Obyte launches Autonomous Agents on Mainnet to unblock Decentralised Finance

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) platform Obyte has announced that Autonomous Agents (AAs) were successfully activated on 29th February 2020.

Autonomous Agents are a way to program and automate the movement of funds on a distributed ledger, they are most useful in decentralised finance (DeFi) applications. It is the first time that programmable money is deployed on a DAG based distributed ledger.

DeFi apps benefit from DAG because unlike blockchains, access to DAG ledger is absolutely disintermediated. There are no authorities, such as miners, who could block or delay access to the ledger to manipulate the outcome of a DeFi transaction. Front-running and other manipulation by miners is a common concern in many DeFi applications.

With DeFi, many more people can get access to financial services than is currently possible, and more advanced financial products can be built and launched, easily and in a permissionless way.

Autonomous Agents are programmed in Oscript, a language specifically developed for this purpose. Unlike its predecessors, such as Ethereum’s Solidity, Oscript doesn’t support dangerous programming patterns that can lead to hard-to-find bugs. This helps to minimise the chances of high-profile hacks that we’ve seen on Ethereum, such as TheDAO, Parity, and many others.

Oscript is also easy to learn and program in. A typical AA can be developed in as little as two days.

Applications that can be developed with Autonomous Agents include algorithmic stablecoins, decentralised exchanges, prediction markets, decentralised oracles, synthetic assets, collateralized lending, payment channels, market makers, margin trading, futures contracts, investment portfolios, decentralised registries, game economies, etc.

The launch follows 7 months of testing on the testnet, deployment of 2375 Autonomous Agents, and processing of 25482 AA transactions, in addition to seven rounds of AA developer contest with new Oscript language. A team from Bosch won the last round of the contest with an Autonomous Auctioneer dapp. Bosch also runs one of the Order Provider nodes on the Obyte network.