Today we’re excited to be sharing a powerful proof-of-concept agent service, a fully autonomous oracle built with the Autonolas stack. You can see the oracle service running live here. The potential demonstrated here is immense, and we hope you will find it just as exciting as we do.

What is Autonolas?

Autonolas provides a novel suite of tools for creating autonomous off-chain services. This stack will allow developers to build an entirely new type of crypto app that can take action on its own, communicate with non-blockchain data services and run continuously. This is done through the use of multi-agent systems and a composable architecture that emphasizes robustness, transparency and decentralization.

What We’re Introducing Today

To demonstrate just one possible approach to building with the Autonolas stack, we’ve created an oracle service as a way to help developers and users understand what’s possible. In this oracle example, we demonstrate how our stack makes use of multi-agent systems to come to consensus on and return an accurate estimation of a given price pair. That price pair is the old classic: BTC/USD.

Oracles are a vital part of blockchain infrastructure, connecting blockchains with off-chain data sources. Today, multiple stacks for oracles exist, but like much of current web3 infrastructure, they make many compromises. Autonolas’ oracles solve many of the most common challenges through the unique properties of our multi-agent system software stack.

Unleashing Autonolas Oracles: What it looks like in practice

Every 300 seconds (a configurable value), the agents making up the Oracle collect price data from 4 sources (another configurable value): CoinGecko, FTX, Binance and Coinbase. Each agent retrieves price data from a single source.

Once the prices have been retrieved, the agents share their observations with each other….

…who then each use the observed prices to compute an aggregate price according to some pre-agreed upon measure (here, the median)…

…and then finally the agents share their aggregate price and come to a consensus on it.

This aggregate price is then sent via a transaction by one of the agents–the keeper agent–to a smart contract deployed on-chain.

How Are Autonolas Oracles Different?

Autonolas oracles are able to keep blockchain’s promise of decentralization but at lower cost by replicating, off-chain, the fault-tolerance guarantees and consensus mechanisms that power on-chain activity.

Only the necessary information observed by the oracle that is required to validate its correctness is recorded on-chain. This means we can reduce spending on transactions, provide robustness, guarantee decentralization and trust-minimization.

Thanks to a composable stack, the oracle can be extended to include more than just the aggregation of the prices from various centralized exchanges. For instance, developers could extend the oracle to report more complex statistics and use machine-learning.

Looking Forward

This oracle is a first demonstration of an Autonolas service, and only a tiny glimpse of what’s possible–for example, a service like the one we’re demonstrating here could one day be realized as what we’re calling a “Protocol Owned Service” (PoSe), as outlined in this Twitter thread. We’re building a stack that will unleash full autonomy–spanning on-chain and off-chain–for protocols and DAOs across crypto. In the coming weeks and months, we will be revealing more of our broad-ranging ecosystem and tooling.

Getting Involved

Oracles are a critical primitive for a range of different decentralized applications. If you’re building something which could make use of our oracles — either directly or as a part of a larger off-chain service — reach out to our ecosystem team. We’ll be more than happy to support you in folding this exciting new technology into your application stack.

Alternatively, if you’re an individual developer interested in multi-agent systems, working with Python and taking your web3 development skills to the next level, you should check out our new self-guided video course, the Autonolas Academy. The course is a self-paced learning experience, with the option, on completion, to apply for a more intensive, cohort-based Builder Track. The program is designed to teach you everything you need to know to develop your own apps and services using our framework. You can get started with those materials here.

We hope you’ve found this simple demonstration informative and that your understanding of what’s possible has expanded. Our goal with Autonolas is to transform the way off-chain services and apps are built, empowering developers to take their ideas to the next level. If that resonates with you, we’d love to have you along for the ride.

Connect With Us

For all the latest updates on Autonolas, follow us on Twitter and we also invite you to join our Discord community–it’s going to be an exciting journey, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us.