Happy to fill you in on the efforts with Charli3 to date.
We have been working with Charli3 from before launch to now to help them develop a viable product and service agreement for the Indigo DAO to consider. There have been some challenges around getting specifications of their system and a viable cost model. We initially received proposals with high cost that have ranged all the way up to $30k/mo for various Charli3 feeds. These costs were to Labs and not users and were higher than what the largest provider in the industry (Chainlink) assesses, so it was an easy decision for us to hold off and put more focus towards other solutions in the ecosystem. We hoped that Charli3 would evolve their pricing model and flesh out their specifications, which they seem to have done recently.
We learned this past week that Charli3 was willing to subsidize a feed for iUSD, which is great; but that seems more a response to our letting them know (last year) that their competitor offered that. We were upfront with Charli3 at that time that the competitor’s subsidized feed for iUSD was our focus, but it was their hope to compete for the feed so they kept their focus on iUSD. It was the iEUR feed that we asked them to spec out for Indigo; they additionally worked on iUSD, which we approved the spec towards for good measure and as a competitive pricing exercise. Asking a potential vendor to spec out a solution to include implementation and ongoing costs is completely normal in any industry. This was not to be confused with an ask to go integrate their feeds with Indigo, which they seem to have done on their own accord. Labs never asked the Charli3 team to work towards any integration of any feed whatsoever beyond the spec out process. In a normal world, there should have been a mutually agreed process working up to such activity from their dev team. Once speced-out, we would then present this to the Indigo DAO for approval to proceed with the integration work on the backend for a specific iAsset data feed. That Charli3 moved forward without communicating with us to integrate a feed we did not request does not change our process or commitments.
And just to be fully transparent, Labs only last week received from Charli3 information in a five-page doc about the technical architecture of their oracle solution. We had been looking for such a document during the entire course of our conversations with their team and it should have been volunteered, not asked for. And while the document gives more clarity on their node setup, uptime etc., we still do not have any clarity as to who their confidential KYC’d node operators are. To us, this is need-to-know information for the Indigo DAO members to be able to make an educated and safe decision on whether or not to approve Charli3 for providing data feeds to the Indigo Protocol.
Labs is obligated under our Services Agreement with the Foundation to protect the Protocol and users, and that’s exactly what we have been doing. Just because a vendor says “we have feeds for xxx” does not at all give us the information required to put the trust of such a critical component of the Indigo Protocol in another team’s hands. Full disclosure of the technical architecture, node operators, uptime and data integrity SLA’s, economic incentives of node operators, etc., are all common and expected from any such vendor.
It is Labs intention to recommend non-Labs oracle solutions to the DAO as soon as they are fully ready, as per above. Price feeds are a single point of failure for any system like Indigo, so oracle services vendors do and should face some high bars. I hope the Indigo DAO will appreciate Labs efforts to defend and protect their interest as it relates to Indigo Protocol.
Very well-written and easy to read. I can’t thank you enough for the transparency and I agree with your points. It does seem that perhaps Charli3 is not the most professional team and I am happy you have chosen to not rush into anything. Please keep up the great work!