The Kaiko and iExec Price Feed: Secure Pricing for Ethereum Smart Contracts Kaiko Follow Apr 7 · 3 min read

Stable, reliable and secure price feeds are essential components in the nascent DeFi ecosystem. Cryptocurrency price information is distributed across dozens of exchanges, with varying discrepancies between markets that are in constant flux. Thus, a single reliable price for an asset is required to value collateral in decentralized applications such as smart contracts.

In the past, unreliable price feeds have proven problematic in the DeFi ecosystem. Malactors have exploited low quality pricing information, leveraging unreliable data sources for financial gain.

Because of the inherent complexities involved with aggregating thousands of independent price feeds, data providers play an important role in the DeFi ecosystem. Kaiko, a digital asset data provider founded in 2014, and iExec, a DeFi marketplace for cloud resources, have come together to develop a price feed to be leveraged in Ethereum smart contracts.

One of the difficulties in developing a decentralized price feed is the inherent problem of security. When you leave a smart-contract (known to be a ‘secure’ environment) to connect to the traditional Web 2 environment, there are numerous potential security risks.

iExec has developed a solution to mitigate these risks.

iExec enables smart contracts to overcome three major limitations of the Ethereum blockchain: scalability, privacy, and connectivity. iExec has developed what is known as a TEE, a Trusted Execution Environment, which is a secure area in a machine’s CPU that guarantees code execution. TEE’s ensure that code cannot be tampered with because its logic is implemented at the hardware level, meaning the TEE can’t access the host machine and vice versa.

iExec’s TEE ensures that exiting a smart contract to access information provided by the traditional Web 2 infrastructure is secure.

Combining Kaiko’s data feeds with iExec’s confidential computing framework ensures that Ethereum smart contracts have access to stable and reliable price feeds.

Unlike other decentralized price feeds, the Kaiko-iExec price feed is customizable to maximize resiliency. Kaiko’s selection of data feeds from over 85 exchanges and thousands of currency pairs ensures that pricing data can fit the smart contract user’s use-case.

The Kaiko-iExec price feed is ready for use today by any Ethereum smart contract.

View a demo of the DeFi price feed UI in action:

Interested in learning how you can leverage the Kaiko-iExec price feed? Reach out at hello@kaiko.com or contact@iex.ec

About Kaiko

Founded in 2014, Kaiko is a market data provider in the blockchain-based digital assets space, providing institutional investors and market participants with enterprise-grade data infrastructure. Kaiko collects, normalizes, stores, and distributes digital assets market data via a livestream WebSocket, REST API, and cloud-based CSV Data Feed, to which clients connect to build data-driven applications. Kaiko;s raw trade data, order books, and aggregates cover 20,000+ currency pairs across 85+ exchanges, with new markets added every day. With over five years of historical data, Kaiko provides the most extensive digital asset datasets in the industry. Kaiko caters for the market data needs of professional investors, academic researchers, regulators, security issuers, third-party platforms and exchanges.

About iExec

The iExec decentralized network offers ethereum applications access to off-chain computation and data. ‘Off-chain computing’ means offloading computation to a network of decentralized computing nodes. ‘Off-chain data’ refers to connecting smart contract to secure and verifiable data from the ‘real’ world. Meaning, smart contracts connected to traditional Web2 APIs. At its base, iExec is a decentralized marketplace for cloud computing resources, deployed on Ethereum.