Town Crier

 Basics

• Has been bought by Chainlink (11-20180.
• From this extensive post on oracles (15-1-2019):

"The team behind this academic proposal is composed of 5 Cornell University PhDs and undergraduates.

Town Crier acts as a bridge between smart contracts on any blockchain and https-enabled websites with TLS layer handling handshakes for secure communication to deliver source-authenticated data. The approach taken is different to TLS-notary (security at software level only), allowing for more customisable data relaying."

Tech

• From this extensive post on oracles (15-1-2019):

"The data is recovered by nodes running on Intel’s SGX (security at software and hardware level). This authenticated data feed is delivered from enclave to the blockchain, solely relying on the SGX protection to testify the node is indeed running the software as expected.

To protect confidentiality, messages are only decrypted inside the Trusted Execution Environment’s enclave, which can thus be used not only for safe data transfer but also for ingesting encrypted user credentials (e.g.: private API). In addition, custom requests are supported for potentially multiple web-scraping target.

Their approach to tackle single points-of-failure is to both aggregate data source as well as data oracles on multiple SGX platforms. The software has proven to be relatively scalable with throughputs of 15–65 transactions/sec."