Covoir: improving smart contracts with crowd intelligence and machine learning
Many Blockchain-based applications utilize smart contracts to provide innovative services. For example, a smart contract can be assigned to issue insurance payments to someone whose flight gets delayed. To make the decision of whether to execute the terms of the contract, you need information about the real world (e.g. whether the flight was delayed or not). To get this information, smart contracts typically rely on a source of truth, aka “an oracle”, that can fetch that information. However, most oracles work in a centralized mode which is easily corruptible (e.g., the company might provide incorrect information in order to not have to pay the insurance). Conversely, decentralized oracles can take more than two weeks to fetch information which can be impractical--especially when the smart contract is trying to provide real-time services. Additionally, most oracles can only respond to very structured questions, such as: “Is my flight delayed?” but cannot provide answer more complex questions, such as: “Did this employee hurt themselves on the job and hence should access a particular type of medical insurance?” or “Did this government contractor finish its agreed workload and should the next stage of funds be released?"
Covoir provides trustworthy off-chain data to the smart contracts on blockchains in real time. Covoir is a decentralized Oracle that combines crowd intelligence with machine learning to retrieve off-chain information. The crowd’s intelligence enables access to unstructured and complex real-world data that cannot be simply googled or provided by an API. Covoir is proposing novel techniques for coordinating the intelligence of the crowd in mere seconds. They generate revenue by providing off-chain decentralized data to any type of smart-contract, from any structured or unstructured data source in real time. Covoir is addressing a long-standing problem that has kept smart contracts from responding to complex off-chain events in a timely manner. They hope their product will not only to help current Blockchain services, but also open new applications and services never imagined before.
The Covoir team is made up of members of two student blockchain organizations university blockchain clubs are involved in our MouseBelt University Program:
Blockchain at UNAM and
Blockchain at UCSB.
MouseBelt University is building a community of universities from all over the world enabling students to collaborate, share ideas, and enhance their understanding of blockchain. During our program, we work closely with students to help educate and prepare them for launching a product. At the end of each term, we choose the most promising student projects to invest in, and Covoir will be the first of many!
Here's what the team had to say about the program:
"Engaging with the people from Mousebelt has been very motivating. The team at Mousebelt consists of passionate individuals who work hard and know how to execute. Seeing that work ethic has motivated us to get up and fight to build the future of Blockchain we dream. We have really enjoyed engaging with the engineers at Mousebelt and having them question our products and ideas. Through these interactions, we really feel we grew professionally. It has also been very refreshing to see that Mousebelt has women leaders such as Ashlie in their team since the Blockchain ecosystem can at times be very aggressive towards minorities. Seeing that Mousebelt has women leaders at its forefront has helped us believe in ourselves more. Let’s get to work!"
Need funding for your university blockchain organization? We provide support for blockchain related classes, events, and much more. Join us and receive access to our cross-campus community, 10 weeks of educational workshops and opportunities to funding your company. We will be choosing ten of the most promising student projects and invest $25,000 in each.
Apply here today!
