Blockchain technology's immutable ledgers and trustless smart contracts promise to revolutionise transactions and agreements. Self-executing smart contracts, put straight into code, automate procedures and remove intermediaries. Their greatest strengths, deterministic and isolated, are also their biggest weaknesses: i.e. the “oracle problem”. Blockchains are insular and cannot access real-world data outside their network, and oracle problems arise when smart contracts cannot natively communicate with external data, events or systems. Oracles have been historically centralised entities or simple data feeds, creating a single point of failure that undermines blockchain's decentralisation. Moreover, an oracle is needed for smart contracts to interact with the physical or digital world beyond on-chain processes. However, no matter how good the coding is, a smart contract that depends on a hacked, biased or inaccurate oracle will fail. Reintroducing trust in a trust less system negates blo…
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