Accountable Watching Services (PISA)
Duration: 00:16:33
Speaker: Patrick McCorry
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
At Devcon IV, we presented PISA, a solution to help alleviate the online requirements for state channels. Thanks to an Ethereum Foundation grant, the team has taken the idea of an 'accountable watching service' further to help alleviate the online requirement for other off-chain protocols such as Plasma and in general most smart contracts. What do we mean that PISA is usable by most smart contracts? Ideally, if we consider a smart contract where the user has to be online and watching for an on-chain event, then PISA can be hired to protect them (and perform the final step). Our goal is to help improve the UX for most smart contracts as users can simply go off-line and PISA can finish the task in a financially accountable manner. In this talk, we'll discuss the substantial changes to PISA such that it can be generically used for most smart contracts. We'll discuss the implementation of PISA, the open-source project, and how other projects can use our simple API to sign up to the accountable watching service.