Oracle Feeder

Introduction

The RefractedLabs oracle feeder provides the basic abstraction to facilitate data collection, vote preparation, and oracle vote submission. Its primary function is periodically to submit votes to the RefractedLabs oracle module on behalf of the validators, based on observed external data which is provided via Plugins.

Concepts

The feeder is designed to be extensible by Plugins. Developers are required to extend the Plugin class that is controlled by a VoteManager to prepare and vote for the external data which is already collected either by the Plugin itself or by any Services which are already running in the background to collect the data.

VoteManager

At the heart of the feeder design is a VoteManager with two main responsibilities: detecting the start of the next voting period of the oracle module by observing the chain forEventVoteIntervalEnds, and asking for data from the Plugins for the next voting period and submitting an oracle vote into the oracle module using the data provided by the plugins.

The VoteManager is supposed to communicate with all plugins and commit a vote transaction within a vote interval. Vote interval breaks into two parts; the preparation time for plugins to perform any required operations before delivering final vote data, and the reserved time for collecting all plugins’ vote data to shape a single vote message and submitting it to the chain.

Plugin

Plugin is the entity responsible for preparing module votes which are finally wrapped as an oracle vote (pre-vote and combined-vote) and submitted to the oracle module by the VoteManager. A plugin may provide any number of ModuleVotes each for a known module registered in the oracle module. Each module vote consists of any number of NamespaceVote each with a payload of string type.

The following code snippet presents the Plugin API and its related data types:

export interface PreparationResult {
}

export abstract class Plugin {
		
    abstract start(): Promise<void>;

    abstract stop(): Promise<void>;

    abstract isStarted(): boolean;   

    async prepareForVote(event: EventVoteIntervalEnds, preparationTime: number): Promise<PreparationResult> {
        //TODO implement data preparation logic if any
    }

    onPreparationTimeout(event: EventVoteIntervalEnds) {    }

    abstract getModuleVotes(event: EventVoteIntervalEnds, preparationResult: PreparationResult): Promise<ModuleVote[]>;

}

Plugin extensions should implement the following methods:

• start

  This method contains the initialization tasks of a plugin.

• stop

  This method contains the finalization/clean-up tasks of a plugin.

• isStarted

  This method returns true if the plugin has started successfully, and false otherwise.

• prepareForVote

  This method may perform any prerequisites prior to the final data collection call by the VoteManager. The maximum available preparation time is passed to the function as the preparationTime argument. The data returned by this method is later passed to the getModuleVotes method.

• getModuleVotes

  This method should return ModuleVote[] with respect to the current vote interval and the given preparationResult produced by the prepareForVote method invocation. Implementations should avoid performing long-running tasks, or the vote submission will be delayed and might be rejected by the oracle module if the vote deadline is missed.

Service

A Service is a standalone component started by the feeder at the beginning of feeder execution. It performs ongoing background tasks, which may include:

• Monitoring an external data source
• Processing collected data
• Storing the result in persistent storage to be used by plugins

The following code snippet presents the Service API:

export abstract class Service<T extends ServiceConfiguration> {
   

    async start(): Promise<void> {
         //...
    }

    async doStart(): Promise<void> {
        this.doStartInBackground().then(() => {
            this.resolveStop()
        }).catch(this.rejectStop);
    }

    async doStartInBackground(): Promise<void> {
        return
    }

    async stop(): Promise<void> {
        //...
    }

    abstract cleanUp(): Promise<void>;

    isStarted(): boolean {
        //...
    }
}

A Service contains the following methods:

• start, doStart

  These methods contain the initialization tasks of a service. There is usually no need to override them.

• stop

  This method contains the finalization or clean-up tasks of a service. There is usually no need to override this method.

• isStarted

  This method returns true if the service has started successfully, and false otherwise.

• doStartInBackground

  This method may be implemented to perform long-running tasks in the background.

• cleanUp

  This method should be implemented to perform any clean-up tasks.

Usage

The following code snippet demonstrates a sample usage of the oracle feeder, which includes the below main sections:

• Loading configurations and initializing loggers
• Instantiating OracleClient and feeder Context
• Registering services and plugins to the context
• Instantiating the feeder and starting it

class Configuration extends FeederConfiguration {
    databaseService: DatabaseServiceConfiguration
    samplePlugin: SamplePluginConfiguration
    sampleMonitoringService: SampleMonitoringServiceConfiguration 
}

async function main() {
    // load configuration and initialize logger
    const config = await loadTypedConfig<Configuration>("./config.yaml", Configuration);
    initLogger(config.log)

    // initialize context
    const signer = await DirectSecp256k1HdWallet.fromMnemonic(config.feederMnemonic, { prefix: "pryzm" })
    const oracleClient = await connectWithSigner(config.chain.rpcUrl, signer, config.chain.broadcastTimeoutMs, 
        GasPrice.fromString(config.chain.gasPrice))
    const context = new Context(oracleClient, config);

    // register database service
    context.registerService(DATABASE_SERVICE_NAME,
        new DatabaseService(context, config.databaseService))

    // register sample monitoring service and sample plugin
    context.registerPlugin(new SamplePlugin(context, config.samplePlugin))
    context.registerService(SAMPLE_MONITORING_SERVICE_NAME,
        new SampleMonitoringService(context, config.sampleMonitoringService))

    // initialize and start the feeder
    const oracleFeeder = await OracleFeeder.newInstance(context);
    await oracleFeeder.start()
}

main().catch((error) => {
    rootLogger.error("uncaught error", {error})
})

When the feeder starts, it starts the context which in turn will start the services. If all services have started successfully, it will then start all plugins. Both services and plugins are started in the order they were registered.

Plugins and services can get a handle on any registered service or plugin by using the context's getPlugin and getService methods.

Configuration

The Feeder and its core components, like the vote manager, plugins and services, are all highly configurable. Their configuration structure is defined through classes, as shown in the following code snippet:

export class FeederConfiguration {
    log: LogConfiguration
    telemetry: TelemetryConfiguration
    feederAccAddress: string
    feederMnemonic: string
    validatorValAddress: string
    voteReservedTimeMillis: number
    chain: ChainConfiguration
}

export class TelemetryConfiguration {
    enable: boolean
    serverPort: number
}

export class ServiceConfiguration {
    disable?: boolean;
}

export class PluginConfiguration {
    disable?: boolean;
}

export class ChainConfiguration {
    rpcUrl: string;
    lcdUrl: string;
    grpcWebUrl: string;
    wsUrl: string;
    wsTimeout?: number;
    addressPrefix: string;
    denom: string;
    broadcastTimeoutMs: number
    gasPrice: string
    preVoteFee: StdFee | "auto" | number
    combinedVoteFee: StdFee | "auto" | number
    blockCommitTimeoutMillis: number
}

export class LogConfiguration {
    level: string;
    dirname: string;
    filename: string;
    maxSize: string;
    maxFiles: number;
}

TelemetryConfiguration : enable

Whether telemetry feature should be enabled and the server be running at the specified serverPort under path /metrics

FeederConfiguration : validator

The valoper address of the validator used by VoteManager to set the validator property of pre-vote and combined-vote messages.

FeederConfiguration : feeder

The account address of the feeder that is allowed to submit votes on behalf of the validator.

FeederConfiguration : feederMnemonic

The mnemonic used by VoteManager for signing vote messages.

FeederConfiguration : preVoteFee and combinedVoteFee

There are three types that can be accepted for preVoteFee and combinedVoteFee that each one will be explained briefly in the following sections.

If you provide auto as fee, when signing a pre-vote or vote message, first a transaction simulation is performed to estimate the gas and then the estimated gas is multiplied by a constant value (1.3) which is finally used for fee calculation.

preVoteFee: "auto"

In case the default constant is not desirable, you can provide another multiplier instead of using auto like below:

preVoteFee: 2

Finally, in case you want to skip the transaction simulation step, you should provide all the required properties of the fee yourself, as well as determining gasPrice.

gasPrice: "0.02uprism"
preVoteFee:
  amount:
    - denom: "uprism"
      amount: "0"
  gas: "250000"

ServiceConfiguration and PluginConfiguration

Services and plugins should extend ServiceConfiguration and PluginConfiguration respectively to define any custom configuration options. For example, a database service configuration might be defined as follows:

export class DatabaseServiceConfiguration extends ServiceConfiguration {
    database: DatabaseConfiguration
}

export class DatabaseConfiguration {
    database: string
    host: string
    port: number
    user: string
    password: string
    migrationPath: string
}

ChainConfiguration : wsUrl

The websocket URL used by VoteManager to subscribe to EventVoteIntervalEnds events.

ChainConfiguration : blockCommitTimeoutMillis

An estimation for block generation time on the chain used by VoteManager to calculate preparation time.

This YAML sample illustrates a possible configuration file structure:

log:
  level: 'debug'
  dirname: 'logs'
  filename: 'feeder.log'
  maxSize: '1kb'
  maxFiles: 10
telemetry:
  enable: true
  serverPort: 2121
feeder: "prism1u5pnr446txcfzlq42v3h7j4p6232hgem7rdz0f"
feederMnemonic: "injury moon patient local average edge car train start wet depend bundle barely coach rule fee pattern medal ridge regular degree elbow before sausage"
validator: "prismvaloper156pcgs3faegfte0vuaykr9az3hh9kx2etftljf"
voteReservedTimeMillis: 3000
chain:
  rpcUrl: "http://localhost:26657"
  lcdUrl: "http://localhost:1317"
  grpcWebUrl: "http://localhost:9091"
  wsUrl: "ws://localhost:26657"
  wsTimeout: 5000
  addressPrefix: "prism"
  denom: "uprism"
  broadcastTimeoutMs: 10000
  gasPrice: "0.02uprism"
  preVoteFee: 2
  combinedVoteFee: 2
  blockGenerationTimeMillis: 5000
databaseService:
  disable: false
  database:
    database: "feeder"
    host: "localhost"
    port: 5432
    user: "postgres"
    password: "postgres"
    migrationPath: "./migrations"
samplePlugin:
  disable: false
sampleMonitoringService:
  disable: false

💡 The prism-feeder project provides a complete implementation of a feeder that is built using the oracle-feeder project.