ep7 Hyper Oracle Co-founder Kartin | seamless dev development wi…

ep7 Hyper Oracle Co-founder Kartin | seamless dev development with programmable oracles

Antalpha HackerHouse Media

0xeA68

November 27th, 2023

Intro

Why do we need zkOracle

zkGragh standard and beyond

Ecosystem growth with open-source and permissionless environment

Related Links and resources

Intro

Welcome back to Wen Building podcast, this is an episode about Oracle, but forget about those traditional oracles used in blockchain. Cause we have Hyper Oracle here to present to us what are the new trend for Oracle space. In Hyper Oracle, they defined a network called zkOracle Network. what’s zkOracle and why it’s better than other traditional oracles such as Chainlink, The Graph, etc. In this episode, we will explore this landscape with Hyper Oracle’s co-founder Kartin.

Guest: Kartin, co-founder of Hyper Oracle, X @0xKartin

Host: Franci, X @FrancixDeng

Timeline

01:25 Kartin's personal background

06:32 What are zkOracles

09:12 What does Hyper Oracle provide to unleash imaginery space for dapp

12:03 Computation ability and data source are key to DeFi 3.0

15:29 What are zkGraghs

17:49 Make assembly script become a provable language

18:58 What can be zkAutomation used for?

23:42 OPML and future roadmap

29:08 Proof of oracle work

30:25 Education and developer growth strategies

32:02 Differences between zk-coprocessor and zk-oracle

33:15 Vison for Hyper Oracle

Why do we need zkOracle

A lot of crypto hacks happened because of the Oracle problem.The essential reason why Oracle is still a problem for blockchain is because right now, old Oracle is designed by a voting mechanism. It's like a staking and voting mechanism. So it's not about the fact of proving verification. It's about the participant voting for a fact for the smart contract. Which means if the voter are corrupted or the voter's computer got hacked, it's not working out. That's why the DeFi security is always a big problem when you go to Oracle. So I begin to realize that we can use the zero knowledge proof technology and started a new project called Hyper Oracle to use zkp to do the Oracle.

Let's define what's oracle first. Oracle for us is basically like the enhancement for the smart contract through some sort of off-chain mechanism. ZK oracle is basically a new paradigm for doing oracle that we no longer rely on voting and staking. And instead of voting for a fact that happened in the real world or happened in the internet or happened in the blockchain event. We right now do zero knowledge proof on the fact to do a self verification on the smart contract. So that the smart contract can have more data source.

If you don't have oracle, the smart contract can only do really simple thing in the blockchain. Because they can only send the data on current block,not even historical block. So you will need oracle to do that, even for on-chain historical data. And the definition for ZK oracle is basically you use ZKP to do it instead of like staking and voting. And so make it more reliable, more decentralized and even faster, safer and cheaper. And we also want to use oracle to enhance the computation ability for a smart contract. So we need to try to put as much as computation not in the smart contract as much as possible. But we also really want the end-to-end trustless for the computation and data processing. So which means we got to make the whole process become a self-provable. So what ZK oracle does is provide this kind of end-to-end trustless setup for the smart contract. So that smart contract can have more data source, like on-chain historical data, internet data. And also have stronger computation ability for the smart contract. So it can perform more stuff computation to process this kind of data. And ZK oracle will provide a really safe decentralized mechanism to do it.

Smart contract without a ZK Oracle is more like Nokia phone compared with iPhone.They haven't utilized fully the computation ability. But a new DeFi 3.0 probably will utilize the ZK Oracle to perform more kind of computation and data source in this smart contract. So they can do more things for people. That I think is the key toward the massive adoption for crypto. Because right now we can pretty much only use crypto to do simple stuff like trading. But if we want to use crypto to do more things. We’ve got to unlock more computation ability and more data source for the smart contract.

zkGragh standard and beyond

ZK graph is a new standard to program a Oracle. Before hyper oracle basically none of the Oracle in the space are programmable. So with traditional Oracle if you want to have some services. You need to call the Oracle provider to let them modify their Oracle to support the function you need for your DApp. It's at least not permissionlessly programmable. And with hyper oracle you can permissionlessly program the Oracle with the way you like. So every time some developer want to use ZK Oracle for their DApp. They just can write the program in the ZK graph. And actually writing program in ZK graph is super simple. It doesn't require you to know anything about zero knowledge proof. Because we have a sophisticated ZKVM which is fully optimized and have really strong performance. And then they can basically just write the logic they need for their DApp in the ZK graph. And then they can submit the ZK graph as an nft to the blockchain. And all the ZK Oracle operator, they will download the ZK graph in the computer, run the ZK graph for the user. And then submit the result with the proof into the verifier that provided by certain developer. So this whole DApp is online now. There’s no need to ask Hyper Oracle team to deploy it. It's like fully permissionless, fully decentralized. So it make it become programmable and ZK graph is that program.

The ZK graph uses assembly script. We are the first team in the world that make assembly script become a provable language. And I also need to get a credit to EthStorage team. They basically is the first team that enable Go language to be provable. And assembly script probably most developer haven't heard about it. But essentially it's like a JavaScript syntax and compile the JavaScript into a wasm binary. So because we use ZKWasm as the proving engine for the ZK Oracle, everything in ZK graph will compile into wasm binary and put down into the ZKWasm. And then generate the proof for the execution trace. And we submit the proof with that result into the smart contract together.

Ecosystem growth with open-source and permissionless environment

We propose a new idea that called proof of Oracle work. So it's the future way that people can run the ZK Oracle protocol by just download the ZK graph NFT and then run it and reward in the on-chain verifier smart contract. We have a concrete plan that can fully decentralize every node since the day one when we launched the ZK Oracle project in the mainnet.

We are going to have some hackathon and stuff, but I don't really have a strategy to grow developer community. Because I think things happen naturally. Once someone see the potential of the ZK Oracle evolution, they will do it and they will benefit from it. And we just need more time to let people know this new kind of Oracle is a safe, neutral, no bias oracle, that is possible and it's through the one of the strongest security assumption which is the ZKP cryptography. And once they realize that they will do it and then it will just become a new standard for people to do a smart contract.

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Hyper Oracle: A Programmable zkOracle Protocol

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zkWASM, The Next Chapter of ZK and zkVM

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Wen Building aims to engage in in-depth conversations with Web3 builders. It explores the cutting-edge technological developments in Web3, analyzes the mechanics of blockchain products, and observes industry trends and challenges.