Proposal To Add Redstone Oracle for DOLA on Base

Summary

Subscribe to Redstone price feed for DOLA to support third party DOLA lending market opportunities on Base.

Why Inverse Needs a DOLA Price Feed

  • We are in the proposal stage with multiple lending markets where DOLA will be proposed as a borrow-only or collateral asset. While Chainlink remains the “industry standard” for price feeds, volume and other requirements make a Chainlink oracle for DOLA unavailable in the near term. Redstone, a Chainlink rival, is increasingly accepted among popular lending markets as an alternative price feed and a DOLA feed from Redstone can be built and supported for a fee.
  • Protocols where DOLA is proposed just as a borrow-only asset (not collateral) to-date have also responded that there is a strict requirement for a Chainlink or Redstone price feed and proposals relying on hard-coding DOLA to $1 will be downvoted.

About Redstone

Audits

Terms

Setup Fee:

  • $25k fixed, one-time fee. This covers the setup of a price feed including the development, data sources setup, and infrastructure setup, e.g. relayers.

Infrastructure Maintenance:

  • Base fee for maintaining the feed on one network: $1k/month
  • Launching the feed on an additional network: additional $1,000/month per network

Gas Fees:

  • 🏛 Classic Model | RedStone Documentation
  • On Ethereum mainnet: ~$1k-$1.5k/month at standard Gas Costs levels (estimate) but can get pricier if there is a lot of volatility on the market.
  • On L2s: ~$150-$300/month per network in Gas Costs.

Analysis

  • A Redstone DOLA price feed for Base only would require approximately $40,600 in one-time setup and monthly maintenance and gas costs over 12 months, or an average of approximately $3,400 per month. Prelim analysis, with a hypothetical four chains for purposes of analysis, here: Redstone Math - Google Sheets

  • The benefits of a Redstone price feed for Inverse on Base include:

    1. Partnerships that lead to new sources of demand for DOLA, lowering liquidity costs and improving FiRM lending capacity
    2. Opportunities to announce partnerships with well-known third-party lending protocols, attracting still other lending protocols across chains
    3. Redstone oracle serves as a proxy for quality or reliability which enhances the DOLA brand.

Proposal

  1. Authorize the Growth Working Group to spend up to $32,800 over six months on a Redstone DOLA oracle.

It’s become increasingly evident that integrating a Redstone Oracle for DOLA represents a significant opportunity, especially as we await the availability of a Chainlink price feed. However, I believe we should reconsider our strategy concerning the deployment of these oracles across multiple chains from the outset.

Price feeds should only be set up once clear opportunities for DOLA are identified on that specific chain (that require it). This approach not only ensures that our resources are allocated efficiently but also allows us to assess the potential return on investment before committing to the additional costs associated with maintaining multiple feeds.

Furthermore, considering the high gas costs on Ethereum L1 and the availability of accurate USD feeds for DOLA through existing Curve liquidity pools, I propose we do not proceed with an Ethereum L1 price feed at this time. Instead, our efforts could be more strategically allocated toward platforms like Gearbox, Compound and Grace on Base, where DOLA has a lot of opportunity for integrations due to the very large liquidity achieved on Aerodrome.

By focusing our resources on establishing a single price feed on Base, we not only concentrate our efforts on a platform with imminent opportunities but also potentially reduce our initial budget to approximately $33,000 for the first six months, and only $7.8k for the following 6 months (assuming no additional oracles added). This targeted approach not only serves as a more cost-effective strategy but also allows us to test the effectiveness of a Redstone Oracle for DOLA in a controlled environment. While the success of our endeavours on Gearbox, Compound and Grace remains uncertain, a dedicated feed on Base would still provide valuable insights and serve as a compelling proof of concept.

1 Like

Edited to limit proposal only to Base. Adjusted maintenance fee to updated price of $1,000 per additional chain.

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Gm. From my understanding Redstone is an end-to-end centralized oracle.

Would the redstone team care to elaborate the following questions:

  1. who collects the data? In this case the DOLA price.
  2. who runs the oracles?
  3. are there any multisigs that can impact the oracles? If so who has control over those?

I’m also interested in the current state and not some future promise of decentralisation.

Best.

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@patb could you elaborate on the above alternatively?

Covered in Redstone docs here Data Providers | RedStone Documentation

We actually recommend a hard $1.00 ceiling be set on DOLA as a borrow-only asset as a safety precaution but partners have indicated their requirement to instead use an oracle and will accept Redstone. There are no DOLA feds planned for any of these third party lending markets today so bad debt risk to DOLA in these implementations is zero.

Hi @patb. I’m quite unsure if this industry simply refuses to actually verify how things work before they’re implementing it or just doing so because of some presumed reputation a protocol apparently has.

Redstone collects all data centrally. When they say data sources, it’s simply APIs they’re calling themselves (otherwise congrats on getting the European Central Bank and even Chainlink on board!).

Eveything is literally hosted by them. DOLA is a mainly on-chain trading asset so redstone would be collecting the on-chain data themselves (from other data businesses like CoinGecko, kaiko or even other oracles like Chainlink), saving it on their own “data distribution layer” (again operated by themselves) and making it available over their own API. You can quite easily check this on their own documentation and the respective GitHub repo it links to. (Please note how every single data point is literally them)

This data then needs to find its way on-chain through oracles. These are again all operated by Redstone directly. You can even verify that on their own website (check nodes section).

By all means, go ahead and integrate a completely centralized solution that can be killed by a single team at either the data collection or on-chain publication process, but don’t say that people haven’t warned you.

There is a reason you see people from MakerDAO make posts like these.

https://x.com/chroniclelabs/status/1772616535309160595?s=46&t=aRdEi_d8jttLkTojlCOoLA

https://x.com/chroniclelabs/status/1772616537607713047?s=46&t=aRdEi_d8jttLkTojlCOoLA

Guess who they’re referring to.

Best