Moracle, a toolkit for building better decentralized applications
During the first Lisk Builders Community online meetup, Jackson Roberts presented his project Moracle, showing the current issues in blockchain world and how his solution can help developers to build oracle services to feed data to blockchain applications.
In reaching widespread use, blockchain ecosystem depends on centralized services, such as blockchain explorers, Indexing services, custodial wallets and Data APIs. Sometimes you have to trust them completely and, in some services, there is no incentive for high performance or reliability.
Moracle is a platform for extending Lisk decentralized apps with centralized services, without sacrificing reliability or immutability. This approach shows that this project is much more than an oracle platform, as it encourages developers to build indexing services or centralized front-ends to give new capabilities to decentralized apps, getting also paid for that service.
Moracle provides two things: a toolkit to allow developers to build centralized services (data APIs, explorers) for decentralized apps and to deploy those APIs in a decentralized global network for free; a service that allows node operators to run instances of Moracle services and get paid in MRCL tokens when people utilize those services.
Among its strength points, Moracle allows people to build their own oracle it in less than 100 lines of code, making it easier than state-of-the-art competitors like Oraclize/Provable.
The project is currently in alpha stage, as Jackson has been rewriting all the old Moracle code from December-January, after finding design limitations. At the moment the basic concepts have been implemented but are still not secure.
Answering to the question “are you exploring the integration into other blockchain platforms or do you purely focus on Lisk?” Jackson stated that he is primarily focused on Lisk and he intends to use it with the Lisk SDK, but as this is a transaction layer where people pay for data services, there are no technical limitations regarding other integrations.
As seen in the past, the game theory in oracle environment must be examined in depth: in order to avoid that attackers exploit the network and get control of fake data sources, the punishment must be always greater than the possible benefit in attacking the system. For this reason, Jackson is analyzing different solutions to solve this complex problem, taking inspirations from Chainlink (regarding the slashing approach).
Jackson is developing the entire project on his own but he is looking for additional developers that are interested to contribute in this open source initiative. If you want to get involved, write him on Discord (@Jax#4739).
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