An Introduction to TicTon Oracle — Innovative price oracle for TON
Tic Ton Oracle is a decentralized oracle network designed to provide real-world token prices for the TON Blockchain. Serving as a bridge between on-chain smart contracts and off-chain data sources, Tic Ton employs an Actual Price mechanism to update the oracle’s quotations. Unlike other oracles that utilize a penalty system to ensure price quality, our approach is more about incentivizing quoters to provide accurate prices; otherwise, they risk being arbitraged by validators. This method allows TON to interact with external data in a secure and decentralized manner.
During the TON Taipei Workshop in 2023, our team discovered that there was no operational oracle on the TON, which limited the development of many DeFi applications. Consequently, we began researching Tic Ton Oracle, aiming to leverage TON’s unique features to create the most suitable oracle for use on the TON network.
How TicTon Works?
TicTon oracle stands as the premier fully decentralized oracle on the TON. Diverging from market-standard final prices set by price providers, it employs Game Theory to craft a decentralized network of non-cooperative games. This network ascertains the ultimate price via mechanisms of arbitrage and bidirectional options, incorporating the chain with random data from decentralized price streams.
Architecture
In-Depth Architecture Breakdown
You can envision the TicTon Oracle as the story below:
A Watchmaker can submit a correct time to TicTon’s Alarm. If a Timekeeper finds any Alarm with inaccurate time, they can report a new time to that Alarm.
If the time provided by a Watchmaker remains unadjusted by the Timekeeper, the Watchmaker receives a reward. Timekeepers also earn rewards for correcting erroneous Alarm times. The funds for these rewards come from customers who pay to check the current time.
Step1: Provide price by Watchmaker
Watchmakers can provide accurate quotes to TicTon Oracle; for instance, if the quoted price is 1 TON / 2 USDT, the watchmaker must transfer 1 TON and 2 USDT to the Oracle as a commitment. The Oracle then creates an Alarm for this quote. Multiple watchmakers may quote simultaneously, resulting in several Alarms, each representing different quotes. If a quote remains unarbitrated by the Timekeeper after 20 blocks (refer to step two for the process), the watchmaker can claim rewards for that quote.
Step2:Verify price by Timekeeper
When the Timekeeper believes an Alarm’s quote (1 TON / 2 USDT) is incorrect and the actual price should be 1 TON / 3 USDT, they can use 2 USDT to purchase the 1 TON.However, they must also provide a new, correct quote and transfer an amount double that of the exploited Alarm. If the original Watchmaker contributed 1 TON and 2 USDT, the Timekeeper must then transfer 2 TON and 6 USDT (representing 1 TON / 3 USDT) to the Oracle. The Oracle will then create an Alarm to record this quote and allow other Timekeepers to review it for arbitrage opportunities. Through this method, malicious quotes require asset commitment to the Oracle, but they also provide Timekeepers with arbitrage opportunities, each requiring a double asset deposit. As the arbitrage process repeats, the threshold for submitting malicious quotes increases.
Step3: Protocols get price
Protocols can retrieve prices from Tic Ton Oracle while paying some basic fees.
For more detailed information on the pricing mechanism, you can refer to this video.
Why the Actual Price Quoting Mechanism Is Ideal for Implementation on TON
The Actual Price quoting mechanism is particularly well-suited for implementation on the TON Blockchain, primarily due to TON’s advantage of high Transactions Per Second (TPS). The exceptional TPS capability of the TON Blockchain significantly reduces the waiting time required for the verification process. In practice, assuming that the verification time requires 10 blocks, what might take more than 120 seconds on platforms like Ethereum can be completed in 50 seconds or less on TON.
This increase in efficiency not only makes the Actual Price method more efficient but also allows for a quicker response to market dynamics when deployed on TON. The reduced verification time ensures that the oracle can update prices more swiftly, providing DeFi applications with the most current and accurate data. This efficiency is crucial in the fast-paced DeFi environment, where even a few seconds’ difference can have a significant impact on the outcome of transactions.
Conclusions
As blockchain networks increasingly seek off-chain data, TicTon meets this growing need through an innovative and decentralized approach. With this in mind, TicTon boasts a wide range of applications and has already been incorporated into many Defi projects. It undoubtedly possesses the capability to emerge as a premier oracle in the industry.
