Portus Network is a multi-chain open, trustless, permissionless Data Oracle. Portus is an open, trustless, permissionless API oracle. It is both an Inbound Oracle and an Outbound Oracle with features designed to ensure information validity and action traceability:• Open because it is built from open-source software and made available as open-source
software for full transparency.
• Trustless because the network allows participants to interact publicly or privately without
requiring a trusted 3rd party.
• Permissionless because anyone can participate without authorization from a governing
body. This is valid for both consumers and providers.
Portus is first a full-scale API Gateway. It's an API management tool that sits between a client and a collection of 3rd party services. An API gateway is a reverse proxy that defines API endpoints that aggregate various external services and return an aggregated result. API gateways are a standard in the enterprise landscape. It's common for them to handle everyday tasks such as user authentication, rate limiting, and statistics.
One component of the Portus network is the Portkey node. It's a piece of software that is both an Inbound and Outbound Oracle and sits at the API provider's premises.
Why Portus Network?
- Democratize the Data Oracle market: anybody can become a Data Provider
- Replace validators with decentralized insurance and arbitration
- Engage the community through delegated staking insurance pools
- Reduce complexity and hurdles: stateless node, no validators, no quadratic communication
- Significantly lower fees, only the gas fees of every integrated blockchain to be paid
- Bring all kind of external data in the blockchain, not only numbers: unlimited possibilities, Portus Network enables numerous functionalities of smart contracts
- User friendly API Gateway that connects smart contracts with any event from the real world
Technology:
- Stateless node that can be run by anybody, anywhere
- Ultra high-performance message routing and validation
- Create complex API orchestration workflows, combine APIs, apply transforms and validations
- Multi-blockchain integration
- Multiple messaging models: request-response, push-pull, fanout, inter-chain
- Advanced circuit-breaker capability to prevent failures
- Embedded message security: IP filters, quota, clickjacking protection, XSS protection etc.
Staking
Portus is designed with decentralization in mind. To incentivize network participation by token holders, they can opt to stake their coins in insurance pools rather than solely focusing on trading or doing nothing with them at all. The dAPI provider can choose to let network participants stake their tokens in the insurance pool, to cover the insured amount. Participants that stake their tokens in a pool will earn inflationary rewards from the network, based on their staked amount. Participants that stake their tokens in an insurance pool will also share the risks of the insurance pool. It is imperative for potential stakers to understand those risks and that being a staker is not a passive task. Some actions that a staker should perform are:
- Perform due diligence on the providers you wish to stake on before committing. If a provider you staked on misbehaves, a portion of the insurance pool will be distributed to consumers. Stakers should carefully consider the staking choices
- Actively monitor the providers you've committed to. Stakers should ensure the dAPI providers behave correctly, meaning that they have good uptime and don't get compromised.
Features
The Portkey node is designed to be a fully stateless component that dAPI providers can deploy to run their own oracle nodes. It must provide features to ensure data consistency, resiliency, performance, reliability, security, and scalability.
Portus is more than a typical proxy that forwards consumers to backend services. It's a pure API Gateway that interacts with different microservices to provide consumers a single interface that improves response times, saves bandwidth, and delivers a better user experience.
- Self-service - The Portkey node requires no coding because all data transformations, picking, merging, definitions, and transforms are declared in a single configuration file. All the API gateway behavior can be edited in the JSON file by hand or using the visual designer, a GUI that allows you visually design your API from scratch or edit an existing one.
- Performance - It's been built with performance in mind. Expect massive performance and speed in every running instance. Because the Portkey node has been coded in Go using minimal dependencies and the best architecture practices, the node can support a massive amount of traffic with low memory
consumption - Linear Scalability - Unlike other solutions, Portkey's stateless design is the only architecture that can provide true linear scalability. The node does not require coordination or centralization. There is no concept of a cluster because all nodes are autonomous and can keep running even if all other nodes are
shut down. - Low Operational Cost - The node can run in very small machines, serverless, and containerized environments. With an average memory usage of 100MB RAM on heavy-traffic machines, the costs can be kept to a minimum compared to existing solutions.
- Run it everywhere! - Portkey natively runs in any cloud or private datacenter and is designed to run both in Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, and Nomad but also directly installed on bare metal machines and serverless environments.
- Extensible - You can extend the node functionality and your business logic with plugins. Many operations can be done directly from the configuration file using Google CEL for validators and Martian DSL for HTTP requests and responses.
- Secure - Portus is designed with security in mind. It provides rate-limiting, OAuth, SSL certificates, and
protection from clickjacking, XSS, MIME-Sniffing, HSTS, HPKP, and much more. - QoS - The node allows you to control the throttling and usage quotas based on the criteria you specify.The limits can be set both for end-users and at the infrastructure level. When settings limits against your backends, bursting is controlled to allow certain spikes without affecting end users.
- Multi-platform - The node is written in Go and runs natively on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS.
- Multi-chain - New blockchains can be added easily. Just migrate the smart contract to the new chain and write
a Go plugin to talk to the smart contract. - Open-Source - Portus is entirely open-source under the MIT license. You are free to fork the repos, create pull requests and contribute your ideas. Just make sure you have a look at the contribution guidelines.
