Remember this visual from the early 1900s? This is a telephone switchboard. Back in the day, you couldn’t just dial up your friend’s number and connect in seconds. First, you would have to call in to a telephone network operator, they would receive your call by plugging in one end of the lead into the switchboard. Then, depending on which city you wanted to call in to, the operator plugs in the other end of the lead into the corresponding destination node, completing the circuit. Once your call was done, the operator would disconnect both leads and start the process all over again.
For almost a century, this how information travelled across the world - cavernous rooms of operators manning complex floor-to-ceiling switchboards and connecting input nodes to the right output nodes at frenetic pace.
Today’s topic of exploration, the aptly-named Switchboard wants to be the ubiquitous data platform for the Solana blockchain, enabling any developer to bring data from the real world and feed it into the various apps and protocols that require it. Inputs 🤝 Outputs.
Before we dive deeper into the mechanics of the platform, it’s important to understand why Switchboard is so fundamental to the Solana dev ecosystem.
Blockchains are incredible systems. They’re distributed ledgers that maintain a record of transactions as a single source of immutable truth. Whatever happens on the blockchain stays on the blockchain. Be it a transaction or an agreement, everything is recorded, searchable, verifiable.
Smart contracts, layered on to the blockchain make the system even more explosive. It makes money programmable. Two parties can enter into agreements without a middleman and trust that it will be executed once the set conditions are met.
However, the blockchain is sort of like a supercomputer with no internet connection.
It is disconnected from the real world. While it has infinite knowledge and historic record of what happens on the chain, it is oblivious to anything outside of it.
The blockchain does not know what the weather is, or what the price of Apple stock is, or how much the Nasdaq moved over a given time scale or even who won the IPL (though it can almost always be certain it wasn’t RCB).