NEAR is thrilled to announce that Flux, the first cross-chain oracle for economically secured data feeds, is now live on the NEAR mainnet!
With its cross-chain oracle platform, which features support for other networks like Aurora, Flux brings secured data feeds to any and all high-throughput data apps — like trading platforms that need access to lots of reliable data — on the NEAR blockchain. To facilitate their mainnet launch, the Flux team is also releasing the $FLX token, which will be vital in helping to power its oracles.
“We were one of the first teams from Ethereum to make the jump to a new layer-one, NEAR, back in January 2019,” said Peter Mitchell, co-founder of Flux. “Jasper De Gooijer, co-founder of Flux, and I started building on NEAR before testnet was live and have worked closely with the team to design a best in class oracle to make NEAR the go-to layer one for economically secured DeFi.”
Earlier this year, Flux raised $10.3m in seed round funding from leading investors like Distributed Global, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Figment Ventures, and Reciprocal Ventures.
Flux’s unique feature set will bring a next generation oracle capable of powering mainstream use cases like derivatives, lending, stablecoins, dynamic NFTs, yield farming, reserve currencies, insurance, asset bridging, off-chain computation, and more to NEAR.
Crucially, Flux’s oracles can power all of these use cases with economic guarantees. By utilizing Flux, protocols on NEAR now have access to the most secure source of data in the crypto space.
Flux’s Two Oracles
The Flux team currently offers two oracle products. Their First Party Oracle allows trusted data sources like Coinbase, AmberData, Kaiko, and others to post data directly on-chain to protocols. By contrast, Flux’s Economically Secured Oracle enables protocols to request crowdsourced, API, and Price Feed Data from any on or off-chain sources.
The Economically Secured Oracle consists of a robust validator network with professional validators like Figment, which runs the Flux Validator Infrastructure. The Flux Validator Node is so lightweight that it can run in a browser and with no minimum stake. The service is open to all community members that wish to secure the network.
Unlike existing oracles such as Chainlink, which features whitelisted node operators, on Flux any community member can participate in securing off-chain data brought to the blockchain. This creates a decentralized environment that is magnitudes ahead of competitors.
$FLX Token Launch
To coincide with Flux’s launch on the NEAR mainnet, the team is also releasing its own utility token. Flux views the $FLX token as the bedrock of its ecosystem, which will be entirely governed by the Flux DAO and secured by validators. $FLX is capped at a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens.
“$FLX tokens secure and strengthen the network, serving as collateral for nodes for select data requests and validation,” writes the team on the Flux Medium page. “Depending on the sensitivity of data requested, data requesters can specify the collateral amount for nodes to stake up to process their request. In addition, $FLX tokens serve as collateral for disputing data outcomes and challenging their conclusions”
The Flux DAO enables token holders to vote on upgrades and design changes across the Layer One platforms that Flux supports.