This article is directed towards existing and potential curators of TheGraph protocol. TheGraph is an indexing protocol for querying data on the Ethereum network. Thanks to the protocol every developer is able to create and publish open APIs and thus make blockchain data available to users both easily and cost-efficiently. The respective open APIs are called “subgraphs”. However, this raises some important questions:

Which subgraphs are worth being indexed and utilized by users?
And who can help to make the suitable subgraphs accessible?

The response to these questions is the job of curators. They use GRT tokens to signal which subgraphs are best suited to be indexed in their opinion. A more detailed description of their diverse roles and functions in the TheGraph network can be found in this blog post. To incentivise their work, curators can earn money by signaling on those subgraphs that become valuable to the network (for more information on the TheGraph economy, this blog might be helpful). …

In the first part of this series about blockchain oracles, we explained the oracle problem, what a blockchain oracle is and how they work in general.
We also gave examples of different blockchain oracle networks and want to continue here with Chainlink as the by far most prominent system and dive deeper into its processes.

The Chainlink blockchain oracle network

Chainlink aims to create a “highly generalized oracle framework where users can create any oracle design pattern to retrieve and validate data in a highly secure and reliable manner”.
This is achieved by building a trusted marketplace for consumers of oracle information and oracle node operators where Chainlink node smart contracts function as middleware and solve the oracle problem. The validation part is tackled mostly through aggregation of pricing data from different sources via multiple nodes and positive incentives for good performance in form of Chainlink Token (LINK) payments to node operators per fulfilled data request. Currently the aggregation process resides on-chain, but Chainlink plans to implement off-chain aggregation in the future.
Staking/Slashing (see above) will also be implemented in the future to further increase reliability. …

In this article, we are going to explain why we need blockchain oracles and the general oracle problem and its use cases. Then we describe the terminology around blockchain oracles and how they work.
Last but not least, we present examples of different blockchain oracle networks and provide a list of links for additional reading.

Why do we need blockchain oracles?

Smart contracts are the key concept behind the Ethereum platform or more generally speaking blockchain 2.0 — the second generation (after Bitcoin) in the evolution of blockchain technology, which is the foundation of most use-cases today.

Smart contracts rely on deterministic triggers to execute their code. These triggers can originate from a user account/wallet (e.g. by sending funds to the contract) or from another smart contract (via so called traces or internal transactions). …

When you work with large data set you know the limits and challenges of traditional database management systems. You pay the price for the total cost of ownership. You manage and maintain the server infrastructure and need to make sure that data is accessible and up and running 24/7. As soon you are required to share your data with different parties within your organization or partners, data storage needs to be distributed and redundant in order to guarantee not only availability but high performance to return speedy query result sets. Sounds familiar, right?

About Google BigQuery

In 2010 Google started to test Google BigQuery which was available for the public at the end of 2011. Within the last 9 years, Google BigQuery evolved and added additional features beyond just “querying” petabytes of data in a few seconds. Google BigQuery ML,BigQuery BI Engine, BigQuery GIS topped up the BigQuery tool set. …

Anyblock Analytics, the company behind the blockchain analytics platform eth.events — which contains all publicly available data from Ethereum-based networks — is excited to announce that they closed a 500,000 Euro seed funding round by three business angels, Accelerator Frankfurt and ISB development bank. It will enable them to offer services that support use cases such as the comparison of metrics for cryptocurrency analysts, token bridge monitoring that connect different blockchains, and oracles that trigger a smart contract for clients in the growing Ethereum ecosystem and other blockchain networks.

By working with Anyblock Analytics, IT teams can save time when developing enterprise-grade smart contract solutions, as they do not have to run their own server nodes. Marketing managers and other less technical stakeholder benefit, as the data can easily be put into charts and dashboards to generate valuable insights with easy to understand visualizations. …

We are proud to integrate eth.events data with leading oracle provider Chainlink!

The eth.events ElasticSearch API will serve as an oracle for Ethereum smart contracts requiring real-time blockchain data from any of our 17 indexed networks. This makes accessing on-chain information a lot easier and more flexible for smart contract developers.

As an example, the eth.events Chainlink oracle leverages the real-time capabilities of our enterprise software stack and enables a simple yet important use case: Real-time validation of transaction hashes. …

It has been a busy first quarter of 2019 for us buidling https://eth.events/, this is a brief summary in case you missed our posts on Medium or Twitter.

Product Development

First and foremost we are very happy how much our SQL launch resonated with the community! (https://twitter.com/get_eth_events/status/1098230800728973312)

In the last week we expanded our offerings quite a bit. We are happy to report that now all public Ethereum chains comprising all historic data are decoded and enriched and therefore are available to be queried using Elasticsearch DSL and SQL. (https://twitter.com/get_eth_events/status/1112624890870284288)

As always everything is updated in real-time and in a reorg-safe manner. Also everything is still free to use and you can start using our services right away: https://account.eth.events/auth/signup/ …

Thanks to method signature decoding, we have now matched 84% of all Ethereum transactions to corresponding calls and translated more than 91% of logs to human-readable events. This makes it so much easier for eth.events users to work with realtime, reorg-safe blockchain data!

Previously these numbers were about 40–50%, but we broke the >500.000 contract ABIs down into >130.000 unique methods. If we cannot translate function call data into clear text names using our smart contract ABIs, we now decode the logs by utilizing the function hashes.

Fun fact: We found >2.400 different transfer functions!

Some limitations still exist: We cannot put a label on instances where contract fallback functions are used, as well as constructor calls. Also when decoding tx calls, we only have 4 bytes to match which may result in multiple results. For now we use the first match, but anyway assign a lower probability to the respective values in our database in order to indicate some uncertainty. Future refinements are on our roadmap, reach out if you want to contribute! …