This proposal focuses on implementing DIA’s decentralized oracle system on the Cardano blockchain. The project will be carried out in four iterative stages over four months:

1. Planning & Architecture – Define specifications and design integration patterns.

2. On-Chain Development – Develop and deploy smart contracts on Cardano to receive and validate oracle data.

3. Off-Chain Module – Build off-chain components to bridge data between DIA and Cardano efficiently.

4. Testing & Deployment – Deploy on testnet, conduct QA and make the system ready for production use. This integration will allow Cardano to access DIA’s full suite of services and data feeds.

The Cardano ecosystem currently lacks integration with decentralized, trustless oracle networks, such as DIA. Oracles are essential for bringing real-world data on-chain, enabling a wide range of smart contract applications, such as DeFi, insurance, and real-time event processing. Without oracles, dApps on Cardano remain limited in functionality and adoption. DIA offers a robust, decentralized, and transparent oracle framework that is widely utilized across various blockchain networks. Integrating DIA into Cardano would significantly boost its capacity to support real-world use cases by making trustless off-chain data available to smart contracts. This integration opens the door to a broad range of services that DIA can provide, including the provision of price oracles for over 2,500 cryptocurrency tokens, 10,000+ RWAs, Liquid Staked Tokens, and more, with the ability to customize each feed for specific protocols and use cases. By bridging DIA with Cardano, we improve developer tooling, enable new types of dApps, and strengthen Cardano’s position as a leading smart contract platform.

DIA offers a robust, decentralized, and transparent oracle framework that is widely utilized across various blockchain networks. Integrating DIA into Cardano would significantly boost its capacity to support real-world use cases by making trusted off-chain data available to smart contracts.

This integration opens the door to a broad range of services that DIA can provide, including traditional asset pricing and custom oracles for NFTs, sports data, and more. By bridging DIA with Cardano, we improve developer tooling, enable new types of dApps, and strengthen Cardano’s position as a leading smart contract platform.

DIA’s trustless data feeds are already powering multiple blockchain ecosystems.

Bringing DIA to Cardano would:

• Enable DeFi dApps to access reliable price data and other off-chain information.
• Facilitate the creation of complex smart contracts that depend on external data.
• Attract new developers and projects by expanding the ecosystem's tooling.
• Provide Cardano with infrastructure parity with other major chains already using DIA.

What Problems DIA Solves and the Benefits:

Data Transparency: Unlike other oracles, DIA’s architecture is unique in that it sources data on a first-party level, directly from over 80 centralized and decentralized exchanges, rather than relying on premium data providers. This sourcing methodology enables end-to-end, 100% transparency about the origin of data at the individual exchange level, resolving the issue of data opacity and providing Cardano smart contract developers and users with complete transparency about their data sources.

Learn more about DIA’s data sourcing here: https://docs.diadata.org/reference/architecture/data-sourcing

Data Customization: DIA's granular data scraping enables the creation of tailor-made data feeds to meet the specific needs of each dApp on the Cardano blockchain. This solves the problem of one-size-fits-all data feeds, allowing developers to customize the parameters of their oracle, including data sources, data cleansing filters, pricing, computational methodologies, update mechanisms, and more.

This customizability has proven essential in fostering innovation, as DIA oracles can uniquely cater to different dApp needs, thereby supporting a wider array of dApps and use cases.

Support for More Assets than Traditional Oracles: DIA's ability to construct price feeds for crypto assets traded on any of DIA’s supported DEXs and CEXs, so long as they meet DIA's liquidity, volume, and source criteria, addresses the problem of limited data availability for less commonly traded assets.

This benefits Cardano users by expanding the range of supported assets on the network.

Cross-Chain Asset Support: Many ecosystem-native assets face limitations in cross-chain functionality due to inadequate oracle support, hindering their utility beyond their original ecosystem.

DIA overcomes this challenge by placing an emphasis on sourcing asset price data from decentralized exchanges, thereby expanding support for a broader range of ecosystem-native assets that are not covered by centralized exchanges.

Product & Ecosystem Value: Generally speaking, the presence of multiple oracles is critical for bolstering security and maintaining the long-term sustainability of an ecosystem. By incorporating multiple oracles, developers can access diverse data sources and leverage various tooling options, enhancing their decision-making capabilities and reducing the risk of data manipulation or inaccuracies across the entire Cardano smart contract ecosystem. This redundancy not only fortifies the ecosystem against potential threats but also fosters an environment of trust and transparency, ensuring the consistent and dependable operation of the network over time. In addition to this general outlook on the benefits of having multiple oracle providers in the Cardano smart contract ecosystem, the below highlights the specific ways DIA Oracles stand apart, and will provide value to the ecosystem:

Customizable oracle feeds tailored to each dApps needs: Setting itself apart, DIA offers bespoke oracles crafted to meet the precise requirements of each individual dApp. This adaptability enables the optimization of oracle deployment, tailoring data sources, price methodologies, and updating frequencies, among other aspects, to better support the varied functionalities of dApps.

For example: In a perpetual trading protocol, the need for high-frequency updates (e.g., every 10 seconds) is critical and often applied for prominent blue-chip assets. However, in a lending-borrowing protocol, where a broader range of assets may be supported, a lower update frequency is often preferable. This is particularly important for assets with lower trading volumes and liquidity, where a high-frequency update can pose risks, allowing for potential price manipulation within short timeframes. To mitigate this risk, the DIA oracles can be optimized by extending the trade collection window and adjusting the update frequency. For instance, increasing the update frequency to every 2 minutes enables the inclusion of more trades into each reported price, creating a robust price feed that aligns with the specific requirements of the lending protocol.

In this example, DIA's ability to adjust the update frequencies and trade collection window ensures greater resilience and accuracy in data provision, particularly when dealing with lower volume assets or varying market conditions. This exemplifies how different oracle parameters can be optimized for different use cases and assets. For more information on how DIA’s customizable oracle feeds support innovation and diverse use cases across ecosystems, please visit DIA’s Arbitrum Network Case Study: https://www.diadata.org/case-studies/arbitrum-network/

First-Party Data Sourcing: Additionally, different from other oracles in the Cardano ecosystem, DIA’s architecture consists of first-party data sourcing, directly from over 80+ high confidence DEX and CEXs. This will add value to the Cardano ecosystem in multiple ways, by first adding an additional source of price in the ecosystem. Different from other oracles, DIA oracles offer 100% transparency regarding each and every individual source that is considered in generating a price feed, and developers can select and customize these sources. This proves to be significant, especially for cross-chain focused dApps.

For example: In a cross-chain lending-borrowing protocol or collateralized debt position (CDP) protocol, collateral may exist on other chains, and thus, DIA’s source selection capabilities uniquely enable developers and users to value assets and collateral as they exist on their respective chains.

Cardano-Native DEX scraping: The ultimate goal for the DIA integration is to maximize Cardano smart contract functionality and innovation by fully integrating all of the relevant components of DIA’s product suite onto Cardano. Perhaps the most significant component of this integration will be the inclusion of Cardano-native DEXs into the sources that DIA supports. This capability, unique to DIA due to its novel first-party data sourcing architecture, will ultimately add significant value to the entire Cardano ecosystem. As the only oracle provider in the ecosystem that can support Cardano-native assets, which only trade on those DEXs, DIA will play a crucial role. What’s more, DIA will not only support these assets within the Cardano ecosystem but will also provide price feeds for these assets across the 55 (and counting) other chains with which DIA is actively integrated.

Additional Unique Benefits of the DIA Integration: Broadest Oracle Data Library in Web3 - DIA supports price feeds for over 2,500 cryptocurrency tokens and more than 10,000 RWA price feeds, offering a breadth of assets unmatched. This extensive assets coverage will significantly broaden the scope and utility of applications on the Cardano Network.

Largest Liquid Staked Asset Library - Due to DIA’s novel first-party sourcing architecture and partnerships with numerous prominent liquid staking protocols, DIA supports the broadest range of liquid staked tokens (LSTs), a category that has quickly become the largest segment of DeFi, as measured by total value locked (TVL).

Random Number Generation - In collaboration with DRAND, DIA offers an on-chain oracle for a universally accessible source of publicly-verifiable, unbiasable, and unpredictable randomness. Following an initial multi-party computation to establish a distributed key, Drand nodes operated by independent parties periodically broadcast information that gets aggregated into a final random beacon whose validity can be easily verified by users. DIA is a proud member of Drand's League of Entropy (https://www.cloudflare.com/leagueofentropy/), a consortium of organizations that are working together to produce a truly random beacon. Ultimately DIA seeks to deploy its Random Number Generation oracle on Cardano.

Milestone 1: Planning & Architecture Duration: 4 weeks

• Define the overall system architecture.
• Identify on-chain and off-chain components and their interactions.
• Specify data flow between DIA and Cardano.
• Document oracle integration approach.

Outputs:

• Architecture diagram.
• Specification document.
• Initial GitHub repository with documentation.

Milestone 2: Smart Contract Development Duration: 4 weeks

• Develop smart contracts to receive and validate oracle data.
• Implement message and data validation logic.
• Write unit tests and initial dApp examples.

Outputs:

• Deployed smart contracts.
• Unit test suite.
• Sample usage examples.

Milestone 3: Off-Chain Module Development Duration: 4 weeks

• Develop off-chain connectors to fetch and relay DIA data.
• Integrate retry, logging, and fail-safe mechanisms.
• Configure interaction with Cardano infrastructure.

Outputs:

• Off-chain data processing module.
• Logs and error handling features.
• Integration tested with smart contracts.

Milestone 4: Testing, Documentation, and Deployment Duration: 4 weeks

• Deploy solution to Cardano testnet.
• Finalize technical documentation and user guides.
• Collect and incorporate community feedback.

Outputs:

• Testnet deployment.
• Complete documentation.
• Feedback summary and final iteration.

Project Management: $12,450 Technical Architecture: $24,900 Smart Contract Development: $37,350 Off-Chain Development: $37,350 QA, Maintenance, Documentation & Deployment: $12,450

Total: USD 124,500

Team Members From Protofire Manuel Padilla – Lead Software Engineer (Cardano, Plutus, Haskell)

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuel-ale-padilla/
• GitHub: https://github.com/manupadillaph

Camila Mancusi – QA Engineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilamancusi/

Francisco Ciordia Cantarella – Full Stack Developer

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/francisco-ciordia-cantarella-5323461b8
• GitHub: https://github.com/Fran-cio

Braian Leiva – DevOps Engineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/braian-leiva/

Team Members From DIA: Samuel Brack - Cofounder; CTO

• Github: https://github.com/kaythxbye
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelbrack/

Philipp Pade - Lead Integrations Developer

• Github: https://github.com/jppade
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-philipp-pade/

Nitin Gurbani - Senior Developer

• Github: https://github.com/nnn-gif
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitin-g-098229228/

Zygis Marazas - Product Lead

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zygimantas-marazas/

David D’Amario - Quality Assurance Lead

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-d-amario-44838b1ab/

Khawla Hassan - Technical Product Manager

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khawlahassan/

Protofire is an established Web3 engineering team with past clients including Chainlink, The Graph, Filecoin, and MakerDAO. We specialize in cross-chain integrations, smart contract development, and blockchain infrastructure.

Protofire already maintains an active collaboration with DIA Oracles, having previously worked on similar integrations across various blockchain networks, including Soroban, Kadena, Alephium, Ripple, Hydration, Bifrost, Stacks, OpNet, and others. This ongoing partnership ensures we bring relevant experience and technical understanding to deploy DIA on Cardano successfully.

DIA Team Experience:

Since 2018, team DIA has extensive experience in deploying oracle contracts and providing robust oracle infrastructure on 55 Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains, including but not limited to EVM-compatible and WASM environments. A full look into the DIA ecosystem can be found here.

More information on DIA’s Technical Structure: https://docs.diadata.org/intro-to-lumina/how-it-works More information on DIA’s Token Price Feeds: https://docs.diadata.org/data-products-and-tools/token-price-feeds More information on DIA’s Randomness Oracle: https://nexus.diadata.org/data-products/randomness More information on DIA’s Real World Asset Price Feeds: https://www.diadata.org/real-world-asset-rwa-oracle/ More information on DIA’s Ecosystem of dApps & Blockchain Partners: https://www.diadata.org/ecosystem/ More information on DIA’s Case Studies: https://www.diadata.org/case-studies/

After initial development, Protofire and DIA will maintain the solution through a 3-month post-launch support period, which includes bug fixes, updates, and incorporation of community feedback. In parallel, our ongoing collaboration with the DIA team ensures continued alignment and technical support for evolving use cases. The entire codebase will be open-sourced and maintained on GitHub, enabling transparency, community contributions, and long-term sustainability as Cardano’s infrastructure grows.

How DIA Works: DIA boasts a modular architecture, engineered for comprehensive data coverage across a multitude of sources, asset price feeds, and supported blockchains. This architecture is composed of three integral components: Collection, Computation, and Publication. DIA currently supports 55 blockchain networks.

Collection: At the heart of DIA is the data collection system, a mechanism that fetches granular market data from a broad range of on-chain and off-chain exchanges, including Centralized Exchanges, Decentralized Exchanges, and Traditional Financial Markets, amongst others. Through the availability of billions of trades, DIA enables the creation of resilient, high-confidence price feeds.

Data sourcing at DIA is accomplished through exchange scrapers, developed by both DIA and an ever-growing community of contributors. These scrapers are integral in the creation of price feeds for assets across all networks – there is no reliance on third-party premium data providers.

Computation: DIA employs transparent computational methodologies to process raw trade data into reliable feeds. From outlier cleansing filters to sophisticated pricing techniques, DIA can support diverse requirements. From developing straightforward Time-Weighted Volume Average Price (TWVAP) asset price feeds to crafting complex, use-case-specific price feeds, DIA capabilities are comprehensive.

Publication: Upon creating a price feed, it is published via the API endpoint. This data feed is then pushed on-chain, wrapped in Oracle smart contracts. DIA’s decentralized network of nodes takes on the responsibility of pushing oracle data on-chain, currently servicing 55 major L1/L2 blockchains.

Monitoring & On-Chain Price Delivery: Data Sourcing and Processing: DIA's architecture employs a diverse data sourcing strategy, gathering trade data from over 80 on-chain and off-chain first-party sources, namely decentralized and centralized exchanges. Utilizing dedicated scrapers, DIA pulls raw trade data at the individual trade level from these sources, consolidating and processing this information using exclusively open-source and transparent methodologies.

On-Chain Price Delivery and Node Infrastructure: For the seamless delivery of price information on-chain, DIA maintains a robust infrastructure comprising multiple nodes. In the event of node malfunctions, an automatic transition to a new node occurs, ensuring uninterrupted data provision. DIA's collaboration with a diverse group of leading node providers across different chains enables reliable and high-performance data streaming.

Guarantees for Gas Prices: The oracles use the on-chain gas price suggested by the RPC node and then add 10% of a safety buffer on top of that to ensure timely execution. Apart from that, no other gas costs are part of the system.

Comprehensive Monitoring System: DIA has implemented a comprehensive monitoring system to continually assess the performance of its data sourcing and delivery processes. This system actively tracks critical metrics, including data source uptime, response times, and data accuracy. In the presence of irregularities or inconsistencies, the monitoring system generates prompt alerts, enabling swift intervention to maintain the overall integrity of the data provided by DIA. This proactive monitoring approach ensures that the data delivered to users remains secure, reliable, and accurate, underscoring DIA's unwavering commitment to transparency and data integrity.

DIA has transitioned from a managed scraper, computation and delivery architecture to a fully permissionless framework. This transition emphasizes meticulous quality assurance measures, such as low-liquidity asset provision based on a decentralized architecture supported by multiple independent reporters adhering to specified parameters.

The lack of integration with decentralized oracles, such as DIA, is well-known within the Cardano development community. There is strong demand for enabling smart contracts that rely on external data to unlock the full potential of DeFi and real-world applications.

No major external dependencies.