Blog:
HUMAN App upgrades: keyless oracles, and UI improvements
With the recent maintenance of the HUMAN App, we’d like to share some of what we’ve been working on. We’re thrilled with the popularity of the HUMAN App, and proud of our community of data-annotators that use it daily. That said, we’re committed to making ongoing improvements. With the soon-to-be-released update, the HUMAN App will have a new UI that will make it easier for workers to work, and receive their rewards.
Alongside this, we’ve also been testing some backend improvements to the use of oracles, which has resulted in the implementation of keyless oracles.
HUMAN oracles – such as the reputation oracle – are designed to run entirely on-chain by default, but in some cases it is helpful to provide Web2 bridges in order to simplify integration.
As HUMAN use cases have grown, a common request has been to support more trust models in the oracle system – in particular, to allow job requesters to maintain sole control over payout distribution.
While the original design of HUMAN oracles ensures fair and balanced guarantees between all parties in a low-trust environment – via escrows, oracle-enforced decisions, and oracle-triggered escrow release – job requesters sometimes operate on a permissioned or semi-permissioned exchange.
In these cases, so long as payments are being made soon after tasks are completed, reducing the task completer's risk window at the cost of increased latency and on-chain expense may not be a necessary tradeoff, as the exchange can stake its reputation on requester behavior, potentially with automatic on-chain slashing if the Requester misbehaves.
Keyless oracles allow us to improve performance while shifting the trust balance. In short, their design moves all key-holding duties to the requester: no oracle would ever emit an on-chain transaction that changes escrow state or manipulates a wallet containing tokens. Only reputation calculations, reputation updates, and other on-chain metadata are optionally handled directly by keyless oracles. This has several benefits, one of which is to simplify the security analysis.
Other benefits to the use of keyless oracles are reduced operating costs, lower latency, and a simpler design. They also bring security benefits, in that controlling an oracle gives an attacker almost no network advantage, as oracles have no direct access to any resources.
Keyless oracles are now running in beta on the HUMAN App, and we look forward to seeing the community response, and monitoring the performance impact.
The initial community response has been strong, and we look forward to seeing how the design evolves over time as more experience is gained during this test period.
If you wish to enquire about integrations, usage, or to learn more about HUMAN Protocol, get in contact with the HUMAN team.
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