As I already explained to you here, none of these claims about Chainlink is true. I will repost my comment here to provide context to everyone.
This is simply not true and a bit disingenuous. Chainlink simply wants to provide the DeFi ecosystem with the most secure price oracle solution with the highest quality data and this involves pulling from data aggregators who have full time monitoring teams to ensure manipulation is prevented 24/7. Taking a simple median from a select few exchanges is simply not an adequate oracle solution as it will always be vulnerable to market coverage issues and manipulation attacks around volume shifts and consolidations. As I described in the post linked above, the three layers of aggregation (data level, node level, network level) prevents any single source of truth. Relying on a single source of true is what played a significant factor in the $100M false liquidations of Compound users, and at the very least made the attack much easier and cheaper to pull off.
These are not “unnecessary layers” but layers of redundancy to ensure smart contracts always receive price data that reflects the true market wide price and not that of a single or a few exchanges. As I described in my proposal, Chainlink is directly secured by cryptoeconomics through an opportunity cost of losing future income if a node is malicious, as well as losing their reputation as an DevOps infrastructure provider. This is why we have never seen a successful attack against the Chainlink network, because the incentives work and ensure correct data is always posted on-chain.
As I also described, taking a simple median across a select few exchanges who change their infrastructure to support signed data compatible with Ethereum still does not provide adequate market coverage because it doesn’t take into account volume and liquidity differences across exchanges like data aggregators do. Here is a repost of my comment for more context.
I think you’re missing the key point of market coverage. The issue with Compound’s oracle during this DAI manipulation attack was that it did not report the true market wide price. If an attacker manipulates the entire market (across every single exchange), then yes all oracles would be affected at that point, but that’s only because the true market wide price was changed, but that’s not what happened during this event, only a single exchange (Coinbase) was manipulated. That’s the nuance here, market coverage raises the cost of attack to highest degree possible, and while it doesn’t prevent market manipulation altogether, but does make it as expensive as possible and ensures protocols always receive the true market wide price.
Like we discussed at length in the governance discord channel, the DAI liquidation event was a mixture of two factors. Too much DAI debt taken out AND a lack of price oracle market coverage. Coinbase is not the only liquid market for DAI and the DAI/USD Coinbase trading pair only tracks 4.75% of DAI’s daily volume according to CoinGecko. The vast majority of the volume is from Uniswap, which Chainlink adequately tracks today through its usage of data aggregators. Both of these factors (debt and market coverage) need to be solved, but we shouldn’t be ignoring the latter whatsoever. We can solve both issues at the same time, because market coverage played a significant factor in the false liquidation of $100M in user funds. The longer the Compound protocol goes without ensuring market coverage, the more exposed user funds are to further oracle manipulation.