Orchid adds a new 'secret shopper' oracle for greater transparency

Decentralized VPN Orchid is adding a Chainlink oracle that, like a “secret shopper,” samples bandwidth pricing from all the providers in the network. 

Orchid co-founder Steven Waterhouse explained the importance of this feature, stating, “The basic idea is in decentralized services like Orchid, where we have a decentralized VPN, there's no way of really knowing exactly [how much a provider might charge]. A provider might say they’re charging a certain amount, we don't really know until you try it. So we wrote some code that in a decentralized fashion, shops for bandwidth on the network.”

He said that in the future, this may lead to new features being added, such as the ability to track the uptime of bandwidth providers. Waterhouse also said that choosing Chainlink over other oracalized data providers was easy, a his relationship with the project’s co-founder Sergey Nazarov goes back to 2014.

When asked whether the pandemic has had a positive impact on the demand for VPN services, Waterhouse stated that it is difficult to judge, with Orchid being a new business:

“I am definitely conscious of the fact that there's an overall demand for privacy services as more people are working at home and also as people are starting to become more aware of some of the issues that are going hand-in-hand with potentially increased tracking and surveillance of people in global pandemics are also in terms of you can change.”

Waterhouse was a founding partner of Pantera Capital, one of the first crypto investment firms in the world. Regarding the recent DeFi boom, he is convinced that people are “risking capital on unaudited contracts and anonymous teams and so on.” He did admit that he was excited about the launch of the Uniswap’s UNI token, stating, “I think that that's a great team and it's good to see what can be done with a solid team behind.”

Chainlink has recently acquired a privacy-preserving protocol, DECO, from Cornell University, which should make its data more secure.

Earlier today, Binance also announced its decision to list Orchid's native token (OXT) for trade.