Back in 2015, the Oraclize team won a hackathon during the London FinTech Week with a blockchain-driven app that was supposed to automate the insurance claim process in case of a flight delay. However, the team soon recognized that having little experience with the insurance industry itself, there is little sense in pushing such a product forward. So, they’ve focused on the technology instead to deliver an app that would power blockchain-based projects regardless of the industry they serve.

At #D1Conf, Thomas Bertani of Oraclize shared the experience of building a vendor-agnostic solution that acts as a binder between an app on blockchain and the data source. Why would one even need it? Unlike traditional architectures that use APIs to retrieve data from a data source, decentralized architectures can’t rely on this approach due to technical reasons.

According to Thomas, this problem belongs to the realm of the walled garden — an environment that either grants access to any data available on the Internet or denies it. While, it may be hard to convince the data source provider to integrate with blockchain, the Oraclize system acts as a data-carrier to enable connection between your app and the data source.

“The oracle problem in the blockchain space is providing data, which comes from different context. In traditional architectures, there is a technical solution: one figures out which web API one wants, where the data comes from, and then just writes three lines of code that fetch the data. This is something you can’t do on blockchain simply.” — Thomas Bertani, Oraclize

Another question is why would anyone trust such a binder? Thomas highlighted the “authenticity proofs” — cryptographic means that ensure a trustful connection and prevent data tampering. For instance, the solution features “native signatures” that check data authenticity using a customized protocol defined by the IETF standard proposal.

To learn more about the trusted model underlying the Oraclize solution, as well as examples of real-life implementation, watch the video.

You can also check Thomas’s slides.