Introducing Caldera Policy Engine, Developed in Collaboration with Predicate
Introducing Caldera Policy Engine, Developed in Collaboration with Predicate
We’re proud to unveil the Caldera Policy Engine, developed in partnership with Predicate. This powerful tool allows Caldera chains to manage their behavior and flexibly establish transaction prerequisites for their rollup.
What is Predicate?
Predicate is a network for simplifying transaction prerequisites. Through Predicate, users, developers, and communities define rules for onchain interactions, integrating expressive pre-transaction logic into decentralized applications. These rules, like legos, can be stacked to form policies, which are enforced by the Predicate Network.
Why this matters: Empowering Specialization
As part of our commitment to modularity, a guiding principle for us at Caldera is empowering specialization over generalization and flexibility over rigidity. On monolithic blockchains, dozens of flourishing applications with legitimate usage have fallen victim to exploits, hacks, and other attacks by a few bad actors over the years. We’re here to fix that.
By leveraging Predicate to power our Policy Engine, we enable every ecosystem and application building on Caldera to thrive because of their infrastructure—not despite it. The Predicate Network enforces transaction prerequisites directly at the smart contract level. Once a policy is implemented, Predicate validates that the inbound transaction meets the policy’s criteria. To ensure that policy enforcement is trust-minimized, Predicate leverages EigenLayer for a distributed network of economically incentivized operators. These operators reference the policy and issue signatures for each transaction. Signature issuance is deterministic, and transactions without a valid Predicate signature are automatically rejected.
Our Policy Engine equips Caldera rollups with the ability to customize and fully own their network’s behavior using both onchain and offchain data, such as historical flow of funds, blockchain analytics, verifiable credentials, dynamic allowlists, etc., based on the policy requirements. This gives teams the tools to build for their unique user base while ensuring the security and integrity of their ecosystem. Crucially, the rollup maintains control over the policy rather than their service providers.
Use Cases: Endless Possibilities
We’ve already built some unique use-cases with our Policy Engine.
For instance, the team at RARI Foundation sought to build a creator-first blockchain that reduced complexity and costs for users while empowering NFT creators to benefit from their work. As such, in addition to minimizing throughput and gas fees through Arbitrum Anytrust DA, we implemented a node-level royalty-enforcement system for RARI Chain using the Policy Engine to prevent bad actors from circumventing royalty payments and ensure that creators across the RARI chain ecosystem are rewarded for their NFT sales.
For another chain, we implemented OFAC compliance enforcement by preventing sanctioned addresses and IP addresses from sanctioned countries from transacting. Using a similar approach, we could also integrate KYC providers, anomaly detection, rate limiting, and more.
Put simply, the possibilities are endless.
Build the Future
We believe developers should have the power to build without compromise and tailor their chains to their desired use cases. We're building Caldera to ensure this is the case, and with Predicate’s technology, this Policy Engine is another step in the right direction.
About Caldera
Caldera is one of the fastest-growing rollup ecosystems on Ethereum, empowering web3 teams to launch high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups. Dozens of leading EVM chains, including Manta, ApeChain, Kinto, Injective, RARI Chain, and Zero Network by Zerion, use our trusted Rollups-as-a-Service platform to enjoy unified connectivity with rollups across all leading frameworks.
