From oracle to middleware layer: Supra is entering the market with a layer-level positioning

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Loopy Lu

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In the Web3 narrative, investors and users alike are paying more attention to the application layer and the underlying chain, one of which can “carry the next billion users” and the other is the cornerstone of the operation of the crypto world.

But the market’s attention to the middleware that drives and lubricates both seems to be slightly lacking, especially for developers, excellent middleware is crucial, oracles, automation, cross-chain protocols, etc. are all indispensable to promote Web3 development. At the same time, the market’s attention to the safety of this track and the sustainable development of the future also needs to be strengthened.

As we all know, oracles and cross-chain bridges are more common targets. In July, Poly Network was attacked for a second time due to a cross-chain bridge vulnerability, with losses of up to 10 million; In August this year, the lending agreement Exactly Protocol also suffered a loss of $12 million due to a cross-chain bridge vulnerability. According to CertiK’s report, there were 54 losses caused by flash loans and oracle manipulation vulnerabilities in the second quarter of this year, resulting in a loss of about $23 million.

So what is the main reason why they are constantly attacked? One of the common factors is that these two middleware have a very similar weakness, that is, when the event loses the security and decentralization of the traditional blockchain in the process of oracle and cross-chain bridge circulation, the security level of data events is reduced from the original L1 level to the middleware level, giving hackers more possibilities to be attacked.

However, Web3 is still early, the oracle dilemma is still not solved, the market demand is changing with each passing day, and the time to turn over against the wind and redefine the market standard will come at any time. However, we believe that in the existing market landscape, the technology middle layer will be the absolutely necessary component for the next market stage. Odaily will take readers on a journey to discover Supra, an innovator on the rise in the ancient track of middleware.

In terms of blockchain security latitude, we observe that Supra is from the middleware entrance, from the original SupraOracles are now focusing on the middleware service layer of the IntraLayer, while providing high-quality services for the market while sparing no effort to improve security, escort off-chain data and cross-chain liquidity. Let’s take a look at what Supra, which recently announced a $24 million private round and is invested by a number of top institutions, is currently doing.

How does Supra start from the oracle track?

What is the “oracle dilemma”?

Anyone who knows about oracles should have heard more or less about the “oracle dilemma.” The situation is that blockchain essentially has the natural advantages of reducing single points of failure, ensuring data security, and preventing data from being tampered with. However, when the blockchain needs external data to execute the contract, the oracle service must be used, and if the oracle as the data source has security risks, the security of the blockchain is reduced to the oracle level, and the data problem of the source will directly affect the execution result of the smart contract. Therefore, ideally, oracle networks should be as secure and decentralized as L1 while ensuring accurate data.

In other words, in order to improve security and decentralization, we need to build as many network nodes as possible. But the more network nodes, the longer multiple rounds of consensus take, and the greater the gas consumed by user transactions. Not only does this lead to higher costs, reduced eventual certainty and performance, but also delays in data availability, resulting in the potential for slippage. Therefore, there is an “oracle dilemma” in the oracle network. Many oracle networks on the market sacrifice security and decentralization to ensure the refresh rate of available data.

However, oracles, as a bridge between the blockchain and the real world, are crucial to the further development and landing of Web3 and the metaverse. Perhaps in the early development of Web3, the mushrooming DeFi project did not have a particularly strong demand for real-world links, as long as middleware can provide fast and accurate feeding, security has a certain basic guarantee, and the degree of decentralization only stays in the concept and has no big impact. However, with the continuous evolution of Web3, the market urgently needs accurate and secure data, and it is necessary to ensure data security and improve decentralization while ensuring high performance, that is, the oracle dilemma must be solved.

How does Supra solve the “oracle dilemma”?

So how can we balance these demand points so that the degree of decentralization and security of oracles is no less than L1 and L2 and ensure high performance of accurate data.

Supra is building the next generation of oracles for the blockchain industry, solving the “oracle dilemma” in a real sense. Supra designed the “Tribe-Clan” or “tribe-clan network node architecture”, introduced the L1 consensus mechanism, and created innovative technologies such as representative value and consistency distance. This unique mechanism design is called DORA (Distributed Oracle Protocol).

By reading Supra’s latest white paper, the author summarizes the key points of the agreement:

1. Shuffle parent-child node architecture - Tribe & Clan

Supra’s node network has a “tribal-clan architecture.” This is a mother-set, subset relationship, where a tribe is evenly and randomly divided into multiple clans.

! [From oracle to middleware layer: Supra is entering the market with layer-level positioning] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-7f230462a9-415e6cb885-dd1a6f-69ad2a.webp)

Each clan contains 5 clans, each clan contains 25 nodes, the random shuffling mechanism between clans and clans is executed every x minutes (x execution time can vary), the random process is blessed by Supra’s verifiable random numbers, node collusion and node attacks are unlikely to occur in this network.

To make it easier to understand, many oracle node networks on the market are equivalent to a CLAN in the fabric, so DORA may be 100+ times more secure in some sense.

! [From oracle to middleware layer: Supra is entering the market with layer-level positioning] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-7f230462a9-6842ac7720-dd1a6f-69ad2a.webp)

! [From oracle to middleware layer: Supra is entering the market with layer-level positioning] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-7f230462a9-0eecbeb6b9-dd1a6f-69ad2a.webp)

2. 33% Byzantine Tolerance: Representative value

Without any Byzantine errors, only a single node is needed to fetch information from multiple sources; But in the case of a Byzantine error, we will need multiple nodes. When all nodes can provide a value as input, then when some of them are Byzantine nodes, the rest of the honest nodes agree and challenge them to choose a single representative value, S-value. This representative value must converge between the maximum and minimum values of the honest node in the protocol. The representative value is calculated by the aggregator family selected by the tribe, and is a single value formed by the aggregator family combining the values signed by the clan nodes.

2. Consistency distance

The protocol requires that even in the worst case there be an honest value, take this value as an anchor, and then fix the other values together so that the other values, even if dishonest, cannot arbitrarily deviate from the honest value. This binding distance is called the consistency distance D.

4. Alternate Protocols

After the protocol starts, the backup countdown will be started, and if there is no representative value output within the specified time, the standby protocol will be triggered, and the protocol will start the entire fabric tribe to calculate the representative value instead of a tribe under normal conditions.

5. Node multi-round asynchronous calculation

In reality, a new round of protocols can be started every few seconds, since a new round can be started without waiting for the previous round to end. The values for the rounds may be published out of order. For example, the value of round 4 may appear before the value of round 3 on SMR. In fact, round 4 carries a fresher and more accurate value, so the information from round 3 may not be of any use after round 4 is available. Based on this assumption, we can save resources on some unnecessary calculations and communications. Delayed data can be retired.

The above features also bring a series of advantages to the protocol, the main advantages of which are summarized as follows:

• The shuffled node architecture introduces a high degree of randomness, which can greatly improve the security and decentralization coefficient, and greatly limit the attacker’s attack ability;
• Data can be processed in shards between different tribes, which greatly improves the processing efficiency;
• Multi-round asynchronous calculation to ensure data accuracy and refresh rate;
• In addition, its moonshot consensus algorithm also provides L1-based security and 2-3 seconds of final determinism for the protocol, making the overall performance of the protocol run higher.

What is the IntraLayer built by Supra?

SupraOracles is the starting point of Supra, but with the continuous launch of other middleware products such as VRF and cross-chain protocols, the project officially upgraded the brand to Supra in July this year, trying to build an automated cross-chain interoperability center that provides multi-middleware services, connecting L1 and L2, Web2 and Web3, to provide the core infrastructure for promoting the development of blockchain.

There are currently hundreds of chains on the market, and many blockchains also provide more and more diversified services, resulting in the current user experience in real usage scenarios is extremely fragmented. The prominent pain point of this multi-chain reality has also attracted the attention of industry researchers and developers, and how to securely and invisibly transfer assets and information from one chain to another to achieve interoperability has become an urgent problem for the industry.

Focusing on this pain point, Supra recently released an innovative “bridgeless” cross-chain communication model to help cover more networks with Supra’s services and securely link blockchains to achieve high-speed and secure interoperability.

At present, most cross-chain bridges on the market use a multi-signature design. Such bridges typically consist of a set of staked bridge nodes, each of which individually signs events that occur on the source chain (such as funds locked in the source chain currency), and then these signed events are aggregated and transmitted to the target chain along with the protocol signatures/seals of each node through a “multisig” mechanism. Such a process prompts corresponding actions (e.g., releasing funds in the local assets or currencies of the target chain). And this process is also the stage of cross-chain bridge manipulation, and the cross-chain bridge manipulation cases we mentioned at the beginning of the article are mostly such cases.

In Supra’s “bridgeless” cross-chain protocol HyperNova, the relay nodes only share the cryptographic consensus information of the source chain, and there is no need to trust any relay bridge nodes to ensure the correctness of the relay information, just to ensure that the relevant events on the source chain are not missing, censored or delayed when they are delivered to the destination chain. The nodes on the target chain will independently verify the validity of the source chain event, so the information related to a chain event of the relay bridge node cannot be tampered with during the cross-chain transmission of the event, and those attacks that do not lock the corresponding assets on the source chain and provide false information on the cross-chain bridge to release or mint assets will not be able to occur on the “relay model” cross-chain bridge, directly curbing the possibility of manipulation.

Also, in the HyperNova bridgeless model, only relay nodes are relied upon to forward data, rather than verifying the correctness of the data. Therefore, bridge nodes do not require a large amount of equity, just an honest node to ensure activity and censorship resistance. In addition, this can also avoid multiple rounds of consensus, which can improve the efficiency of implementation.

HyperNova allows Supra’s existing services to cover more networks, builds a middleware service layer - IntraLayer - by vertically integrating native oracles, VRFs and other functions, and is also a core infrastructure for interoperability, helping dApps communicate seamlessly in the decentralized blockchain field, and can fuse all chains into a whole.

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The ancient middleware circuit: Value discovery may have begun

Taken together, the concept of IntraLayer accurately describes Supra’s unique positioning. IntraLayer is an integrated framework for Supra’s oracle, cross-chain bridge, and smart contract platform that is natively cross-chain compatible and designed to work together to help dApps communicate seamlessly in the fragmented environment of blockchain.

Supra focuses on the “dilemma” and uses L1 algorithms to ensure the security of middleware, as long as it is necessary to solve the security trust problem, we can see Supra’s efforts. The project already supports 10+ mainnets, 40+ testnets, and its just-announced “Learn to Earn” community airdrop campaign is in full swing.

When we look back at the old experience of the DeFi world - looking for demand from incremental markets and new application scenarios from emerging technologies such as L2/ZK, Supra’s products may have gone to a more novel and potential track.

At present, the market has reached an important stage of bear and bull alternation. In the next market stage that will usher in the future, few people can predict the next heavyweight track from 0 to 100 in the current industry context (technological innovation has not yet produced major changes, and the industry theme narrative has not broken through). At the same time, we have all experienced in the crypto world, and no track has been monopolized by only one winner for a long time. Greater development potential and market space are still worth exploring. We believe that these original explorations have already laid a broader space for growth for the ancient track.