SEDA’s beta v0.1 mainnet has been live for over one month, and the community is actively upgrading tokens from FLX to SEDA. The network has secured its target of 100 onboarded validators, with more than 134 million SEDA tokens staked and over 110 million FLX upgraded and burned. The recent release of SEDA’s technical roadmap from BETA v0.1 to the first mainnet upgrade v1.0 highlights a great opportunity to explore SEDA’s vision from conception to realization of a new Web3 data access, transport, and configuration standard.
Paper Contents
- The SEDA Origin Story
- SEDA Design Principles
- The Need For Industry Standards
- Next Steps Towards Standardization
SEDA’s Origin
Before the SEDA network was conceptualized, we deployed Flux, a first-party oracle on NEAR, Aurora, and Evmos in 2022. Flux grew its total secured value (TVS) to $3.58 billion in 8 weeks and enabled over $152 billion in cumulative value on-chain. Naturally, as Flux continued to grow withtraction, new projects in each ecosystem wanted to integrate to access the data necessary for their applications. At the height of Flux’s success, the flaws of all traditional oracle design models became apparent.
Towards the end of 2022, the tooling required to deploy a protocol or chain became easier, and new networks and protocols were being deployed at rates previously unseen. As blockchains cannot access data outside their native execution environment, the need for oracle integrations grew in parallel. Developers launching a new chain or protocol needed access to data to build applications. As oracles are designed to require native integrations to new networks and new smart contracts for each new data feed API, companies began requiring proof of traction for new networks to justify resource-heavy integrations. This resulted in scalability issues with integration times that can reach upwards of 6–12 months.
The experience at Flux and the feedback from developers across multiple existing and developing networks was clear: traditional oracle models need upgraded designs to scale to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding multi-ecosystem blockchain environment. Ecosystem fragmentation and the siloing of traditional Web3 tech stacks was another emerging challenge that had to be addressed. With rapid blockchain deployment and a lack of industry-wide interoperability protocols, liquidity, and users were split, further fragmenting Web3.
The decision was made to support our thesis that fragmentation and lack of oracle scalability would continue to worsen, stopping Flux’s expansion and beginning the development of an industry-wide solution. The result was SEDA, a permissionless data access transport and configuration solution.
The SEDA Design — Solving Industry Challenges
Permissionless. Chain-agnostic. Programmable. - the cornerstone design principles of SEDA’s solution. Embodying these principles, SEDA lays the foundations for a new standard that naturally supports current, passing, and long-term industry data needs. The SEDA design standard was developed to support innovation by empowering developers to access data where they want, how they want, and as they need. Additionally, SEDA’s design allows existing oracle models to integrate with the network, instantly mitigating the scalability and delay challenges inherent in their designs.
Web3 is still an emerging industry and will continue to evolve. New trends will come and go, and new challenges will naturally arise. However, the need for day-one access to high-fidelity, low-latency data will remain. By leveraging a permissionless & chain-agnostic architecture, the SEDA Network natively provides day-one access to any data type for all networks. Builders simply deploy or connect to existing prover contracts monitored by a network of solvers that allow for instant querying of any data type available on SEDA.
Web3 is entering a hyper-specialized, abstracted app-chain era. New application-specific chains demand instant data access coupled with the need for industry-wide interoperability. Hyper-specialized applications also require the ability for complex data configurations that can present data for consumption within predefined parameters. With this understanding, it becomes extremely apparent that incorporating permissionless, chain-agnostic, and programmable designs into any standard supports unrestricted innovation, flexibility, and interoperability.
Where a smart contract network empowers developers to deploy any smart contract permissionlessly, SEDA empowers developers to permissionlessly deploy any data module with the additional benefits of configuration and industry-wide transport.
The Need For Web3 Industry Standards
The lack of industry standards is the catalyst for Web3 fragmentation. The industry cannot interoperate as ecosystems are built using different logic, languages, and standards, creating the siloed tech stacks we are trying to solve today. This fragmentation complicates user experience, forcing them to manage multiple accounts, wallets, and gas tokens across various ecosystems. Web3 is building towards real adoption that stems from the application layer. The industry risks stalling until the challenges that fracture Web3 UI/UX and ecosystem interoperability are solved.
To solve current challenges, SEDA envisions industry standards as the framework for making Web3 usable globally. Much like the TCP/IP standard was adopted for Web2 development to facilitate how data is exchanged, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received, SEDA is leading a similar standard to support the data requirements for all of Web3.
To appreciate the need for standards, imagine that the TCP/IP standard was never adopted, and each internet browser was built on its own standards. Users would be forced to use specific browsers to access specific websites. How usable would Web2 be if we had to have individual accounts across multiple browsers and be required to know which pages are accessible by which browsers? This highlights the current fragmented state of Web3 and showcases the demand for a data access, transport, and configuration standard that can unify Web3 into one usable, interoperable ecosystem.
Achieving these standards in a decentralized environment is challenging because there is no central authority to enforce them. The Web3 community must collectively recognize and adopt standards that benefit the entire industry. Initiatives like the CAKE framework for chain abstraction, which includes SEDA, indicate a growing recognition of the need for Web3 standards. Competition can be a natural factor that leads to a lack of collaboration in new industries. However, SEDA’s design principles above mitigate competition by enhancing current infrastructure models and improving the building experience for new developers. The essence of any good standard is that it benefits current and future projects, promoting collaboration and connectivity over competition.
Mainnet Rollout And Next Steps Towards Standardization
SEDA is beginning a very exciting development sprint that will launch our standard across 240+ active and any future chains. As a company, we have maintained consistency and discipline in the rollout thus far and will continue this approach for future mainnet versions.
Phase 1 - Deploying The Foundations
We are entering the first phase, as the engineering team is actively deploying the first overlay nodes, solvers, and modules to testnet, which will allow the first proof of concept (POC) integrations. During this phase, we will integrate with leading interoperability, RWA, identity, and RaaS partners to issue the first data requests and test initial features. With the success of POCs and testing, we will initiate the code freeze and final audits necessary for a feature-full mainnet V1.0. Explore the rollout in depth with our technical roadmap.
Phase 2 - Securing Industry Utilization
As we upgrade from mainnet beta to V1.0, our pipeline of partners will actively integrate into the network alongside deploying prover contracts to networks in need of day-one data access. This phase represents the opportunity for SEDA to showcase the design across a variety of use cases with both new and blue-chip projects. SEDA’s design inherently benefits any current or future Web3 builder. As such, this stage will highlight the beginning of the SEDA’s hyper-growth and adoption phase, establishing SEDA as a necessary building block for any protocol.
Phase 3 - Horizontal Scaling & Value Redistribution
With the initial pipeline integrated and actively issuing data requests across an array of ecosystems, we will begin to hyper-scale to any new network that can benefit from deploying a SEDA prover contract. SEDA’s modular nature and one-contract integration mechanisms allow the network to plug and play with any new blockchain deployed. As the quantity of data requests naturally increases with more integrations, the opportunity for Oracle extractable value (OEV) arises. During this phase, we will explore OEV capture and redistribution techniques. Capturing OEV can allow SEDA to dynamically redistribute value back to network participants, creating a closed-loop value cycle on the network.
We are thrilled about the upcoming phases and look forward to collaborating with both existing and future projects, playing a vital role in advancing Web3. Our community who have been with us from day one, joined along the way, or are yet to come, play a pivotal role in the network. We are thankful and excited to have you as a part of the first data standard for Web3. The SEDA founders and team can answer any questions in our Discord. Be sure to join all of our community links to participate in establishing Web3’s data standard, SEDA.
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