Why another Chain?

At Morpher we aim to democratize access to financial markets, worldwide.

One example is our real-time, decentralized, transparent and free trading experience. We do this by combining three different components at the backend side:

Oracle based Data Provider

Current Oracle solutions are updating prices on chain either when a certain change in price happens, or only upon requesting it with a paid request. Most, if not all, data feeds are delayed, have unknown licensing rights and are not held accountable for the data quality. As our trading experience relies on real-time tick data, we built an oracle-style request/response model to bring external data into the EVM sandbox

1. With Tick level data quality
2. From Real-Time, high quality data-feeds
3. With redundancy from several data feeds

Smart Contract based settlement layer

We built our trading engine and settlement layer around Solidity Smart Contracts to utilize all the benefits a decentralized blockchain system would bring, including, but not limited to:

1. Smart Contract based economics
2. Decentralized governance
3. Transparent trade settlement
4. Openness without any data silos
5. Cross-Chain compatibility

Layer 2 Solution

Transaction settlement on EVM based blockchains is paid in native gas-tokens. Even on layer 2 chains such as polygon, a transaction is never free and costs a few matic, which in turn a volatile against USD. As we rely on real-time data and want to offer a free trading experience, without sacrificing transparency, we started our own layer 2 EVM compatible blockchain to allow us:

1. Trade with Zero Fees for us and the end-user
2. Fast settlement (1s block time)
3. With rollups and snapshots to Mainnet for transparency
4. And compatibility (and fallback) to other EVM based chains (like mainnet or polygon), if users are willing to pay the enhanced security.

What we try to do differently

While Morpher Smart Contracts (#2) are state of the art for a settlement layer and fit our own use case and the platform as a whole, we think there is room for improvement with the Data Sources we built (#1) and the Layer 2 Solution we run (#3).

Our long-term goal and commitment was always a truly decentralized and democratized trading system that benefits everyone along the way. This document describes a change in #2 and #3 so that:

Real-time tick-level data is readily available

1. on chain for all Smart Contracts
2. from multiple sources
3. with redundancy and
4. proof of data quality

Data-Vendors are

1. paid directly and are
2. licensing data in a transparent way
3. held accountable for data quality

Anyone can join,

1. so that there is no centrally controlling entity
2. Through a staking model with decentralized governance

The existing Ethereum Tooling ecosystem

1. can be used without any restrictions
2. Is fully back/sidewards compatible to other EVM based chains

And finally, transactions are executed in a timely manner with predictable, low volatile, economics