
Smart Cities: DAOs and Data Transparency with Dave Connor
Kweku lee
Description
My guest today is Dave Connor, a DAO member at API3. API3 is a platform for decentralized API services targeted at the web3 infrastructure. Data feeds are served and governed in a decentralized manner. In the standard internet web, API3’s stated goal is to allow decentralized versions of APIs to be built, managed, and monetized at scale. As blockchain technology plays an even bigger role in the economy — from decentralized finance to supply chain management — the team behind this project says it has never been more important for smart contracts to provide “timely, reliable real-world data.” Oracles are a form of middleware that sits in between APIs and smart contracts — increasing costs and centralization. API3 intends to get around this problem by enabling API providers to operate their very own nodes. Dave is an experienced operations lead, having experience as a VP Of Business Development with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and blockchain industry. Our conversation covers API3 and decentralized oracles, Smart Cities, real-world examples of the integration of blockchain and data. We begin our conversation by discussing API3 and decentralized oracles. Dave dives deep into oracles, the oracle problem, and the current limitations with on-chain data. We continue our conversation about oracles by discussing API3 and their approach to scaling a decentralized oracle. We finish our conversation about oracles by discussing the importance of providing superior data transparency all the way to the factual data source level to have a truly robust system. This naturally leads our conversation to how this technology is fundamental to building "Smart Cities." We begin our conversation about Smart Cities by discussing the lego blocks that trusted decentralized data can enable, we discuss for example how a developer could build a decentralized version of Uber with roughly 3 APIs. Our conversation continues by discussing how this technology can be extrapolated and applied at a larger scale like i