OAK Network - An automation infrastructure layer for Web3.0.
Automation is a major component of all online activity - from filtering and auto responders of emails to the more sophisticated IOT platforms like IFTT that emerged on web2.0 and most importantly the financial sector, for things like payments, subscriptions, etc. All these stuff happen automatically without us having to explicitly confirm or press a button for them to happen. Can you imagine having to remember to pay your subscriptions every month manually? Imagine the frustration and amount of effort you would have to put into this.
Surprisingly no one on web3 space was talking about the need for automation, especially with the explosion of DeFi. We don’t have subscriptions, recurring payments, or even limit orders on Decentralized exchanges (at least in a web3 native way), exactly because of the lack of automation.
Thankfully the team of OAK came up with this brilliant idea of creating an automation platform that could potentially solve all of these problems by leveraging the power of substrate and the polkadot ecosystem. The result of their work is OAK and Turing networks, on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. Turing is live on the Kusama network and OAK is going live on Q4 of 2022.
OAK follows an event-driven approach to their design that allows cross-chain automation with the use of the Polkadot XCM system. For example, a payroll dApp that runs on Shiden and calculates the amount to be paid to every employee of a company can instruct another Payment dApp that runs on Acala network, to make aUSD payments to the employees every 2 weeks, without the person responsible for the payroll having to lift a finger. Needless to say that everything happens in a non-custodial and trustless manner, which is a huge differentiator from other solutions that are currently being worked on. Genuine Web3 DNA.
The above is just a simple automation example that can be achieved using OAK’s technology. Currently several use cases are being worked on between OAK and other parachains and we expect that this number will grow dramatically when the Polkadot ecosystem starts delivering actual dApps that run on top of the parachains.
OAK brings extra joy to our team since Chris was the CTO of Monday Capital before he took the step to build OAK alongside Irsal. Of course, we are extremely happy that he did so and we became their first investor :)