Acala Collaborates With Band Protocol to Release Open Oracle Gateway for Polkadot DeFi
By: Kevin Lu
Tags: Partnerships, Blockchain Development, Defi, Decentralization

Band Protocol is excited to announce our collaboration with Acala, a cross-chain decentralized finance hub and stablecoin platform based on Substrate, to release the Open Oracle Gateway — an open, inclusive and progressively decentralized price oracle service to the DeFi ecosystem in Polkadot, Kusama, Acala ecosystems and beyond.

Secure and real-time decentralized price feeds for collateral assets such as DOT, BTC, and ETH will be provided by Band Protocol to Acala as well as any other blockchain connected to the Polkadot Network.

Acala is the first-of-its-kind decentralized finance platform, built to deliver a set of DeFi protocols such as an algorithmic stablecoin and lending application on a cross-chain level. Based on Substrate, a framework for building blockchains that can run natively with Polkadot, Acala is focused on connecting true interoperability, economic and transactional scalability. The team has closed a $7 million investment round led by Pantera Capital among other investors including 1confirmation, Arrington XRP Capital, ParaFi Capital, Coinfund, Spartan Capital and more.

Before integrating with Band Protocol, Acala operated its own oracle network with multiple nodes sourcing off-chain data for on-chain operations to evaluate borrowing capacity and liquidation risks. However, realizing the challenge of providing secure and reliable decentralized oracles cannot be solved by Acala alone, the team has collaborated with Band Protocol to create a more open and inclusive solution using multiple oracle solutions to achieve maximum security and decentralization.

Opening Doors For Multiple Oracle Networks

Band Protocol has been an advocate of leveraging multiple oracle solutions to mitigate dependencies on immutable smart contract code, human errors and potential centralized elements in other solutions. The Open Oracle Gateway is a testament to this advocacy, allowing multiple parties in addition to Acala to operate their own oracle networks and provide price feed services.

This means any oracle provider can be set up, and through a governance proposal, it would be enacted through a runtime upgrade. The provider will then be able to post off-chain data to Acala where data feeds from all parties will be aggregated into a single reliable price feed available for consumption via the gateway.

Default Oracle Pallet (the Provider):

https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library/tree/master/oracle

An oracle provider such as Band Protocol can implement their own oracle pallets to meet specific requirements such as validating cross-chain data feeds. Existing signed oracle APIs such as the Coinbase Price Oracle can be easily integrated simply by adding a Coinbase Provider pallet and validating their signature.

The Gateway can be envisioned as a highly flexible meta-network or meta-aggregator of oracle networks that will encourage an ecosystem of service providers to provide optimized and differentiated services to meet various needs of applications without bias or prejudice. DApps can choose to use price feeds from one particular provider such as Band Protocol-based on their preferences or alternatively choose to use an aggregated price feed from these providers. DApps can also obtain raw data from individual node operators and aggregate themselves. The aggregator can be further customized, so data consumers can choose to use a median price, an average or whatever methods they favor.

Band Protocol will work with Acala Network on their road to progressively decentralize by onboarding new and reliable service providers onto their platform which will evolve into elected Council governance and eventually, democracy.

Quality of Service & Free Transactions

All price feeds posting to Acala regardless of which provider network they belong to, will be provided with Quality of Service. Transactions submitted by the Operator are operational transactions — system critical transactions that are prioritized and guaranteed to be included in a block. This will prevent invalid and out-of-date price feeds due to spikes in gas fees and congested networks, such as in the case of Black Thursday.

In addition, all valid feeds will be refunded with the transaction fees incurred, essentially making oracle feeds FREE while preventing spam and ensuring integrity. A valid feed transaction would need to be signed and posted by an approved Operator, and only one transaction is permitted by the same Operator within a single block.

Project Status

The Oracle Gateway is deployed and running on Acala’s Mandala Test Network. There are two oracle networks Providers are being configured: Acala Oracle and Band Oracle. Other oracle providers will become available once respective integration work is complete.

One of the Acala Oracle Operator feeding prices on-chain: https://acala-testnet.subscan.io/account/5Fe3jZRbKes6aeuQ6HkcTvQeNhkkRPTXBwmNkuAPoimGEv45

One of the Band Oracle Operator feeding prices on-chain: https://acala-testnet.subscan.io/account/5FPBT2BVVaLveuvznZ9A1TUtDcbxK5yvvGcMTJxgFmhcWGwj

The aggregated price feed is a calculated value that can be read via RPC calls using acala.js.

Looking Forward

Band Protocol is excited to work with Acala on the initial deployment and development of the Open Oracle Gateway to realize a common goal of uniting decentralized oracle and service providers to collectively enhance the security and reliability of cross-chain DeFi. While the Gateway is a collaboration between the two teams, Acala and Band Protocol, we are excited to work with many more leading blockchain projects on iteration and future improvements.

This is also a leap forward for Band Protocol to support all blockchains on the Polkadot Network with truly decentralized and scalable oracle technology. We are excited to share with our community the many other integrations within the Polkadot ecosystem as they prepare to launch into the production environment.