A Study of Blockchain Oracles

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain oracles, their architectures, and roles in enabling smart contracts to access external data, highlighting technical and human oracle aspects.

Contribution

It offers an in-depth analysis of blockchain oracles, including their design patterns, architecture, and the human oracle's role in ensuring data truthfulness.

Findings

Overview of widely used blockchain oracles

Discussion on oracle architectures and design patterns

Analysis of human oracle's role in data verification

Abstract

The limitation with smart contracts is that they cannot access external data which might be required to control the execution of business logic. Oracles can be used to provide external data to smart contracts. An oracle is an interface that delivers data from external data outside the blockchain to a smart contract to consume. Oracle can deliver different types of data depending on the industry and requirements. In this paper, we study and describe the widely used blockchain oracles. Then, we elaborate on his potential role, technical architecture, and design patterns. Finally, we discuss the human oracle and his key role in solving the truth problem by reaching a consensus about a certain inquiry and tasks.