Witnet

Blockchain technology promises to revolutionize business by creating smart contracts that, unlike paper contracts, are impossible to breach. However, up until now, smart contracts are completely isolated from the rest of the Internet.

The Witnet protocol connects smart contracts to any online data source. Sport results, stock prices, weather forecasts or even other blockchains.

The protocol works thanks to a distributed network of mining nodes—called witnesses—who earn Wit tokens as a reward for retrieving web data and reporting it directly to the smart contracts.

Witnesses are also in charge of validating transactions in the network and bundling them into blocks that get appended to the blockchain periodically.

The probability for every witness to be assigned tasks or mine new blocks is directly proportional to their past performance in terms of honesty: their reputation.

The Witnet protocol is designed to make Wit mining viable even on commodity hardware, thus guaranteeing fairness and decentralization.