What is DIA?

Before we delve into what is DIA, it’s important to understand what oracles are. Blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano and others don’t have ready access to off-chain data. So, they must find some way to source data from the real world to execute smart contracts deployed/hosted on them. This is where oracles come into the picture. Oracles are entities that supply off-chain data to these smart contracts. 

Short for Decentralized Information Asset, DIA is an open-source, multi-chain, end-to-end data and oracle platform for Web3.0. Unlike other oracles, DIA provides both on-chain and off-chain data, obtained directly from various on-chain and off-chain sources. DIA feeds can be customized based on data acquisition methodologies and sources. This provision of highly resilient and tailor-made feeds creates a new paradigm for oracles.

The DIA platform is where all the suppliers and users of this data come together. It facilitates sourcing, validation and sharing of all such verified and transparent data feeds, for traditional and digital financial applications. The data-feeds available on DIA are all institutional-grade and cover multiple verticals including DeFi, metaverse, asset prices and more. 

Launched in 2018 as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), DIA is managed by a Swiss-based non-profit association of the same name. 

Let’s now learn about DIA’s mission, to gain a better understanding of what is DIA. The creators of DIA believe that the current oracles are non-transparent, vulnerable and hard to scale. DIA serves as an efficient open-source ecosystem for financial data. It aims to provide accurate, transparent and verifiable data for Web3.0, by bringing together data providers, data users and its community members. Its mission is to democratize financial data, just like Wikipedia has done in the information space, vis-à-vis centralized encyclopedias.

The DIA token is the DIA platform’s native token, enabling efficient governance. It is also used for other purposes within the DIA ecosystem, including funding data requests, staking, platform development and accessing live data streams. 

What is DIA - Key points

• DIA can efficiently source all types off-chain and on-chain data
• Offers tailored data feeds based on sources and methodologies
• Data feeds are made available as APIs or oracles 
• Can be easily used by any off-chain app or dApps residing on popular L1 and L2 chains
• Fully transparent and open-source

How DIA works

Now that we’ve learnt what is DIA, let’s go in-depth and understand how does DIA work. All data on the DIA platform is crowd-sourced from publicly available sources, without the involvement of any third-parties. 

Every second, the DIA platform aggregates thousands of data points from multiple off-chain and on-chain sources. These sources include decentralized exchanges (DEXs), centralized exchanges (CEXs), Metaverses, NFT marketplaces, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms, Traditional Finance (TradFi) platforms and more. Data is pulled directly from their smart contracts and APIs. As mentioned earlier, these data feeds are fully customizable, including the choice of the sources and methodologies.

Source: Diadata.org

How does DIA work – Step by step explanation

Data requests

If a user requires any particular data set that’s not already published on the DIA platform, they can publicly submit a ticket for it. They also link the data request with a bounty (in DIA tokens), which is paid to whoever provides the requested data first. The bounty is paid after the concerned information is validated.

Data submission

Once the incentive for the data request is set, data providers (an open community of developers) get into action. The set bounties can be publicly accessed on DIA’s Gitcoin page. The developers create data scrapers that connect new data sources to the DIA platform. Anyone is free to contribute and validate the data. Furthermore, it takes less than 72 hours for any institutional grade and customized data to get integrated with DIA.

Source: Diadata.org

Data validation

The developers fulfill the data request as a submitted code, which can be validated through a staking mechanism. Anyone can challenge this code by staking DIA tokens (data dispute staking). A vote is taken by the community on who has supplied the correct data and who should be rewarded with the concerned stake. Bounties are also offered by the DIA Association for finding security flaws, bugs, errors and manipulation attempts in the system.

Off-chain computation

Thereafter, the newly provided raw data is thoroughly sanitized and further processed, as per certain transparent methodologies, to improve its reliability even more.

Data storage

Once the data is cleansed and further processed, it is stored inside a flexible, open-source and immutable database. This database can handle all data types, from simple to complex. 

Data publication and usage

The processed data is then made available off-chain through API endpoints and on-chain via DIA platform’s oracle system. DIA code can be freely explored by anyone, and is found here on Github. While DIA provides all historical financial data free-of-cost, DIA tokens are charged for using specific APIs or live price feeds. 

Various entities actively use DIA oracles, especially the DIA price feeds. These include DEXs, Metaverses, staking rewards-related dApps, NFTs-related dApps, games and more. DIA oracles can be easily integrated on all popular blockchains like OKX Chain, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, Gnosis Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Fantom and more. 

As of writing, the platform provides a comprehensive library of data feeds, which comprises price feeds for 20k+ traditional financial assets, 18k+ NFT collections and 2k+ digital assets.

Where is DIA used

If we talk about DIA use cases, there are specific uses of the DIA token and the DIA platform.

About DIA platform’s use cases

DeFi platforms

Many prominent DeFi platforms like Synthetix, MakerDao and others are exposed to oracle vulnerabilities. They are critically dependent on accurate and transparent price feeds from oracles. DIA perfectly serves their price data needs and enables them to focus on their clients and operations without any concerns.

Information providers

Anyone in the business of providing accurate data on financial markets and/or crypto assets can use the DIA price feeds. Some entities in this category are: crypto data portals, financial news websites and market research businesses.

Financial authorities and Regulators

Taxation authorities and financial regulators rely heavily on market data to make important regulatory decisions. A platform like DIA best serves their data needs.

Traders and finance-related businesses

Businesses or individuals engaged in any trading activity stand to gain tremendously from the trustworthy and open-source data feeds of DIA. These include individual investors, portfolio managers, traders, or anyone directly involved in the crypto or conventional financial industry.

About DIA token’s use cases

Funding data requests

Data seekers can offer bounties (in DIA tokens) on their specific data requirements. Data providers who create scrapers and source the required data sets are rewarded with these promised bounties, later.

Voting on governance proposals

Holding DIA tokens gives people the power to vote on governance proposals floated by the DIA DAO. These proposals can be related to DIA tokenomics, technology, product-related or upgrades.

Incentivizing platform development

The onus of DIA development lies with its token holders and the community. Any desired feature can be proposed, voted on, funded and then developed by the platform’s developer community. These developers are rewarded with DIA tokens from the platform’s ‘Ecosystem Token Pool’ (more on it in the Tokenomics section below).

Data validation

DIA tokens can also be staked for incentivizing the validation of data feeds, scrapers, existing oracles, methodologies and more. 

Earning yield

DIA platform also runs a special staking program for DIA token holders. It involves locking-up DIA for 9, 12 or 24 months, to earn an interest yield. More details can be found here.

Accessing specific APIs and live data feeds

All historical data is available free of cost on the DIA platform. However, anyone interested in accessing specific APIs and live data feeds must buy them with DIA tokens.

DIA Founders / History

Although the DIA Association was co-founded by a dozen individuals, three individuals - Michael Weber, Paul Claudius and Samuel Brack - are known as its main leaders.

Paul Claudius

Paul is DIA’s lead advocate and face of the project. He is also widely-perceived as its Chief Business Officer (CBO). A serial entrepreneur, Paul, before co-founding DIA, served as Berlin-based nu3 Group’s Director of European region. He is invested in and has advised various e-commerce, IoT and health-tech start-ups. Paul manages strategic partnerships and business development operations at DIA.

Michael Weber

Michael earned a diploma in Physics and Economics from Germany’s University of Cologne. He is also a Master of Science degree holder from ESCP, Europe. Counted amongst true crypto veterans, Michael is also a serial entrepreneur like Paul. Besides DIA, he founded multiple well-known projects like Goodcoin, BlockState and myLucy. At DIA, he manages the Finance and Legal operations.

Samuel Brack

Samuel is a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree holder in Computer Science from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. His forte is cybersecurity and he heads DIA's Tech and Development departments. Samuel is also a well-recognized keynote speaker at leading computer networking conferences held in Florida, Singapore, Berlin and Dubai.

DIA tokenomics

Although the DIA project was founded in 2018, the DIA token which powers the platform was launched much later in August 2020. DIA is based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 fungible token standard. A total of 200 million DIA tokens were pre-mined at its launch. 

The tokens were allocated by dividing them into six main categories:

1. 15% of the maximum supply that is 30 million DIA were sold through a 14-day public offering held from Aug. 3 through Aug. 17, 2020. The sale was held using an innovative bonding curve mechanism, with the initial DIA price set at $0.05. Of these 30 million, only 10.2 million were sold to the public and the remaining 19.8 million DIA were burnt.
2. 10 million DIA were sold through a private sale, with the DIA price set at $0.50 per token.
3. The ‘Ecosystem Token Pool’ was allocated 25 million DIA tokens. This pool funds various ecosystem initiatives and actions including platform development, DeFi integrations, holding DIA and data collection.
4. 24 million DIA were assigned to the project’s team and founders. These tokens have a 29-month long vesting period.
5. Early investors and advisors of the DIA project were allocated 19.5 million tokens. Majority of these went to Outlier Ventures.
6. The remaining 91.5 million DIA tokens have been locked in an Association Reserve, which will be utilized as collectively decided by the DIA’s governing token holders. 

Source: Medium.com

How is DIA created/mined?

As mentioned above, the entire supply of DIA tokens was pre-mined at the time of the token launch. No more DIA tokens can be mined or created, as of writing. One can acquire DIA tokens by either participating in the DIA ecosystem or by buying them from an established crypto exchange like OKX.

DIA competition and how it fares 

Other well-known oracle platforms like Chainlink and Band Protocol are DIA platform’s primary competitors. Of these, Chainlink, with a market cap of over $4 billion at the time of writing, is DIA’s biggest rival. The main difference between DIA and its peers is how it sources data. While other oracles, including Chainlink, depend on third-party providers for their data feeds, DIA takes the crowdsourcing approach. 

DIA functions as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, implying that anyone is free to contribute to its development. It’s due to this reason that DIA has been able to scale-up its products and services so rapidly, despite having a small core team. This is quite different from other oracles which are mostly centrally managed. 

Source: Coin98

Most oracles provide non-transparent, pre-built data feeds with no customization option. However, DIA allows users to customize their data feeds based on sources, update mechanisms, methodologies and more. Additionally, DIA is quite transparent about where it sources the feeds from. Anyone can look at its data’s journey from the sourcing point till delivery. 

As evident from the chart above, despite all its positives, DIA has quite some catching-up to do with its peers. At $167.7 million, its total value secured is almost negligible when compared to Chainlink’s $15.83 billion. The total number of entities partnered with DIA for its data feeds is also way less than its competitors (see chart below).

Source: Cointelegraph

DIA Partnerships & investors

DIA emerged as one of the star performers from the Outlier Ventures’ Base Camp Accelerator. The project is backed by well-known venture capital funds including TRG Capital, Continue Capital, Jun Capital, A2DAO, ZBS Capital and Outlier Ventures. There are multiple angel investors involved with DIA too. 

The project has partnered with multiple entities over the years to strengthen its market position and expand its ecosystem. Some of its noteworthy partners are: Polkastarter, Hedget, ADD.XYZ, Elrond, Ankr, OKX, Gather, OIN Finance, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap. More details on its partnerships can be found on this Medium.com page.

DIA strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

Strengths

One of DIA’s biggest strengths is how it crowdsources its data feeds. This mechanism allows it to efficiently and quickly fulfill new data requests, with end-to-end transparency. It can deliver any publicly available data and is well on its way to becoming the Wikipedia of financial data. DIA platform’s data offerings already exceed 5000 digital asset prices, as of writing.

How DIA effectively uses its native token for driving the platform's development and growth is another major plus. It makes its growth sustainable and the platform self-sufficient. Furthermore, the fact that its data feeds can be customized based on users’ requirements also gives it an edge over its competitors.

Source: Diadata.org

Weaknesses

Although DIA has strong fundamentals and has grown considerably since its launch., it hasn’t accomplished success like some of its popular peers. There are less than 100 projects that use DIA data feeds as of writing. This, compared to Chainlink’s, is very less. Hence, DIA’s expansion and adoption efforts have plenty of room for growth. 

Opportunities 

With blockchain and crypto adoption growing globally, oracle services like DIA will become more and more relevant in the future. As it supplies on-chain and off-chain financial data to DeFi and TradFi platforms, DIA has a major growth opportunity ahead of itself. It can potentially penetrate further into these markets that are expected to be worth hundreds of trillions of dollars in the future.

Threats

Any fundamental or macroeconomic development that can hamper the rapidly growing global adoption of crypto and blockchain tech, is a threat to the DIA platform too. DIA price feeds are majorly used by DeFi applications, NFT marketplaces and various types of dApps. Any kind of regulatory restrictions on these verticals can also negatively impact the DIA platform.

DIA roadmap

DIA Association claims it has worked hard to create a solid foundation for DIA post its launch. Even before Polkadot’s para chains were conceptualized, DIA had built a substrate-based off-chain worker for itself. The team plans to continue its efforts in making DIA the best-in-class and go-to data solution for high-growth L1 and L2 chains, in the future. It will continue integrating markets native to all such blockchains and ecosystems.

DIA will serve all kinds of projects like NFT marketplaces, lending markets, derivatives and more, which will drive the DeFi industry of the future. Their ambitious product mission involves providing extremely specific and easy-to-acquire feeds by selecting markets and methodologies, for different use cases.

The platform is simultaneously working on a DAO infrastructure that will allow token holders to make commercially and legally binding decisions under Swiss law.

DIA updates, News, Highlights

In a significant development for the DIA platform, its native token got listed on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro on Jan. 24, 2021. Coinbase is the largest crypto exchange in the US. The listing allowed inbound transfers of DIA on Coinbase, in regions wherever crypto trading is permitted. The token is available through the following trading pairs – DIA-EUR, DIA-USDT and DIA-USD.

On Jul. 20, 2022, DIA platform made a major announcementabout DIA oracles’ successful integration with the OKX platform’s native OKX Chain (OKC). DIA’s open-source oracle infrastructure will now be available to developers building on OKC. These developers can access DIA’s comprehensive library of data feeds to build all kinds of NFTfi and DeFi applications. OKC is a highly secure and programmable smart contract-enabled blockchain that allows for the creation of next-gen dApps. It is secured by Tendermint and Delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms and can support more than 4,000 transactions per second.

About DIA xFloor – A transparent, customizable NFT floor price Oracle

Around $41 billion have been spent on NFT marketplaces in 2021 alone. The global NFT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 35.27% to reach around by 2026. 

In June 2022, the DIA core team announced the launch of DIA xFloor, real-time price feeds that contain values of various NFT collections, based on their floor prices. The DIA xFloor price feeds are delivered to interested users via oracle smart contracts or APIs. Bringing such reliable NFT price data on-chain now helps Web3.0 developers in the easy integration of NFTs in the DeFi ecosystem. It will also bring in capital efficiency and improve NFT adoption overall. 

This development is crucial for NFTfi (NFT Finance) use-cases as NFTs can now be leveraged in multiple ways – lending, borrowing, swapping, staking and more – within DeFi apps. The users can also benefit from custom filters and price methodologies while sourcing such data.

Source:

Where to buy DIA? 

You can buy DIA tokens from any of the established crypto exchanges in the market, including OKX. At OKX, we make buying DIA extremely easy. Simply create and login to your account. Access our Basic Trading page and look-up DIA/USDT trading pair in the search window. Buy DIA with USDT by setting up a quick ‘Buy DIA’ market order.

How to store DIA?

You can safely store your DIA tokens in your native OKX wallet. It protects all your crypto assets, including DIA, with top-notch security measures. Alternatively, the token can also be saved in external Ethereum-compatible crypto wallets like MetaMask, MyEtherWallet, Trezor Wallet, Ledger, Atomic Wallet and Guarda Wallet.

How to stake DIA

DIA token holders can participate in DIA’s staking program and earn additional DIA as interest yield. This special staking option was introduced via a DAO proposal in April 2021. To stake, token holders must lock their DIA tokens in an interest yield contract for periods of 9, 12 or 24 months. Please note, this staking option is different from the ‘data dispute staking’ wherein community members can stake their tokens for data validations. The yield details are as follows:

Source: Medium.com

However, the participation in this staking program was open from Apr. 23 – Jun. 30, 2021, and is closed now. Anyone interested in DIA staking should check the DIA website for updated details. You can also check the OKX platform’s where users can directly stake their crypto assets from their OKX wallet.

FAQ about DIA

How is DIA token secured?

The DIA token was created using Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard. Therefore, it is secured by the same features that safeguard the Ethereum blockchain. As of writing, Ethereum is transitioning from a Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism for its security.

How does DIA work to incentivize its oracles’ use?

DIA offers economic incentives to any dApps and smart contracts that demand and use its transparent oracles through its DIA token. It considers this an important means to drive adoption and create a more sustainable system. These rewards are distributed through a Continuous Stakeholder Distribution Mechanism (CSDM) which is funded by DIA’s Ecosystem Token Pool.

What makes DIA unique?

There are several aspects that make DIA a unique oracle platform. For instance, how all data feeds are crowd sourced; how DIA token has several use cases within the DIA ecosystem including for the platform’s sustainable growth and development; and how it efficiently functions as a DAO.

Is DIA a good investment?

DIA tokens are a type of cryptocurrency, which is an inherently risky asset class. That said, the DIA platform has solid fundamentals and many investors choose to buy and hold DIA tokens for the long-term. Nonetheless, you must perform all possible due diligence before investing in any cryptocurrency, including DIA. Most importantly, never invest more than what you can afford to lose.

Where can I learn about DIA trading?

OKX platform has an inbuilt feature known as , where you can learn about DIA trading at your own pace. There are many detailed tutorials to teach you everything about crypto trading, from the basics to advanced level trades.