How we started building data-focused ecosystems on Arweave
That’s a fact, 2021 has been a fast-paced year with a massive number of new DeFi projects popping up. Some of them were trying to copy existing solutions, some caught the upward DeFi trend. But many were created to solve common industry problems. Both, our Oracles and Contracts SDK, have origins of the latter.
RedStone Oracles, with low-cost design, solve the problem of data feeds customisability, cross-chain interoperability and scalability limitations.
RedStone Contracts offer Smart Contracts SDK optimised for data processing, solving problems of data heavy on-chain implementations like interactive NFTs.
From hackathon needs to viable solution
Okay, so let’s start from the beginning. In 2019 and 2020 our team members participated multiple hackathons, facing a visible gap in the ecosystem: Oracles delivered just data about the most popular crypto assets and were expensive to start with.
Then, we came across Arweave, a layer 1 chain optimised for data storage. To say it was a perfect match is not enough! Use case became obvious, therefore we joined the Open Web Foundry incubation program with the goal of creating a cost-efficient Oracle ecosystem with the ability to deliver data cross-chain.
Q2 2021
- The inception of RedStone cross-chain Oracle
- We’ve created the backbone of the ecosystem with redstone-node and redstone-api code
- Implementation of monitoring tools for RedStone Oracles and kicking off the first node for 100 tokens prices, already more than standard Oracles
- We closed our Pre-Seed Funding of $525,000 led by Maven 11
How did we end up building two products?
The development of Oracles was going faster than expected. We saw a huge interest in RedStone, which confirmed that a cross-chain Oracle solution with custom data feeds is needed by the DeFi & Web3 developers. However, as we started using SmartWeave, native Smart Contracts for the Arweave network, we faced significant performance and reliability issues. To name a few:
- Low performance with unnecessary calls to Arweave HTTP API and lack of an easy way to add caching layer
- No clearly defined base protocol
- No unit and other types of tests, being very prone to error
- Code that is really hard to maintain and keep up to date with base implementation
That was the moment, when one of our core developers, Peter aka Ppe, decided to take matters into his own hands. Problems with original SmartWeave were faced by multiple projects in the ecosystem including Pianity, ArDrive and CommunityXYZ. Ppe knew that the need to optimise solutions to the possible extends is burning, so he created a structural plan of creating a dedicated RedStone Contracts SDK.
RedStone Contracts originated from SmartWeave but was rewritten from scratch, to make serious optimisation and fundamental changes possible.
Once our Contracts SDK was ready for testing our team member, Alex, came up with a great educational use case, which got popular at that time — Loot Contract. The interest from the Arweave community was just staggering with more than 50% loots being minted in just 3 hours! But most importantly RedStone Contracts were tested in the battleground with almost 10,000 interactions and the Loot example still serves as a great educational example of how to use Contracts SDK.
Q3 2021
- RedStone releases the first version of its core product Smart Contracts SDK on Arweave
- The number of supported tokens by Oracle increased from 100 to over 1000 and the number of data sources from 10 to 50
- Testing Contracts in the real environment with Loot Tutorial
- RedStone is recognised by Vestbee as one of the 10 most promising blockchain startups
- Partnership with Synapse
- RedStone joins Celo Startup Pathway and receives Innovating for Prosperity Award
- RedStone participating in Lisbon Blockchain Week
Oracle cross-chain expansion & Contracts polishing
The last three months of 2021 brought us a rapid expansion of Oracles to other chains thanks to our EVM-Connector technology. First, our datafeeds became available to Avalanche and Polygon, but the true enthusiasm was spared in the Celo ecosystem. Our implementation won the Interoperability track on the Celo Make Crypto Mobile hackathon. Straight away we started working on integration with Moola lending protocol and CyberTime NFT Marketplace. But we didn’t forget about the reliability and decentralization of our infrastructure! Our partnership with Streamr was a big step in making our ecosystem even more robust.
We started the execution of our long term development plan for Contracts, building new tools like dedicated Gateway and SmartWeave Contracts explorer. Projects that used to use the original SmartWeave implementation started one by one moving their infrastructure to our solution — by the end of the year, our SDK had almost 150 users and fantastic feedback.
Q4 2021
- Marcin, our Head of Growth, shares an overview of RedStone at Arweave Permacast
- Alex presented our Oracle at the 0xHack meetup
- Partnership with Streamr, boosting RedStone’s decentralized public cache
- RedStone won the Celo hackathon Interoperability track
- RedStone visits Solana BreakPoint
- Release of an updated version of Contracts SDK, dedicated Gateway and Contracts explorer, we create comprehensive set of tools for developers
Where are we now?
We got into 2022 with huge development and expansion plans — our team grew from 1 up to 7 people and that’s just the beginning. You can expect more diverse data feeds from our Oracles, comprehensive tools for RedStone Contracts development enabling the creation of new projects and partnerships with established projects. But most importantly, our full dedication to creating cutting-edge data ecosystems.
If you like what we do join our Discord server, leave stars on Contracts & Oracles repositories and follow on Twitter – we’re constantly hiring talents so if you are a top player, contact us!
RedStone team
