Introduction

Welcome to Decimal – a trustless data marketplace

What are Oracles?

In the context of blockchain, oracles act as bridges between smart contracts and external data sources. Smart contracts, which are contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code, often require real-world data to trigger and execute certain conditions. Oracles facilitate this interaction by securely fetching and providing external data to the blockchain.

Approches for Oracles

Oracles today have this inherent trade off between decentralization, cost and speed. Oracles which are centralized are fast and cheap and the ones who are decentralized are slow and inefficient. There have been attempts to solve this problem and the solutions lie on this spectrum of centralized to decentralized by making the above tradeoffs.

Ideal Oracle

Ideally an oracle should be able to provide information with the following characteristics

• secure (results from oracle are provable onchain)

• cost efficient (oracle data is calculated only once for max efficiency)

• Frequency (oracle can update data in sub milli second intervals)

• Permissionless

  • For agents (agents who feed data to oracles should be able to join without any whitelisting)

  • For oracle feed (oracle should be able to execute arbitrary logic before submitting the feed)

  • For users (any user should be able to join and specific requests)

We will explore various approaches to oracles and how close are they to the ideal oracle in ecosystem-comparision page.

Decimal's approach

The purpose of Decimal is to make data available for all – in a reliable, accurate, cheap and fast manner.

• The data should be beyond reproach, always verifiable and auditable.

• The system should be sustainable, involving efficient practices to incur minimal wastage and costs for the users and the environment.

• Everyone is unique, and so are their data requirements. Hence, the oracles providing these data should also be equally customizable.

• The data should be accessible for all – with minimal onboarding overheads.

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