Hey, I’d like to chime in as one of the people working on coordinating the oracle network supporting IST’s vaults. Responding to your questions below:
- The oracle solution does not in any way use an existing official Chainlink feed, and instead uses the open source Chainlink software to submit prices to aggregator smart contracts on Agoric. The contracts cannot be changed by any admin user, only governance. The oracle set is initially a set of 5 Agoric validators who are also experienced in Chainlink node operation on other networks.
Each node operator queries a set of API providers on their backend, and they all submit their median price to each round of the data feed. New rounds are triggered either after 10 mins of inactivity or if a node operator has detected a 1% deviation off chain. We’ve distributed the various API providers across the set of oracle operators, so as to have the least overlap possible, to minimise API provider risk.
2-3. There are talks ongoing to ensure the oracle feed for liquid staked tokens are as robust as possible.
- Currently our team at Simply Staking is coordinating the bootstrapping of the oracle network set, maintaining the software and working as a manager of the oracle network (we do not have any on-chain powers, just off-chain coordination, dev work, monitoring/alerting and support).
We are currently in this position as we feel it is critical to ensure the stability and quality of the feeds being used for IST, after many years working on official Chainlink feeds.
The software being used is all open source and documented, being the Chainlink node, monitoring software for the oracle operators and the custom Agoric<>Chainlink middleware. In the long term, it is in the best interest of the network to have a more decentralised approach to oracle set maintenance and monitoring, so we’re happy to support this direction. We’re doing our utmost to upkeep documentation and share knowledge to the other oracle operators.