?Oracles for BTC and ETH?
A blockchain oracle is a tool that is responsible for verifying, collecting and recording information that is outside the blockchain, either in the physical world or the internet, to introduce it as reliable data to said network.
The idea is to create a bridge between those data that are external to the blockchain and the smart contracts developed in it, nourishing the network with useful data that can then be used to execute a smart contract that validates a transaction or closes a dispute in a predictive market.
Oracles have become pieces of great importance for the optimal functioning of DeFi, since many highly complex financial services need to have “real life” data to be able to operate according to the global market. For example, oracles are the information about the winner of a soccer team or a presidential election, data that would be necessary to be able to close a bet in a predictive market.
Chainlink is one of the most used oracles by DeFi applications, since it is a network of oracles that processes verified information in real time. Due to their collective model, DeFi services tend to trust their data, as it would be compared to different information providers.
One of the risks that oracles presuppose is that these tools need a third party to work, since they cannot yet be programmed. A person, and not a code, is the one who enters this data into the blockchain for it to be compared and processed. In this sense, it is believed that oracles can introduce wrong information, have bad intentions or even there is the possibility that they are bribed by users of the blockchain as long as they favor one information over another, a theory that the researcher and journalist put forward. Kyle Torpey.
