An Overview of the Cross-Chain Oracle Middleware Supra: Network Architecture and Functional System

Compiled by: GaryMa, Wu Says Blockchain

Recently, the cross-chain oracle project Supra has attracted significant attention in the airdrop and KYC provider circles. One of the main reasons for the influx of new users is its impressive funding background. Supra has completed over $24 million in funding during its private placement round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Animoca Brands, HashKey, and others.

According to data from CrunchBase, Supra has undergone nearly 10 rounds of financing, with a total funding amount reaching $47.9 million, starting from the first round of financing at the end of 2020. However, the official announcement has only confirmed the latest $24 million round of funding.

From a funding background perspective, Supra undoubtedly carries a halo, but it seems to have been relatively unheard of in the oracle space before? With these curiosities and questions, let's explore this project together.

Introduction to Supra

First of all, Supra is not just a cross-chain oracle product; it proposes the concept of an "IntraLayer" middleware layer. Supra will serve as a middleware network, integrating its series of solutions—oracle, VRFs, and native cross-chain protocols—into a shared secure infrastructure, connecting L1 and L2, Web2 and Web3.

1. DORA Oracle

Regarding oracle functionality, it is perhaps the most familiar aspect for industry users, with common use cases being the secure on-chain introduction of cryptocurrency price data, often regarded as a bridge connecting on-chain and off-chain data. Currently, Supra's representative solution in this area is the DORA (Distributed ORacle Agreement) oracle protocol.

When there are multiple information sources that do not sign their data, we need a mechanism to aggregate all this information into a single representative value and place it on the blockchain, while ensuring a certain level of Byzantine fault tolerance. Byzantine faults refer to nodes that are either unresponsive or can maliciously violate the protocol.

In the absence of any Byzantine faults, a single node can obtain information from multiple sources; however, in the case of Byzantine faults, we will need multiple nodes.

When all nodes can provide a value as input, if some of those nodes are Byzantine, the remaining honest nodes will reach consensus and choose a single representative value to challenge, a process known as the DORA (Distributed Oracle Agreement) problem.

Setting aside technical details, the DORA oracle protocol has the following highlights:

• It considers the possibility of Byzantine faults occurring in data sources;
• The DORA protocol is resilient to a higher percentage of Byzantine faults (51%) rather than the traditional 33% fault tolerance limit.
• The introduction of randomness in the design significantly limits the attack capabilities of adversaries;

2. VRF Randomness

The functionality of VRFs is essentially what we commonly refer to as randomness. Randomness is one of the important factors in achieving security in computational systems and is an indispensable part of any public key cryptographic scheme design. For example, generating true random numbers is crucial for successfully implementing cryptographic methods such as multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs. Randomness calculations can also be applied for other purposes, such as selecting winners in online lotteries or setting game prizes, as well as other types of random selection processes. Currently, Supra's representative solution in this area is the DVRF (Distributed Verifiable Random Functions) distributed verifiable randomness scheme. Although using DVRF has slight disadvantages in computational efficiency, communication costs, and system complexity compared to centralized VRF, its security benefits significantly outweigh its potential shortcomings. Most importantly, distributed VRF truly embodies the core of blockchain technology, which is the spirit of decentralization.

3. HyperNova Cross-Chain Communication Protocol

The most challenging part of cross-chain oracles is native communication with multiple chains. Native cross-chain communication means using the cryptographic signature algorithms of both chains to communicate, allowing smart contracts to verify the data provided to them. Many chains use different cryptographic technologies—thus, this is not easy.

For the cross-chain functionality, Supra has built HyperNova—a "bridge-less" cross-chain design based on chain-to-chain cryptographic consensus, making interoperability between blockchains more secure, reliable, and scalable.

As long as Supra can "detect" the active validator set of Ethereum, it can validate most of its consensus protocols. However, to relay this information from Ethereum to Supra, a relay node needs to be added, which will simply forward events from the source chain (Ethereum) while requiring Supra's validators to explicitly verify the validity of these events. In short, Supra verifies Ethereum's L1 consensus cryptographically.

In the "multi-signature model," trust is required in the majority of the cross-chain bridge nodes to be honest and always do the right thing, while in the "relay model," there is no need to trust any relay bridge nodes to ensure the correctness of the relayed information; it only needs to ensure that relevant events on the source chain are not missing, censored, or delayed when passed to the target chain. Therefore, the requirement to trust the majority of honest nodes in the traditional "multi-signature model" is reduced to just needing one honest node in the "relay model," which is also known as the "bridge-less" model.

Similarly, in the HyperNova "bridge-less" model, it relies solely on relay nodes to forward data rather than verifying the correctness of the data. Thus, only one honest node is needed to ensure liveness and censorship resistance. Additionally, this can avoid multi-round consensus, achieving faster execution.

Highlights of Supra

1. Ecological Landscape

Clearly, Supra's narrative is quite expansive; it is not simply an oracle protocol. Supra has its own underlying blockchain, namely a decentralized oracle network (DON); at the same time, it positions itself as an "IntraLayer," vertically integrating three major functions: oracle, randomness, and cross-chain. This comprehensive design makes Supra's first-layer blockchain a self-sufficient system, allowing users to conduct most on-chain activities without leaving the system or needing to obtain real-world application data from off-chain through third-party oracles. Moreover, Supra can become a powerful interoperability hub, with other blockchain ecosystems serving as radiation nodes from this center, enabling convenient connections in a secure and decentralized manner.

2. Research Capability

Without technical research capability, even the best theoretical solutions sound like boasting. However, upon further understanding, it is found that Supra has accumulated certain experience and research capabilities in its field.

In 2017, the team established the Entropy Foundation, headquartered in Switzerland, aiming to expand the capabilities of smart contracts and oracles, with Supra Oracles being the flagship project of the Entropy Foundation. Its team members consist of professionals with rich experience in cryptography, enterprise integration, IoT solutions, DeFi, innovative consensus modeling, randomness research, and oracle research.

The Chief Research Officer is Dr. Kate, the primary author of KZG Commitments (also known as Kate Commitments), a technology that forms the foundation of most ZK Proof systems today and laid the groundwork for breakthroughs in Ethereum L2 scaling strategies.

It is also worth mentioning that Supra is not a new project; it has been in development for nearly five years since its inception, during which the industry has gone through a complete cycle. However, Supra has clearly not rushed to launch products or tokens but has chosen to focus on deepening research and development.

Supra's Progress and Thoughts

Supra is currently in the Alpha phase of its mainnet.

The DORA Oracle has already supported over 40 testnets and has successfully launched on 13 mainnets. This oracle now supports 120 price data sources, providing over 1.6 million data updates daily, with latency as low as 5-6 seconds, with optimization goals of 2-4 seconds.

The Verifiable Random Function (DVRF) has been deployed on over 25 testnets and has successfully launched on mainnets such as Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, DFK Chain, Doge Chain, and Klaytn.

As for the cross-chain communication protocol "HyperNova" and decentralized IFTTT (if-this-then-that) automation services, they are also set to be released soon.

Overall, Supra exudes a sense of accumulated depth and potential. The theoretically impressive network architecture and functional system, combined with the IntraLayer narrative, indeed make it something to look forward to. Additionally, the recent heat in the RWA space and the industry's long-term optimism for this sector represent incremental demand for future oracle projects. Of course, whether Supra's theoretical high expectations can be realized and whether future ecological partners can develop is crucial, and we will wait and see.