ethereum studio – Blockchainers

Create your own Oracle with Ethereum Studio and oraclize.it

This is a follow-up post to Gambling with Oracles and describes the technical part for the implementation of an Oracle with oraclize.it

People told us last time that we had not really created an binary option. This might be true and to not confuse the reader and also to introduce just another cool use case and link to current events, we are going to bet on the winner of the EURO 2016 soccer championship.

As you see from the posting date, the championship is already finished and the winner is well known, it is Portugal.

So we can just create a static Oracle to make things easier, we will define the Oracle call in our betting contract and on calling update(), the winner will be determined, which is the static json {“winner”: “portugal”}.

You can call bet(winner) with exactly 1 ETH and on calling claim() you will get nothing or (loseBets + winBets) / (numberOfParticipantsWhoBetOnWinner), eg. 3+2/2 = 2.5

Prerequisites

You will need to sign up for the ether.camp Studio and check out the corresponding github project in the terminal, follow the instructions in the README.

Starting the Oracle

After starting the web server, you can access the “Oracle” with https://yourid.by.ether.camp:8080/web/euro2016winner.json which redirects to the file web/eu2016winner.json in your project.

You can test the data retrieval in the Studio, just choose the Oraclize tab, Test query, “URL” and put json(…).winner around the URL.

oracle1

That’s it, by clicking “Test” you should get the result “portugal”. So now the Oracle Smart Contract can call your Oracle datasource and submit the result via callback to your contract.

Obviously, a real Oracle should be a little more dynamic, but for testing purposes this Oracle is enough. You can change the answer by stopping the web server, changing the file manually and restarting the server.

To avoid duplicating information here, please consult the documentation for the ether.camp Studio IDE for actual usage of the sandbox. Remember to give enough value (at least 0.1 Ether in Wei: 100000000000000000) for the update() call, but also 1 Ether in Wei (1000000000000000000) for the bet()-calls, otherwise it will not work.

Deploying the betting contract to Morden

The contract.sol contains the complete contract, it imports some helper classes and the oraclize-API, which, depending on the deployed environment, is instantiated with the corresponding contract address.

In the README you will see the local environment sample, but also the Morden example. To deploy the contract to the testnet Morden, you will have to get Ether first, which is really simple in Morden.

Note: you have to set the networkID to Morden in the constructor of the contract before deploying:

 function FinalWinner() {
   oraclize_setNetwork(networkID_morden);
 }

After deploying, you can click on the Transaction-Hash in the Transaction-Tab, which automatically opens the deployed contract in morden.ether.camp.

To be able to invoke the contract in ether.camp, you will have to upload the sources of the contract, however, there is a problem with inline assembly at the time of writing this post. Therefore we added a special file (for-upload-to-ether-camp-morden-as-source-only.sol-not.executable) for uploading in the root of the github-project, this contract is just for this purpose and is not executable.

In Morden, each call should be done with value 1 Ether, the bet-calls will throw; otherwise and the update call needs some for the call of Oraclize, which costs Ether for each call (consult pricing on oraclize.it).

Gambling with Oracles

How to create a provably-fair high risk financial product with live data feeds provided by oracles.

Introducing Binary Options

This time, we gonna gamble. We will construct a financial product, more specifcally: a binary option, European style, cash-or-nothing.

Binary options are “a type of option in which the payoff is structured to be either a fixed amount of compensation if the option expires in the money, or nothing at all if the option expires out of the money” [1], therefore cash-or-nothing. European style means the option “can only be exercised at the end of its life, at its maturity” [2].

This is a high risk product which is “most likely traded over the Internet on platforms existing outside of regulations” [1], so “the customer is betting against the broker, who is acting as a bucket shop.” [3]

In general, this means that “because these platforms operate outside of regulations, investors are at greater risk of fraud” [1] and “manipulation of price data to cause customers to lose is common” [1].

BinaryOption (3) So, in contrast to common regulated financial products we have a really comprehensible option, which is mostly valued as high-risk, because there is a real clash of interests if the broker also evaluates the stock against the strike price and thus is highly motivated to manipulate this evaluation.

Smart Contracts to the Rescue

So, can smart contracts help here? You bet! The blockchain is trust-less, so you just don’t have to trust anyone, be it broker or bucket shop or both, but you can just prove if everything’s ok.

If a smart contract guarantees you that you will get 195% if you predict correctly and 0% if not, this rule has to be implemented in the contract.

Meeting the Oracle

Given that we can trust the contract, it should be easy to implement a binary option like this:

After deploying the contract, you have 1 hour to invest Ether on calls or puts on the contracts conditions (eg. DAX is above the strike price in 1 hour). After the 1 hour offering period, it's rien ne va plus, no purchase of calls or puts are possible. At this point of time, the current value of the DAX is stored. After exactly 1 hour the DAX is evaluated against the stored DAX value.

if the value is above or equal to the stored value, all calls are returned 195% of their investment, all puts lose all invested money
if the value is below the stored value, all puts are returned 195% of their investment, all calls lose all invested money

Sounds simple? It is!

You can easily prove that the contract actually implements the described rules, but there are two problems: how does the contract know the DAX spot? Contracts in Ethereum intentionally cannot connect to the outside world, therefore the outside world has to call the contract and provide the necessary data. Who tells the contract the exact time it has to retrieve the DAX spot? There must be some callback mechanism, since Ethereum smart contracts are not able to call themselves, have a Daemon, Threading etc.

Let’s gonna oraclize.it

There is a startup solving this problems in a elegant way: oraclize.it

You should look up and understand how oraclize.it works and helps us to solve our problems. In short, callbacks are used by oraclize.it and you can determine the exact data feed of the data which oraclize.it will provide at a certain point of time to our contract. BinaryOptionOrale (1) Here the two problems are addressed:

The contract has to provide a callback for the oracle to call. The data feed is configured when the callback is provided, as well as the time interval.
The oracle facilitates a scheduling to call the provided smart contract callback at the configured time interval.

Both solutions require the user and the contract owner to actually trust the “trusted datasource” (the contract’s user can decide if he trusts this datasource) and the oracle itself to have a working scheduling and not to manipulate the data. In contrast to the “broker” above, the oracle has no interest in manipulating the data.

However, oraclize.it not only offers a service, but even more defines a protocol, so there will most likely be more than one oracle to choose from to offer redundancy in the future.

Building Binary Options in Ethereum Studio

…in the next post.

Realizing how long this post already is, we decided to split the tutorial and the theoretical part. The tutorial will follow soon! Please let us know in the comments if you’d like to have this tutorial and what you expect of it.

Meanwhile, try out this ether.camp tutorial which describes the integration of oraclize.it into Ethereum Studio.

images:
[casino kurhaus] Kurhaus Casino by fr4dd under CC
[binary] binary by christine592 under CC
[oracle] Oracle by Bob Doran under CC

icons:
icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Ethereum Development Tools – an Evaluation Matrix

Developing for the Ethereum World Computer – Revisited

When comparing development methods for and in the Ethereum space, it becomes obvious how brilliant the people involved actually are: as a developer, you have several choices of great development tools and environments, even though the development process for Dapps is quite difficult: it involves different “layers” (frontend with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and backend with the Ethereum blockchain), different languages (JavaScript for frontend dev, Solidity for backend dev), different contexts (public/private/proprietary blockchains).

Taking these different contexts into account, evaluating the different development environments is only possible by identifying the different aspects and value them according to the own preferred usage.

Aspects of Dapp Development

Ethereum-docs-intro (1)

Solidity Development / Solidity Environment
User can edit Solidity content in a text editor, there should be at least syntax highlighting.
JavaScript/Web Environment
User can edit JavaScript, HTML and CSS in a text editor and gets different levels of support like syntax highlighting, code completion, etc.
IDE
User can not only edit code (Solidity and JavaScript), but can also compile, check into a versioning system, debug and deploy to some operating environment.
Versioning
Versioning is supported, eg. by enabling the user to check edited content into a versioning system, show diffs, apply patches, etc.
Collaboration
Modification of code by multiple users is supported, at minimum support of different versions of the code is possible to avoid conflicts.
Deployment
Working code can be deployed to some environment which enables the user and other users to use the working program (a sandbox or real blockchain and a web application server for JavaScript like node.js and static content like HTML and CSS files)

A first Categorization and a Teaser

We will summarize in short the different aspects which are supported in these development environment: Solidity Browser / Ethereum Wallet, Truffle and Ethereum Studio.

This is also a teaser for the upcoming blog posts, which will explain the environments in detail.

Solidity Browser / Ethereum Wallet

In terms of architectural styles, both environments represent minimalism. They are slim and handy, easy to use and fast to learn, but lack some functionality if real development “in the large” is necessary.

Ethereum-docs-browser — Solidity Browser, only Solidity Development, no Environment, ie. not even save of file is possible

Ethereum-docs-wallet — Ethereum Wallet (Mist), only Solidity Environment, no save of file possible, but integrated compiler

Truffle (also: Embark, Dapple)

Truffle satisfies all aspects which a usual client application can offer, therefore you can think of Gothik, it is mighty, almost lavish, and well structured. If you come from web development in JavaScript with node.js, who should look no further, this environment is for you (at least if you don’t need support for online development, versioning and multi user directly in your environment, but use external tools like Git and testrpc for these aspects).

Ethereum-docs-truffle — Truffle, also Embark and Dapple: web development environments, usefully extended with Solidity support

Ethereum Studio, the all-in-one-solution

The Ethereum Studio, in our opinion, resembles Deconstructivism. Why’s that? Because here all aforementioned aspects of software development are taken apart and are reconstructed to fit perfectly to Dapp development. This is an all-in-one-solution which we can really recommend, with two limitation: you have to agree to a uncertain pricing model (it just doesn’t exist right now, you can still test the product) and a “closed” environment, which works seemless and smooth, but expects you to let in to this tool and the development process.

But no other tool lets you test your code this easy with manual and even unit testing built into the environment.

Ethereum-docs-studio — The all-in-one-solution, steep learning curve, but all you will ever need in multi user, versionized, unit tested Dapp development

Stay tuned for the detailed explanations of these great development tools.