In this post, I examine a few problems in existing Preconfirmation proposals. I introduce a new role: “The Preconfirmation Gateway” to completely abstract preconfirmations from users. I also explore a few examples of how the gateway may be able to facilitate coordination between preconfers.

In early civilizations, truth was based on myth. Observations of worldly phenomena were wrapped in symbolic narratives, religious beliefs, and ancient wisdom. Over time, humanity began to value objective measurements and reasoning, birthing disciplines such as science, mathematics, and logic.

A bit of background. This was a little idea that sprung up while I was working on a completely unrelated, much more complicated oracle-based project. I wrote a short paper on it the following weekend, and isn’t something I invested a whole lot of time in because I assumed something like it probably already exists. Just recently, I looked into things a bit more and asked some people who might know, and to my surprise, nothing seems to be along the same lines of what I’m proposing here.

Oracle project RedStone announced a partnership with Manta Network to provide price feeds for Manta Pacific's push oracle model. Manta Pacific will transition to zkEVM in the coming weeks to provide stronger security and improved user experience. This is a scalable and cost-effective environment for developers building the next generation of dApps. RedStone's push oracle plays a critical role on Manta, providing low-cost price feeds for L2 solutions.

Synthetix core contributor Noah Litvin has released a proposal for implementing ERC-7412 batch processing, which aims to allow smart contract engineers to integrate off-chain data by simply calling functions on the oracle contract. This standard preserves the composability between smart contracts and adjusts the economic incentives between data consumers and the oracle network, while relying on transaction batch processing (i.e. atomic multi-operation, multi-call) to automatically pre-verify data from decentralized oracle networks when necessary to execute transactions.

Oracle project Pyth Network announced the launch of BIFI/USD price feed data. Reportedly, $BIFI is the governance token of leading multi-chain yield optimizer Beefy, and BIFI/USD price information is now available for smart contract developers on 45 different blockchains.

A recent study highlights significant market misconduct in the DeFi sector. Data indicates that there have been at least 30 instances of price oracle manipulation. Sandwich attacks have led to an average decline in liquidity buyers' execution prices by 5.93%, while just-in-time liquidity attacks have resulted in an 85% decrease in liquidity providers' shares in pools, significantly impacting participants' financial interests. For more details, see: Xiong, X. et al. (2023). "Market Misconduct in Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Analysis, Regulatory Challenges and Policy Implications".

AI public chain Oraichain, which provides data economy and oracle services, has opened the OCH official token airdrop. Holders of INJ, KAVA, ATOM, ORAI, and OSMO tokens will be eligible to apply.

Venus Protocol officially announced on social media that the Binance oracle team has discovered and fixed the issue. However, due to caution, the snBNB market and two other markets with similar Binance oracle configurations (agEUR, stkBNB) will remain suspended. Other markets are still fully functional and unaffected. The suspension is just a precautionary temporary measure.

Venus Protocol posted on social media that due to a Binance Oracle price feedback issue in the isolated LST BNB pool today, the snBNB market is currently suspended. Out of caution, two other isolated markets (agEUR, stkBNB) are also suspended.