DIA (DIA)

From their website (16-8-2020):

"DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is an open-source, data and oracle platform for the DeFi ecosystem. DIA leverages crypto economic incentives to drive supply, share and use transparent, crowd-verified price data and oracles on financial and digital assets."

Basics

• Based in: Switzerland
• Founded in: 2018
• Mainnet release:

History

• Went through the OV’s ‘Base Camp Accelerator’

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here, with a bounty up to $750.
• From their blog (6-7-2020):

"Bounties for finding errors, bugs, manipulation attempts or security flaws as well as for improving and building the overall platform structure and security are provided by the association."

Bugs/Hacks

• During the KuCoin hack it didn't freeze coins or hard fork, but did think about allocating (26-9-2020) new portions of tokens to affected users. In the end it seems like they asked users to deal with KuCoin and its insurance.
• From The Defiant (29-9-2020):

"At DIA  we consciously decided against a fork. The entire vision of DIA is a reflection of the promise of decentralization: We want to move away from centralized decision making and concentration of power in the hands of a few. We didn’t miss the irony in the fact that we also took a central decision to stick not to fork and stick to the status quo. Especially in the early phase of a project until both the community and the project itself reach some degree of maturity, centralization can make sense to make sure that DAO structures are implemented safely."

Governance

DAO

• Wrote a summary of its DAO developments (7-12-2022), guilds, proposals and 262 contributors.
• Has launched its governance forum (20-10-2021).
• Has announced their DAO roadmap (7-11-2020) which can be seen below under 'Roadmap'. They also mention it will use Snapshot for voting.
• From their blog (6-7-2020):

"The DIA platform is an ecosystem that employs a governance token. DIA is managed by a decentralised community of DIA token-holders and their delegates. DIA governance tokens can be used to drive the collection of data, validate the data, vote on association relevant decisions and incentivise the building of the DIA platform itself.

DIA governance tokens are employed for activities including:

1. Voting on governance issues

Any issue pertaining the association and its platform that has severe implications will be put up for voting by means of the governance token. Any token holder can participate and cast their vote.

1. Funding data collection

Data seekers can put bounties on specific data needs. Data suppliers who build scrapers to source particular sets of data will be rewarded with a bounty upon completion of the work.

1. Validating data through staking

DIA tokens can be staked to incentivise the validation of existing oracles, scrapers, methodologies and more.

1. Incentivising platform development

The DIA platform will be developed by its community and token holders. Any feature that is desirable can be suggested, voted on, funded and worked on by the DIA developer community.

1. Accessing live data streams and specific APIs

All historic data can be accessed free of charge, whereas access to live data streams and specific APIs can be purchased with DIA tokens."

• From this blog (14-7-2020):

"DIA will start decentralising its governance through multiple governance distribution mechanisms including the bonding curve distribution, incentivising Governance Token usage and holding, and an ecosystem token pool reserved for innovative projects and governance participation."

Token

Launch

• From their website (16-8-2020):

"DIA governance token will be made available on the Gnosis DEX, following a short initial offering using a bonding curve mechanism. Anyone can participate in the Bonding Curve Allocation.

Bonding curves are an innovative type of public offering design. A cleverly designed smart contract that autonomously creates a market for DIA, without the need for an exchange. The Bonding Curve Sale will be followed by liquidity provision on the Gnosis Protocol Mesa DEX."

• From The Defiant (7-8-2020):

"DIA started its 14-day sale of 30M DIA tokens (15% of supply) on Aug. 3, with the initial price of $0.05. The first batch had an average price of  $0.64. In a private sale 10M tokens were sold at $0.50. An additional piece needed to understand what happened is that DIA used a bonding curve pricing mechanism to enable the determination of a fair market price. This allows buyers to buy and sell back instantly.

Also, the team said in its communications they would accept ETH, DAI and USDC, but only provided buy and sell orders replicating the bonding curve in USDC, expecting Gnosis Protocol would have enough liquidity for ETH and DAI through its liquidity providers. But there wasn't enough ETH liquidity for high volumes which meant that ultimately the wETH/DIA price ended up being higher than the USDC/DIA price. “The highest price difference between wETH and USDC occurred In batch 4: a wETH buyer purchased at 1.50 USD tokens worth USD 309,729 while USDC buyer acquired worth USD 55,724 tokens at USD 1.21, leading to a spread of 23,87% in that transaction,” DIA founder Paul Claudius told The Defiant. The result is disgruntled ETH/DIA buyers. They are upset enough to have formed a separate Telegram channel in which they have even come to discuss the possibility of legal action. It may be of some relief to those buyers thatDIA’s price has more than doubled just in the past day, and with the token now trading at $2.2 they could get the chance to break even or more likely, sell at a profit. 

Claudius says he feels responsible for what happened, and “regrets the way he reacted,” as the project’s initial blog posts didn’t acknowledge ETh buyers’ frustration, saying the mechanism worked as intended. He says a big lesson learned is to more clearly communicate how the different providers they’re working with work and their risks. The big winners of the day were liquidity providers. “Every liquidity provider for WETH/USDC profited from the lack of liquidity,” Koppelman said. “One trader alone made >$100k in a few hours.” 

Token allocation

• From their website (16-8-2020): 200M tokens, 30M in the token sale, 10M private sale, 24M locked for seven months for the team.
• From this blog (14-7-2020):

1. Bonding curve supply 15%
2. Ecosystem Token Pool 12.5% (staking rewards)
3. Team Tokens 12%
4. Existing backers 9.8%
5. Association Reserve (community decided upon treasury) 45.7%
6. Private sale 5%

• A proposal by team wants to burn 50% of the Reserve allocation (7-11-2020).

Utility

• Staking and governance. Has an DIA Interest Program, in which people can lock their tokens and get a yield.

Tech

• Docs can be found here .
• Code can be viewed here (16/8/2020).
• Built on: Ethereum, ENS (13-7-2021), 0Chain as storage layer (21-7-2021). Integrated on xDai (3-8-2021). Live on Arbitrum (14-10-2021). Aurora and Fantom got added in 12-2021). Deployed on 35 blockchains (20-3-2023).

How it works

• From their FAQ (21-3-2023):

"Instead of distributing pre-calculated data feeds, DIA covers the whole data journey from sourcing individual trade data to the last mile on-chain and off-chain feed delivery. By leveraging a network of WebSockets and decentralised node providers, DIA retrieves every single trade from more than 80+ centralised and decentralized digital asset exchanges as well as NFT marketplaces. This means that every trade happening for every asset pair gets recorded and collected into blocks of 120 seconds into the DIA Platform.

For on-chain use cases, data feeds are delivered via oracle smart contract and can be deployed on one of the 25+ most relevant layer1 and layer2 blockchain networks. These smart contracts provide a data stream coming from the DIA platform via a REST API. When triggered, the oracle pushes an update of the API to the blockchain network. These oracle update triggers are customizable and can be accommodated to best serve specific feeds.

On the other hand, if the data feed is not meant for an on-chain use case, they can be also delivered via Rest API or Graph QL, enables more flexibility and direct adjustment of feed attributes."

• From their blog (6-7-2020):

"How DIA works — explained step by step

1. Data request: Stakeholders who seek a particular set of data that has not already been published on the DIA platform can publicly submit and fund a ticket to request that data. The successful provision of the data is linked to a bounty, which is paid by the data requester in DIA tokens once the information is validated.
2. Data submission: Incentivised by the data request, data providers create scrapers, connect to APIs or on-chain data to provide the requested data.
3. Validation: Data analysts verify the submitted code through a staking mechanism. If a submitted data is suspected to be wrong, anyone can challenge the submitted code through staking DIA tokens. The DIA community determines through a stake voting process who supplied the right solution and who will be rewarded with the stake in question. Additionally, bounties for finding errors, bugs, manipulation attempts or security flaws as well as for improving and building the overall platform structure and security are provided by the association.
4. Data storage: Validated data is stored in an immutable, open-source database and published on the DIA platform.
5. Usage: Access data through oracles (on-chain) or through APIs (off-chain). Historical financial data can be accessed free of charge, while DIA tokens are charged for accessing live prices or specific APIs. More details on github.com/diadata-org/diadata."

Staking

• From this blog (14-7-2020):

"Smart contracts using DIA oracles will receive DIA Governance Tokens on a daily basis. Distribution will be allocated based on the smart contract asset holdings. Daily token distribution will be allocated linearly to the top 100 smart contracts depending on their percentage of total assets of applications of the total contracts. A smart contract can only receive 15% of total daily distribution.
Proof of Truth Distribution will begin December 1, 2020. To qualify for distribution, smart contracts need to send a daily Proof of Truth transfer with the hashed DIA oracle price of the previous day. Claims from the pool of DIA Governance Tokens collected through Proof of Truth are required to be a minimum of 1 DIA."

Interoperability

• From their docs (11-8-2020):

"Currently, Ethereum is used as smart contract platform because of its widespread use and technical quality, but the DIA system is not limited to one blockchain technology."

Other Details

Data Categories

• From their FAQ (21-3-2023):

"DIA's crowd-sourcing approach to data sourcing uniquely positions DIA to utilise the broadest possible set of sources and ensure maximum coverage of asset price data. Any data feed that is publicly accessible can be sourced, regardless of whether it is listed on exchanges and what its trading volume is - there is no dependency on third-party data providers.

These include pricing data for 3.000+ digital assets, 20.000+ equities, 18.000+ NFT collections, Liquid Staked Derivatives – LSDs. DIA also brings other types of data on-chain, such as verifiable random number generation – RNG, FX rates, lending rates, off-chain automation and many more."

Oracle Method

• Uses ENS (13-7-2021):

"In some cases, oracles may be updated and receive a new smart contract address. After such updates, these new addresses need to be actively communicated to the oracle users and updated in their respective dApps, leaving room for human error and potential delays in updates.

To optimise this process and eliminate error potential arising from updated oracle addresses, DIA leverages Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) domains for its public and custom (user-specific) oracles."

Their Other Projects

Lumina

DIA will launch (12-9-2024) its own L2 rollup, Lasernet, the platform will ensure decentralized operations by using zero-knowledge proofs for data verification and node contributions.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• Rolled out their DAO roadmap (7-11-2020):

"Stage 1: Enable a first binding DAO vote to be implemented

1. Timeline: December-2020.
2. Vote on 9.15 M DIA tokens from reserve
3. Objectives: A) Community: First binding decision to be implemented by team. B) Development: DAO test, tech set-up and UX interface and voting process.

Stage 2: Develop DAO inclusion on tokenomics, data feed governance and strategic decisions

1. Timeline: 2021
2. Objective: Enable the binding vote on multiple aspects of tokenomics, as well as decentralised interaction with the curation, maintenance and arbitration of data conflicts.

Stage 3: Make legally binding DAO votes on governance structure, usage of company funds, HR decisions as well as strategic decisions

1. Timeline: 2022, 2023
2. Objective: Achieve a DAO infrastructure that enables token holders to make legally-, and commercially binding decisions under Swiss law."

Usage

Integrations

• 0Chain; decentralized storage network, will integrate and DIA will use it as storage layer (21-7-2021).
• ADD.XYZ integrated it (22-9-2020).
• Beamswap; announced a partnership (29-3-2022)
• Binance Smart Chain; DIA has integrated itself with BSC (10-2-2021).
• "Cryptolocally: Marketplace for purchasing cryptocurrency in your local currency. DIA provides Cryptolocally with decentralised oracles for cryptocurrency pricing and fundamentals, DeFi lending rates and states and fiat exchange rate data feeds to the end-to-end DeFi gateway platform."
• Dash; "integration of DIA oracles to the Dash platform — a technology stack enabling developers to build decentralised applications on the Dash network — as well as making Dash price and data feeds available to Ethereum and other L1 and L2 protocols through DIA’s open-source oracle platform." (25-3-2021).
• DEFI100; 1-3-2021
• Dopex; announced a partnership and DIA will "provide open-source oracles to Dopex to enable the launch of a single staking option vault and the listing of Metis as a token." (19-5-2022).
• Elrond integrated it (20-8-2020.
• EVMos; oracles are live (28-4-2022).
• Exeedme; 1-3-2021
• Ferrum Network; 14-9-2021
• "Gather: A platform that allows publishers to monetise without ads, provides businesses & developers to access cheap and reliable processing power. DIA provides transparent price oracles into Gather’s ad-free content monetisation platform as well as integrating DIA into Gather Online’s payout mechanism."
• Fuse Network (2-2022)
• "Hedget: A DeFi option trading platform. Hedget will make use of DIA’s price oracle infrastructure to value their decentralised options."
• Horizen; has a partnership and will integrate (10-3-2021).
• Knit Finance; wrapper protocol, will integrate (1-7-2021).
• Moonbeam; will integrate it (19-3-2021)
• "OIN Finance: DIA and OIN Finance announce a cooperation to bring trusted, transparent price feeds to OINs infrastructure gateway to decentralised finance. OIN Finance will be leveraging DIA’s open-source price Oracles to fuel its infrastructure, including modules like the OINDAO."
• Paid Network; will "integrate trusted, transparent price oracles into Paid Network’s ad-free content monetisation platform as well as integrating DIA into Gather Online’s payout mechanism." (21-1-2021).
• PiSwap DeFi; 1-3-2021
• Polkastarter uses DIA as an oracle (8-10-2020).
• Polygon; 1-3-2021
• Shadows Network; will integrate it and has a partnership (9-3-2021)
• Tixl.Finance; 1-3-2021

Competition

• Chainlink, Band Protocol, Open Oracle System, other oracle providers.
• Whereas DIA will let users provide data themselves, ChainLink usually only takes prices from a few places, which can lead to inaccuracies.
• From a DIA AMA (3-12-2021):

"The main difference to Chainlink is the way we approach transparency and sourcing. The nature of our approach requires full end-to-end transparency on data. DIA pulls data directly from the source, meaning CEX APIs or directly from on-chain markets, aggregating prices from individual trades.

This raw data can then be customised for any purpose. Users can choose the sources and the methodologies that make up a price feed and have it delivered to any ecosystem, including Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Polkadot, Arbitrum, Moonbeam, NEAR, Celo, xDai and many more to come.

Additionally, our crowdsourcing approach enables a quick and efficient turnaround of new data requests even far into the long tail. Where other oracles, who aggregate data from premium feed providers are dependent on what their partners deliver, DIA can deliver data for literally any asset that is publicly accessible via one of the major CEXs or DEXs — our offering already encompasses some 5000 digital asset prices and is growing as well as first EU regulatory compliance indices."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Took funding from Moonrock, which according to ZachXBT mainly funds cash grabs and straight up scams (10-12-2021). Although this not directly means that this project is then also scammy, it does mean that the founders did not vest their VCs well.

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Paul Claudius; founder
• Michael Weber; co-founder and Association President
• Iona Surpateanu; Strategy

Funding

• From this article (3-8-2020):

"Is backed by notable venture capital funds, including Outlier Ventures (OV), Continue Capital,
and TRG Capital as well as angel investors from the traditional financial space."

Partners 

• From their blog (3-9-2020):

"DIA partners with the cloud based node infrastructure provider Ankr to provide flexible and scalable cross-chain data oracles for blockchain metadata."

• From their October update (23-10-2020):

1. "Elrond: A technology ecosystem focused on DeFi and IoT. DIA delivers off-chain & cross-chain data and information for DeFi products and smart contracts via DIA oracles and makes Elrond blockchain data available to DIA users.
2. Crypto.com — UX focused crypto wallet, exchange, and payment card.
3. Ankr: An infrastructure platform and marketplace for Web3-stack deployment & decentralised nodes. DIA and Ankr collaborate to further decentralize primary sourced data collection in various blockchains.
4. ADD.XYZ: A protocol that unifies DeFi protocols and blockchain infrastructure. DIA delivers decentralised data oracles to the ADD.XYZ platform to power their newly relaunched full-stack DeFi aggregation platform.
5. Hedget: A DeFi option trading platform. Hedget will make use of DIA’s price oracle infrastructure to value their decentralised options.
6. Gather: A platform that allows publishers to monetise without ads, provides businesses & developers to access cheap and reliable processing power. DIA provides transparent price oracles into Gather’s ad-free content monetisation platform as well as integrating DIA into Gather Online’s payout mechanism.
7. Polkastarter: A DEX built for cross-chain token pools and auctions. DIA provides price oracles to Polkastarter to enable DeFi trading, pricing and anti-slippage features based on transparent, auditable price oracles as well as to accelerate the sourcing, verification, and use of data from network participants in the Polkastarter ecosystem.
8. Cryptolocally: Marketplace for purchasing cryptocurrency in your local currency. DIA provides Cryptolocally with decentralised oracles for cryptocurrency pricing and fundamentals, DeFi lending rates and states and fiat exchange rate data feeds to the end-to-end DeFi gateway platform.
9. OIN Finance: DIA and OIN Finance announce a cooperation to bring trusted, transparent price feeds to OINs infrastructure gateway to decentralised finance. OIN Finance will be leveraging DIA’s open-source price Oracles to fuel its infrastructure, including modules like the OINDAO."

• According to its end of 2020 update (23-12-2020) the following projects are 'part of the DIA ecosystem":

Injective Protocol, Polkadot, Matic, Acala, ZeroSwap and PlasmaPay.

• MAMA, a member, according to their website (27-4-2021).
• From their blog (21-4-2021):

"Partnership with Polkalokr to integrate DIA’s transparent oracles into Polkalokr’s locking platform to enable event-based token distributions."

• From their blog (1-9-2021):

"We are excited to announce a new partnership with Arcana Network. This two-sided collaboration will first enable DIA to leverage Arcana Networks’ privacy technology stack, to offer a smoother and safer experience to the community of developers building DIA’s open-source platform. Secondly, DIA’s accurate and transparent oracle suite will be utilised by Arcana Network to strengthen its treasury management processes."

• Added a whole list of new partners during 2021.
• Dopex; announced a partnership and DIA will "provide open-source oracles to Dopex to enable the launch of a single staking option vault and the listing of Metis as a token." (19-5-2022).

DIA Labs

• From their October update (23-10-2020):

"In order to support the development of fundamental building blocks for the DeFi ecosystem, both as open-source building blocks as well as proprietary solutions, we launched DIA Labs, an acceleration and grant program for individuals, teams and organisations that want to build on and around DIA."

First cohort of mentors:

• Tamar Menteshashvili from Binance
• Eric Wang from Parity Technologies
• Charlotte Baker from Outlier Ventures
• Simon Dedic from Blockfyre and Moonrock Capital

Investments

• From a their blog (17-3-2021):

"Besides an investment into TIXL through DIA’s grants programme DIA Labs, DIA is excited to support the team with expertise, a broad industry network and verified data feeds."

DIA University Student Network (USN)

• From the announcement (9-3-2021):

"A global network of elite universities to foster knowledge exchange between academia and DeFi and collaborative research into DeFi and oracles."

The first participators are:

1. "TIBA — Tsinghua International Blockchain Association. TIBA is the International Students Blockchain Association from Tsinghua University. Their goal is to bridge the gap between students and the industry, between the Chinese and international communities, and to let everyone work together to realize the potential of blockchain.
2. The CMU Blockchain Group is a software developer focused group of students of Carnegie Mellon University, dedicated to bringing high-quality presentations and workshops. Its mission is to equip people with the foundational knowledge to reason blockchain developments from an engineering perspective, taking into account technical, economic and policy factors.
3. Sharif Decentralabs is the blockchain association of the Sharif University of Technology, in Tehran, Iran. It is widely considered the nation’s leading institution for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields."

(:

Knowledge empowers all and will help us get closer to the decentralized world we all want to live in!

Making these free wiki pages is fun but takes a lot of effort and time.

If you have enjoyed reading, tips are appreciated :) This will help us to keep expanding this archive of information.

ETH tip address: 0x83460bE5F218b1520B69D702cE60A1DE37dD8E31