Explainer
Flare Network
A next-generation blockchain with decentralized oracles, smart contracts, and community-governed data providers.
What is Flare?
Flare is a Layer-1 blockchain where FLR serves as the native token for network security, data provision, governance, and transaction fees. Applications built on Flare depend on accurate off-chain data — delivered by decentralized data providers like AlphaOracle.
Learn more at dev.flare.network.
Data Providers & FTSO
Data providers are offchain participants in Flare's protocols, responsible for threshold-weighted voting across sub-protocols. The network anticipates around 100 data providers, selected among validators with the highest vote power.
Vote power is community-driven, derived from two key sources:
- P-chain Stake — FLR staked directly or delegated to validators
- WNat Delegations — Wrapped FLR (WFLR) delegated via the WNat smart contract
Time on Flare is divided into voting epochs (90 seconds) grouped into reward epochs (~3.5 days). Data providers submit price feeds each voting epoch, and accurate submissions earn rewards.
Flare Confidential Compute
Flare Confidential Compute (FCC) extends the Flare blockchain with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to enable secure off-chain computation, cross-chain transaction signing, and fast data attestation — while keeping sensitive data private inside hardware-isolated enclaves.
Applications within FCC are organized as Flare Compute Extensions (FCE). Each extension runs isolated code inside registered TEE machines, extending smart contracts into confidential compute environments. Built-in system applications include Protocol Managed Wallets (PMW) and a TEE-based generation of the Flare Data Connector (FDC).
Key capabilities enabled by TEEs:
- Secure off-chain computation — verifiable code runs in hardware-isolated environments, even if the operator is untrusted
- Onchain registration & attestation — TEE machines prove they run supported code versions before joining a compute extension
- Instruction relaying — data providers parse smart contract events, sign instructions, and relay them to TEE machines after reaching consensus threshold
- Private key management — keys are generated, stored, backed up, and restored securely within TEE enclaves
- Result verification — computation outputs signed by a registered TEE identity can be trusted and verified onchain
Note: FCC is in the final stages of development. Learn more in the FCC Developer Hub overview.
AlphaOracle & FCC Infrastructure
As a Flare data provider, AlphaOracle participates in the FCC stack as an instruction relayer — parsing instruction events from smart contracts, augmenting them with attestation data, signing them, and transmitting them to registered TEE machines alongside cosigners where required.
We operate FCC-related infrastructure on both networks, including:
- FDC attestation — augmenting TEE-based attestation requests using our existing data provision capabilities
- Validators — securing the Flare mainnet through proof-of-stake consensus
- Observation nodes — supporting reliable data delivery across Flare and Songbird
TEE proxy and TEE machine hosting will be added as FCC moves out of beta — publicly accessible proxy interfaces and confidential VMs for executing and signing attested computations on both Flare and Songbird.
Instructions reach TEE machines only after accumulating sufficient signature weight from Flare's data providers — the same decentralized consensus mechanism used across the Flare Systems Protocol.