connect

Connect

A general purpose price oracle leveraging ABCI++. Please visit our docs page for more information!

Connect uses Vote Extensions to create a hyperperformant, extremely secure mechanism for aggregating off-chain data onto a blockchain. It is used by many of the highest-performance decentralized applications today. If you would like to integrate Connect to power your use case, please contact us on our Discord.

[!NOTE] Connect is business-licensed software under BSL, meaning it requires a license to use or reference. It is source viewable, but reach out to us on Discord if you are interested in integrating! We are limiting the number of chains we work with to seven in 2024. We apologize if we run out of capacity.

Install

$ go install github.com/skip-mev/connect/v2

Overview

The connect repository is composed of the following core packages:

• abci - This package contains the vote extension, proposal, and preblock handlers that are used to broadcast oracle data to the network and to store it in the blockchain.
• oracle - This package contains the main oracle that aggregates external data sources before broadcasting it to the network. You can reference the provider documentation here to get a high level overview of how the oracle works.
• providers - This package contains a collection of websocket and API based data providers that are used by the oracle to collect external data.
• x/oracle - This package contains a Cosmos SDK module that allows you to store oracle data on a blockchain.
• x/marketmap - This package contains a Cosmos SDK module that allows for market configuration to be stored and updated on a blockchain.

Validator Usage

To read how to run the oracle as a validator based on the chain, please reference the validator documentation.

Developer Usage

To run the oracle, run the following command.

$ make start-all-dev

This will:

1. Start a blockchain with a single validator node. It may take a few minutes to build and reach a point where vote extensions can be submitted.
2. Start the oracle side-car that will aggregate prices from external data providers and broadcast them to the network. To check the current aggregated prices on the side-car, you can run curl localhost:8080/connect/oracle/v1/prices.
3. Host a prometheus instance that will scrape metrics from the oracle sidecar. Navigate to http://localhost:9091 to see all network traffic and metrics pertaining to the oracle sidecar. Navigate to http://localhost:8002 to see all application-side oracle metrics.
4. Host a profiler that will allow you to profile the oracle side-car. Navigate to http://localhost:6060 to see the profiler.
5. Host a grafana instance that will allow you to visualize the metrics scraped by prometheus. Navigate to http://localhost:3000 to see the grafana dashboard. The default username and password are admin and admin, respectively.

After a few minutes, run the following commands to see the prices written to the blockchain:

# access the blockchain container
$ docker exec -it compose-blockchain-1 bash

# query the price of bitcoin in USD on the node
$ (compose-blockchain-1) ./build/connectd q oracle price BTC USD

Result:

decimals: "8"
id: "0"
nonce: "44"
price:
  block_height: "46"
  block_timestamp: "2024-01-29T01:43:48.735542Z"
  price: "4221100000000"

To stop the oracle, run the following command:

$ make stop-all-dev

Metrics

We have an extensive suite of metrics available to validators and chain operators. Please join our discord if you want help setting them up!

Metrics relevant to the oracle service's health + operation are detailed in our docs, here!