Flare onboards institutional data providers to boost decentralization

Flare Network (FLR) will onboard “professional infrastructure providers,” according to an announcement on December 7. These institutional players will join the network as validators and provide real-world data for Flare’s native oracles.

In particular, Flare highlighted Ankr, Figment, Restake, and NorthStake onboarding. Notably, Flare Network is the “first smart contract platform for whom these institutional validators also provide decentralized data feeds,” as communicated to Finbold.

This recent onboarding aims to boost decentralization for oracle systems often used by blockchain developers. Hugo Philion, Flare co-founder and CEO, shared his vision:

“The fact that institutional validators of the quality and scale of Ankr, Restake and Luga Nodes are willing to extend their business model to also provide decentralized data specifically on Flare gives proof positive to Flare’s vision for a fully decentralized network for data.”

— Hugo Philion

Flare Network’s data decentralization

Luga Nodes is another highlighted validator and data provider to support the Flare Network. Its CEO Anuj Shankar also talked about this new endeavor:

“Luganodes has always been committed to offering institutional-grade services in the blockchain infrastructure space, and we find Flare’s new model of decentralized data provision very interesting. It’s not something we’ve done before, but being part of the Flare ecosystem as both a validator and a data provider to their native oracle aligns perfectly with our mission to provide reliable and secure blockchain infrastructure solutions – and we are keen to see how it improves decentralized data access for developers.”

— Anuj Shankar

Interestingly, Flare reported having 91 active network validators across the globe. Moreover, these validators are also data providers for the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO).

In this context, FTSO leverages blockchain oracle solutions by combining its network’s consensus with data collection in a decentralized manner. An Oracle is a system capable of collecting and broadcasting real-world data with blockchain applications.

Flare describes itself as “the blockchain for data.” It is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer-1 blockchain focused on Oracle solutions.