Introduction

Oracles are a vital part of blockchain infrastructure, connecting blockchains with off-chain data sources. Today, multiple stacks for oracles exist, but like much of current Web3 infrastructure, they make many compromises. Autonolas’ oracles solve many of the most common challenges through the unique properties of our multi-agent system software stack.

The oracle problem 2.0

Having initially made large strides towards connecting blockchains with off-chain data, development in the oracle market seems to have plateaued. Despite offering a relatively decentralized way of accessing off-chain information, the current oracle offering is lacking in several respects:

• They are permissioned: everything from the data providers to the node operators to the chains to integrate often goes through a whitelisting process carried out by a central company.
• They are inflexible: You cannot easily modify or extend the functionality of an oracle to suit your needs. For example, for many oracles, you need to hold a certain volatile asset to use them.
• Your options are currently quite limited: the market is dominated by one player, leading to forms of centralization.

Autonolas oracles are different

Autonolas oracles break past the stagnation in the oracle market

• They are permissionless: the oracles can source data from anywhere, be run by anyone, and its functionality can be easily extended. This leads to a much faster rate of innovation
• They are highly customizable: You do not have to wait for someone to build or upgrade the oracle you need - you can do it yourself with our stack (or call on the hyperfast Autonolas devs for support). For example, if you wanted, you could configure your oracle so that you could pay for it in USDC
• They can be protocol-owned: As a service in the Autonolas ecosystem, your protocol can be earning revenue from your oracle through the PoSe system.

Use cases

The permissionlessness of Autonolas oracles means that the possibilities of Autonolas oracles are endless. To give some concrete examples that go beyond simple crypto price feeds:

• Being able to update the asset composition of an index in real time.
• Monitoring, reporting and verifying for carbon credit systems. In such developing sectors, the upgradability of the oracle would be extremely useful.
• Tracking NFT appraisal data. This could open up the possibilities for derivative and autonomous NFT trading
• As the Autonolas oracle ecosystem develops, the oracles could perform ML aggregation and relay complex data from virtually any source.

Learn about our production oracle running on Polygon. See it running live.

For more details on how the Autonolas oracles work under the hood please refer to our technical overview of the service.

If you are interested in using or building the next generation oracles please get in touch at bd@valory.xyz.