Introducing oracles.club
By: Ashwin Ramachandran and Tom Schmidt
Oracles are one of the last major unsolved problems in DeFi. Recently we’ve seen many oracle-related attacks, and many projects find it difficult to know which oracles are safe to use. To help bring more clarity to the world of oracles, Dragonfly Research is releasing a comprehensive oracle monitoring tool that provides real-time data on all of the major on-chain oracle services. You can access it here.
Why do oracles matter?
Almost all DeFi projects rely on data feeds to report asset prices on-chain. Most of them don’t work at all without access to accurate pricing data. This data is used for margin liquidations, market quotes, collateralization ratios, and more.
In order to get accurate data from the real world onto a blockchain, you need an oracle. There are many oracles out there: Maker, Compound, Chainlink, UMA, to name just a few. But each of these oracles attempts to solve the same underlying problem: how can you securely report off-chain data on-chain?
It’s easy to do this if you just choose to trust the oracle. But if you want real decentralization and trustlessness, you need to do better. Each of the aforementioned oracles takes a different approach to solving this problem while maintaining decentralization, and some oracles have failed dramatically in the past. In oracles.club, we document the different tradeoffs that each oracle makes so you can determine which oracle you prefer to trust.
Given the recent string of oracle failures, we at Dragonfly feel it is more important than ever for the Ethereum community at large to understand and evaluate the tradeoffs of the many different oracle systems in existence today. Because complex systems are intrinsically hazardous, we hope this tool will help entrepreneurs and researchers more easily understand and navigate the current oracle space.
Users should be able to understand the details of any oracle design while easily evaluating their tradeoffs. You will also be able to access real-time, on-chain prices for popular asset pairs (ETH/USD, BTC/USD, and BAT/USD) as well as view historical price data for 6 different DeFi oracle services.
It is our hope that this tool will continue to be improved by the community, and are in the process of open sourcing our codebase and accepting PRs to add more price feeds and oracle descriptions to this service.
Pull Requests and Issues can be submitted here and here. We’re open to any and all suggestions or updates.
