Abstract
It is widely accepted that blockchain and other distributed ledgers cannot initiate requests for input from external systems and are reliant on oracles to provide such inputs. This belief is founded on the fact that each node has to reach a deterministic state. In this paper we show that this belief is a preconceived one by demonstrating a method that supports calls to external systems initiated from the blockchain itself.
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Notes
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We use \(\oplus \) to represent function overloading.
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Indeed, this means that in the prototype it is not possible to make use of a PUSH32 instruction for data that starts with the string “http”, however this does not impact the prototype’s purpose to evaluate the proposed technique.
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Code from https://solidity-by-example.org/signature/ to verify an ECDSA signature was executed in order to retrieve gas costs. The cost of the verification only was calculated by first executing a function call and then adding in a call to verify a signature, and the difference between the two was used to calculate the signature verification gas cost.
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Ellul, J., Pace, G.J. (2023). Verifiable External Blockchain Calls: Towards Removing Oracle Input Intermediaries. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Dragoni, N. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2022 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25734-6_20
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