On-Chain Oracles: Microsoft, Town Crier, Oraclize

One of the most important topics in blockchain adoption is how to reliably integrate external events into smart contracts. The evening will feature four experts in oracles; they will discuss their work on making oracles reliable.

Thomas Bertani founded Bitboat in 2013, and the Bitcoin Equity Crowdfunding Exchange in 2014. He will speak on Oraclize, which he started in 2015: Oraclize offers the world’s most widely adopted state-of-the-art oracle service. Since 2015, Oraclize has served over 130,000 requests on the Ethereum mainnet and several million on testnets, backing its claims with authenticity proofs based on a variety of cryptographic techniques. Oraclize enables blockchain applications to overcome common limitations while minimizing additional trustlines. For this reason, the authenticity proofs rely on independent attestors, leveraging both software and hardware-enforced security technologies.

Fan Zhang is a PhD student in CS at Cornell studying applied cryptography, cryptocurrencies and trusted hardware. He will speak on Town Crier: Smart contracts systems today lack trustworthy sources of data, as currently deployed oracles provide only weak provenance and confidentiality assurances. The Town Crier system leverages trusted hardware (Intel SGX) to provide a strong guarantee that data comes from an existing, trustworthy source. It also provides confidentiality, enabling smart contracts to support confidential queries and even manage user credentials.

Marley Gray is Principal Architect for the Azure Blockchain Engineering team leading the design and development of Microsoft’s Bletchley platform: Smart Contracts today have many short comings when it comes to scale and interaction with external systems. Cryptlets is Microsoft’s platform for Interacting authentically and safely with external systems and scaling Smart Contracts. The Cryptlet Framework provides secure key/secrets management, federated identity and enclaves together in a hyper-scale distributed cloud environment that can provide a multi-party proof engine for secure interactions with any external system as well as shared contract logic running off chain in a blockchain agnostic way.

Jeff Flowers (https://www.linkedin.com/in/flowersjeff/) is a long-time member of our meetup and will start the event off with an 5-min intro to the Oracles (https://oracles.org/) Network which he founded with Igor Barinov (https://www.linkedin.com/in/igorbarinov/). We will also hear a short intro to Oracles via smartcontract.com (https://smartcontract.com/) from Sergey Nazarov.