Oracle Empiric Network Launched $7M Funding Round: Analysis

The Oracle Empiric Network is a new decentralized blockchain on StarkNet which raised $7 million in a funding round led by Variant so let’s have a closer look at our latest cryptocurrency news.

Varient led the round for the new oracle which was created in partnership with starkWare and the Oracle Empiric Network will now focus on hiring and expanding as the co-founder Karl Oskar Schulz noted. Other participants in the round included data partenrs like Flow traders, CMT, Alameda, Gemini, and Jane Street as well as StarkWAre and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal. StarkNet is a zero-knowledge rollup product that addresses scalability issues for the ETH blockchain and was created by StarkWAre which reached an $8 billion valuation after the funding round in May. Empiric Network is co-founded by Jonas Nelle and Schulz and was created with the help of StarkWare.

The blockchain oracle connects smart contracts with the outside world to retrieve and send out information so these traditional oracles are centralized which means the off-chain nodes go out and find data from undisclosed sources and aggregate data off the blockchain. The result of the data like crypto prices or a sensor readout is the only publicly visible item. The lack of transparent data raised concerns about these oracles beucase errors with two data sources led to the path Network oracle incorrectly reporting that BTC crashed to $5,402. Schulz added:

“[Centralized oracles] you can kind of see, like Bank of America lending and borrowing. It works. You can trust it. But it’s not like Aave and Compound where the entire contract is on-chain. You can audit it.”

Empiric Network wanted to go to the source of decentralzied data which are crypto exchanges and market makers. The startup signed more partnerships with big names in the industry and most of them were investors in the current funding round that borough the proprietary data on-chain. The centralized oracle structure was more practical from a tech standpoint and avoided the transaction fees and high gas fees on the blockchain. StarkWAre’s creation of StarkNet provided low gas fees and improved transaction speeds with the ability to perform on-chain computations. The on-chain computations opened a path to move Defi metrics beyond the price feeds and to the types of data valued in the traditional fiannce space:

“Let’s give DeFi the data it needs to really mature and become better. And that’s computational data.”