Open Ledger; Open Source
By: Novera Team
Tags: Decentralization, Pricing, Open Source, Smart Contracts, Blockchain

There are many reasons companies contribute open source software to the community. Some do it to gauge market interest. Others use it to gain reputation and establish a track record of technical competence. It’s a way to engage, and give back to the community while gathering invaluable user feedback. Then there’s the classic motivations of improving software quality, showing thought leadership and aiding in recruitment and employee retention.

Public blockchain projects showcase a new reason. In order for something like blockchain to work, it needs to be accepted by the community. Public blockchains, most notably Bitcoin, have become the repository for vast amounts of value. In order to best secure the data, and highlight the security of said data, all code is released open source. At Novera we wholeheartedly agree with this approach.

While dealing with financial products, there are so many lines of code that indirectly become the gatekeepers protecting value for customers. At Novera we want to open source this code to obtain the highest levels of security we can. Moreover, we want to make this the new normal.

By starting from the perspective of “all our code should be open sourced,’’ it really motivates us to think through — what is really part of our secret sauce? What can we contribute back to the community? We’re bearing in mind that all our contracts that get published to public networks anyway, where their code can be verified independently.

At Novera we see that cryptocurrency and blockchain are leading in the direction of completely decentralized and open technologies and markets. At the same time, there is no standard for establishing the price of Bitcoin within a decentralized market environment. This opens up a grey area where nefarious actors can take advantage and manipulate prices to their advantage.

Various solutions have popped up over the years. So much so, that it’s rare to see the same Bitcoin price from two different sources. Perhaps that is ok. Perhaps there are better solutions. We feel like decentralization is a great way to find out.

A question we should stop to ask, is “what’s the right level of decentralization?”

Trust-Minimization approaches such as bonding anonymous price oracles are ideal for products involving hobbyists, however institutions are not accepting of “price is determined through the use of anonymous observers”.

What is the optimal solution? Does a so-called Schelling point exist for all possible user profiles?

We want to help kickstart an ecosystem where these ideas can be tried, therefore we invite the community to join us in exploring this undiscovered country.

To help pave the way there we’re releasing our pricing index code at:

https://github.com/noveracapital/PriceIndex

The code implements an oracle for tracking the price of an asset, with the following features:

Distributed price reporting: independent registered price agents can report on the price of the asset.

Connectivity: a client can be connected to a price index so it can use the price.

Event handling: any connected client contract with a programmable ending condition will be handled by the price index.

Meadow Suite Automated Unit Testing

Stay tuned for updates,

Jose Herrera and the Novera Team