Introduction to Switchboard Serverless
In the previous article, we covered the “Why build Switchboard v3?” and the technology, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) behind it. In this article, we’ll discuss the whats and hows of v3.
In the previous iteration, v2 offers a great infrastructure — the standard “honest” staked nodes consensus model. Switchboard v3 introduces a new paradigm and a greater solution when building with oracles, providing a secure, verifiable and customizable solution to tailor fit to your data and off-chain execution needs.
About TEEs
A Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a specialized hardware that specializes in data software integrity and privacy.
What are TEEs?
TEEs represents a secure environment within a machine’s hardware or software that is isolated from the operating system and other applications. TEEs are designed to provide a trusted and secure environment where sensitive information can be processed without the risk of being accessed or modified by unauthorized parties. TEEs can attest another TEE to be running a particular software. TEEs are commonly used in mobile devices, banking or digital wallets to provide secure storage for sensitive data.
In a blockchain context, TEEs can be used to securely store private keys for blockchain wallets, ensuring that they cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties. TEEs can also be used to securely process blockchain transactions, ensuring that they cannot be tampered with or modified by hackers or malicious actors.
Switchboard Attestation Program
In the aforementioned article, Switchboard v2 was built around economic security models where data reporters are rewarded or slashed relative to how close or far they were to the median of all data reporters. To participate in a Switchboard Queue, oracle operators are required to lock up some portion of economic stake specified by the queue as well as explicit operating approval from the oracle queue’s authority.
The economic stake combined with the authority-gated operating permission can be “sufficient” to fulfil decentralization BUT it limits oracle honesty incentives to the amount they staked.
Take example where an oracle is supporting a 1 million dollar TVL DeFi protocol, can the oracle’s stake be aligned? Should the oracle be at risk of losing millions of dollars if it misreports? This method introduces additional challenges with capital efficiency, but Switchboard v3 aims to tackle this.
By utilizing TEE’s technology, we can:
- Create a digital signature of the software loaded into it;
- Create a signature of any data generated from within the code.
Verifying the Oracles
In Switchboard’s case, oracles are encapsulated within TEEs, allowing it to create a unique digital signature — a public key of a signing keypair, where we post on-chain for all to verify. In short, these oracles can be trusted but yet verifiable!
Verifying the Execution
Once these oracles are verified and begin to participate in a queue. All user requests such as data feeds, functions, etc can be verifiably executed, where people can verify that the transactions being sent are strictly dictated by the code that created it.
Read more about TEEs, Switchboard Attestation Program here.
Switchboard Serverless
Attention developers! Yes, you saw that right. With Switchboard v3, apart from improving security by verifying oracles and its executions, Switchboard Serverless offers a suit of developer toolings through a serverless approach such that developers’ requests are matched with an oracle, eliminating the need to provision, operate, manage, or worry about any infrastructure or servers. The suite of developer toolings are mentioned in the following.
Switchboard Services
Switchboard Services enables developers to write and deploy functions as part of data feeds — designed to perform specific tasks. With v3, developers can access powerful, customizable and scalable solutions to build and deploy services such as:
- Create complex risk engines that performs calculations based on private market data which feeds directly into a DeFi protocol;
- Develop advanced filtering functions to aggregate, verify and filter off-chain data from multiple sources using custom logic to build dynamic applications;
- Create complex automation flows for your application which can include processing data, sending notifications, updating a database and more!
Switchboard Streams
Switchboard Streams are data feeds and technically a subset of Services, but specifically designed to fetch data from on/off-chain data sources. The Switchboard Builder enables developers to create Streams seamlessly and with full customizability. With v3, the oracles’ execution of the jobs and tasks within each Streams are now verifiable — this helps DeFi protocols to align incentives with oracle operators.
Switchboard Secrets
Switchboard Secrets provides developers a secure and confidential way to access private/gated APIs and data from off-chain sources. With v3, sensitive information can be processed and updated securely.
- Accessibility to reliable sports, price data;
- OpenAI API key;
- Social media (Discord, Slack, Twitter) API key;
- and so much more!
Switchboard pSeudorandomness
Switchboard pSeudorandomness is a randomness service and Verifiable Random Function (VRF) for generating secure and verifiable on-chain randomness using TEE oracles.
Summary
In conclusion, the Switchboard v3 oracle network paired with the suite of products offered through Switchboard Serverless enables developers to access verifiable off-chain computation and data, empowering them to build exceptional products for other developers and end-users.
Join us to revolutionize the standard and plug in a new paradigm of oracles.
Fill up the beta form to test and experiment with Switchboard v3 today: https://tinyurl.com/switchboardv3beta
Contact us: https://switchboard.xyz/contact
Twitter: https://twitter.com/switchboardxyz
Discord: https://discord.gg/switchboardxyz
Github: https://github.com/switchboard-xyz
Docs: https://docs.switchboard.xyz
More links: https://linktr.ee/switchboardxyz
