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In this podcast, hosts Vikram Ramakrishnan and Faizaan Shamsi, partners at the software consultancy QuantLayer, talk to investors and builders of the cryptocurrency arena. We discuss how industry participants think about crypto assets, how they uncover fraud in the market, and which technologies will turn the budding, nascent crypto space into the revolutionary powerhouse early market participants had hoped for.

Mar 11, 2019

We speak about the problem around connecting smart contracts to real world data, how oracles solve that problem and the gives and takes around oracles. We walk through some example oracles in gold pricing data and prediction markets. We finally wrap up with an interview with Jeff Rosen and Doug von Kohorn, founders at Rhombus, where we discuss their approach and solution to the oracle problem.

Topics:

  • Faizaan's thoughts on the ETHDenver event
  • How we should think about oracles
  • The oracle problem
  • What decentralization is from the oracle perspective
  • Centralized oracles
  • Cryptographic annotations
  • What TLSnotary and Town Crier does
  • Astraea by consensus
  • Manipulation resistance
  • What Rhombus is
  • What makes them different from other oracle providers in the Ethereum ecosystem
  • Examples of the kind of enterprise use-cases they see
  • On providing the right price / data
  • How prices of assets completely delisted affects what happens to smart contracts / things
  • Underwriting insurance policies
  • Some areas they're interested in that they think might require more transparency
  • Their thoughts around working with prediction markets
  • Difference between Chainlink and Rhombus
  • How they're doing sales right now
  • Their background
  • What got them interested in the oracle space
  • How they're funded right now
  • What they're excited about for the rest of the year
  • What the lighthouse oracle is and its use

Links:
Rhombus - https://rhombus.network/
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/
r/progresspics - https://www.reddit.com/r/progresspics/
myfitnesspal - https://www.myfitnesspal.com/
Strava - https://www.strava.com/
The State of Decentralized Oracles - https://media.consensys.net/the-state-of-decentralized-oracles-df45bf0dc51d
TLSnotary - https://tlsnotary.org/TLSNotary.pdf
Town Crier - https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/168.pdf
Astraea: A Decentralized Blockchain Oracle - https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00528
OpenLaw - https://openlaw.io/
Ethereum - https://www.ethereum.org/
Chicago Mercantile Exchange - https://www.cmegroup.com/
Coinbase - https://pro.coinbase.com/
Gemini - https://gemini.com/
Chainlink - https://chain.link/
ConsenSys - https://consensys.net/
Getcoin - https://getcoin.site/