are also running Redstone Expedition which is our uh program for engaging the community where you can earn Redstone gems which is which are points uh within the ecosystem uh the team itself we just had our Christmas event and uh all of them got pretty cool H new Redstone backpacks and all of them are pretty excited about that and one thing I want to finish with is the
crypto scene is getting more and more polarized I have a feeling that after elections in the US people just wanted to streamline somewhere that they want to be in favor of one option and against the other and you can see it between evm and non evm networks Solana versus sui recently I saw on Twitter also a big fight between AA Moro where polygon is involved so people will try to polarize more and more and as Redstone what we really want to focus at is growing the pie and making sure especially the new use cases are addressed because we believe okay if someone is attacking you you naturally have to respond and like defend yourself but we ourselves will not go into very strong polarized ideas
because we get advises from many of the marketing um agencies like it doesn't matter what you say it does have to be polarized so that you get attention of people but we don't want to play that game we are Builders and longterm we want to support Builders and that's the reason uh our core focus is just to expand the universe and bringing new uh value to the ecosystem itself and myself I'm also very proud for the crypto folks that they kept pushing the frontier and right now crypto isn't a full force to go into the bull market absolutely well thanks so much Marson for coming on it's really great to learn about Redstone it does feel like a very elegant uh yeah elegant and scalable way and I think I think it's a abundantly clear I think
for everyone you know just how crucial oracles are to support like a wide range of use cases I'm excited to see how you know Redstone is going to it's going to develop in the next year and excited to see also how the token launch will goes in thank you Brian it was absolute pleasure to join over here uh the token itself uh is going to be soon naturally uh but we are pretty positive and I'm extremely extremely excited and dedicated to keep growing Redstone I'm working uh 14 hours a day and with a smile on the face I'm H you know satisfied with the traction that we deliver so thanks a lot for inviting me and I will keep following epicenter for sure thanks so much Maron