RedStone, a modular blockchain oracle provider, successfully raised $15 million in a Series A round of funding led by Arrington Capital on July 2.

Other investors in the round include Kraken Ventures, White Star Capital, Spartan Group, Amber Group, SevenX Ventures, and IOSG Ventures.

In addition, angel investors such as Smokey the Bera and Homme Bera of Berachain, Mike Silagadze, Jozef Vogel and Rok Kopp of Ether.Fi, and Amir Forouzani, Jason Vranek and Christina Chen of Puffer Finance also participated. Not only that, on July 4, the Zircuit mainnet has taken over the emerging oracle project Redstone.

As the total locked value in the DeFi market has doubled over the past year, especially in the liquidity staking space which has accumulated over $50 billion in assets, the RedStone oracle has occupied a unique position in the market with its modular design.

It can be said that RedStone’s financing not only demonstrates investors’ confidence in its future development, but also marks the further consolidation of its position in the blockchain oracle field.

01. Next-generation oracle RedStone

RedStone is a modular blockchain oracle, similar to Chainlink and Pyth Network, but it stands out with the unique advantage of modular design.

RedStone founder and CEO Jakub Wojciechowski stressed that the modular architecture enables RedStone to launch on new networks faster and flexibly adjust traffic based on market demand.

As the wave of liquidity recollateralization tokens emerges, RedStone becomes the first oracle to support projects such as Ether.Fi, Renzo, Puffer, and Swell.

The main function of blockchain oracles is to provide real-world data to smart contracts, ensuring that smart contracts can make decisions based on the latest external information when they are executed. The advantage of modular oracles is that their components can be updated or replaced independently, thus ensuring scalability and integration on different blockchains.

RedStone’s integration with The Open Network (TON) is a prime example. Wojciechowski noted that TON’s architecture made the integration of oracles very onerous, but the RedStone team spent four months ensuring the end-to-end integration was completed smoothly.

According to DeFiLlama, RedStone is currently the fifth-largest blockchain oracle with a total value of approximately $3.5 billion.

RedStone was founded during the Arweave Chain Incubation Program in 2020 and currently supports more than 60 blockchains, including layer 1 and layer 2 networks such as Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Merlin Chain. In the future, RedStone also plans to support Berachain and Monad blockchains, and will launch its functionality as an Active Verification Service (AVS) on EigenLayer.

It is reported that RedStone has been promoting the on-demand approach for the past three years and is currently used on more than 40 L1 and L2, ahead of its competitors.

In the future, with the Dencun (EIP-4844) Ethereum upgrade, liquidity staking and re-staking, and the increase in L2 and Optimistic and ZK rollups, the demand for reliable price data across the industry will further surge. With its future-proof design, RedStone is poised to continue to lead in this rapidly evolving field.

02. What makes RedStone unique

The RedStone oracle takes a unique approach by storing non-standard data on Arweave and transmitting it to all EVM-compatible chains.

Oracles are a type of middleware that enables communication between blockchains and off-chain systems (such as data providers, cloud providers, IoT devices, and payment systems). Smart contracts on various blockchains, including Ethereum, can use data provided by oracles to decide whether to execute agreements or commands. Therefore, platforms and businesses that use smart contracts rely directly on oracles to obtain data from the outside world.

However, centralization and third-party oracles are not in line with the value of blockchain technology and decentralization. The uncertainty and asynchrony of external data make it difficult for nodes to reach consensus.

In addition, the risks of directly accessing an insecure external environment have also deterred many projects, which is the so-called oracle problem. The decentralized nature of blockchain makes it impossible to extract or push data from any external system. Blockchain nodes must be kept in isolated sandboxes, so they cannot directly access traditional services or generate data internally.

RedStone alleviates the problems faced by blockchain projects by providing flexible and affordable oracle solutions.

Its modular design is suitable for DeFi, similar to the L2 of blockchain, enabling it to provide push and pull oracle data services to multiple EVM and non-EVM ecosystems, Rollups, and various application chains.

RedStone’s data is cryptographically signed by the provider and can be verified on any chain that supports basic cryptographic primitives.

RedStone leverages Arweave’s new generation blockchain storage to store large amounts of data at low cost, enabling it to process more data at a higher update frequency.

Unlike traditional oracles, RedStone’s data is stored on Arweave, and the node and partner network provides them to DeFi projects in the form of a decentralized public cache. EVM-Connector allows this data to be injected into the target chain only when needed, ensuring the integrity and security of the data.

In addition, RedStone allows multiple data providers to enter the blockchain ecosystem, each of which can apply different aggregation rules to provide services tailored to the needs of DeFi protocols. RedStone's design also ensures the integrity of the data, and data providers need to pledge RedStone tokens as collateral to ensure that they can continue to operate and provide high-quality data.

Through its innovative approach, RedStone not only provides a secure, flexible and efficient alternative to existing oracle solutions, but also brings reliable real-world data support to application scenarios such as DeFi and smart contracts. As the blockchain ecosystem continues to develop, RedStone will continue to maintain its leading position in the oracle field.

summary

RedStone is hailed as the next-generation oracle, and looking at its performance in 2023 and early 2024, the trading volume data has been impressive.

This is of course inseparable from the RedStone team's hard work in the past bear market. Through carefully planned activities, uninterrupted integration cooperation, continuous polishing and exploration of product innovation, they have become the biggest contributor to the growth of Arweave's transaction volume and have gradually gained market recognition.

In the first half of 2024, RedStone delivered a good report card. We will wait and see whether it will become a leading project on par with Chainlink in the oracle track in the future.