ORIGINALLY POSTED: 16th May 2022

On April 27th 2022, we held the first Flare Community Call. Huge thanks to everyone who tuned in to watch it live — and for those unable to join, please read this post for a quick roundup of content covered, with videos of each specific section of the call.

As Flare accelerates towards main network launch and beyond, this will be the first of many such calls and meet ups. The calls are designed to provide the Flare community with demos, guides and technology updates, as well as a chance to ask questions of the team.

The Community Call

The full recording and presentation deck are below. Scroll further down to jump straight to the specific segments on bridging, the State Connector or the FTSO.

Solving the bridge problem

Hugo Philion, co-founder and CEO of Flare, explained how Flare can solve the $17 Billion bridge problem with:

The State Connector — the first new interoperability primitive.
Layer Cake — a fast, fully-insured, and decentralized bridging protocol for smart contract networks.

Current bridging solutions are built with one of two existing interoperability primitives:

Multi-signature wallets, which are centralized and take custody of user tokens.
Light client relays, which must be slow to be safe.

Flare’s State Connector is a new interoperability primitive, built from the ground up with decentralization, speed and security at its core. This new technology is what makes the Layer Cake bridging system possible.

Layer Cake key features:

Universal Bridging — safely delivering assets between any two smart contract chains.
Linear Scaling — just 101 smart contracts required to connect 100 chains, compared to 4950 direct bridges.
Unifying Liquidity (rather than fragmenting) — for any given token and destination chain, the output is always the same, no matter the origin chain. This means the Layer Cake contract on Solana will output the same Solana-ETH whether the origin ETH is being bridged from Near, Cosmos, Polkadot, or other chains. Other solutions would result in Cosmos-Solana-ETH or even Near-Cosmos-Solana-ETH if the token has transited multiple bridges to its destination. This level of fragmentation dramatically diminishes utility.

State Connector demo

“The State Connector is Flare’s oracle for getting the state of any other system, whether that be a blockchain, or a database. It’s really unlike anything else that’s been built before. It’s the first real oracle with a real consensus protocol integrated.”

The State Connector can come to consensus on the state of any deterministic source of data, blockchain and non-blockchain. This means the data must be binary in nature and have a yes/no answer. For example, did team X win on date Y, or has blockchain transaction Z happened. This makes it possible to seamlessly and trustlessly use Web2 data in Web3 dapps, solving the oracle problem and opening the door to a new era of blockchain utility.

Flare Time Series Oracle

The FTSO has been live on Songbird since September 2021. It provides a method of relaying live price information to the Flare ecosystem in a rapidly updating, decentralized manner. In the future, the technology may also be used to relay any other data that varies over time.

The system leverages Proof of Stake to enable any token holder to delegate their tokens to a chosen price provider in return for yield — and without lock-up.

FTSO details:

There are currently 100 data providers relaying live token price data to the FTSO.
The data providers are contributing stable and reliable prices.
Strong competition amongst the providers drives high performance.

Thank you to everyone who joined for the inaugural Flare Community Call. We’re already looking forward to the next one, so make sure you join our Discord and follow us on Twitter for updates.

Many thanks,

The Flare Network Team