Orakuru is an indisputable price oracle on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). A truly decentralized alternative for off-chain data, it provides real-world data to the blockchain and asks its external nodes to capture data, such as BSC price feeds and off-chain market prices. Orakuru’s data becomes available for on-chain usage in DEXs, prediction markets, insurance, lending, and more, using their feeds to power their dApps.   

Orakuru has launched on Binance Smart Chain and is currently building infrastructure on Solana as well, with plans to expand to other chains. 

What are Oracles

Oracles sound like something from ancient Greek mythology, and in a way, they function in a similar role. In ancient stories, people didn’t have enough information to make decisions and turned to oracles for information beyond their understanding.

In the same way, blockchains such as Binance Smart Chain do not have ready access to information outside of the chain, and so there is no direct way to validate the conditions that smart contracts are based on. An oracle is, simply put, a translator for information provided by an outside platform.

Oracles provide external data to smart contracts that operate on blockchain technology. They are essentially a form of communication between the outside world and the world of blockchain. Because blockchains and smart contracts are closed systems — where there are rigid processes for connecting to external data sources — oracles present a way of securely providing off-chain data to a blockchain network’s on-chain environment. 

What Makes Orakuru Stand Out: Special Features 

• Data availability – Data availability and variety are the key reasons Orakuru was able to scoop up so many partners before they even launched.
• Block times – Being on Binance Smart Chain gives Orakuru an edge to fast block time as low as 3 seconds over other L1 oracles. For that reason, their data will be far more timely and accurate, more frequently updated, and still affordable.
• Data variety – Orakuru allows for ad-hoc, one-off requests. The weather in Paris, the results of a tennis tournament, and so on. The majority of the market will be demanding this as more and more companies start to onboard into the 3.0.
• Product scaling – Orakuru will offer EVFs, random number generators, and many more to scale into sectors such as games and gaming in general.
• Averager contracts – Orakuru is shielding clients from potential ‘single point of failure’ by fulfilling every single data request through averaging from multiple sources.

How Orakuru Works

Orakuru is a decentralized oracle network built with the goal of connecting on-chain smart contracts to off-chain real-world data. Within the Orakuru network, oracle nodes act as an intermediary or ‘middleware’ between blockchain smart contracts and outside information, by processing on-chain requests for real-world data, and translating and sending the retrieved data back to smart contracts in a seamless, verifiable, and trustless way.

Instead of relying on a single source of truth (a centralized oracle operator), which poses the problem of having a single point of failure, Orakuru employs a decentralized network of independent oracle nodes. Each node processes consumer smart contract requests and retrieves the requested data, which is then aggregated on-chain by the Orakuru aggregator smart contracts.

Orakuru Architecture

At the core of the design of Orakuru lies the OrakuruCore smart contract deployed on BSC, which is responsible for the following tasks:

• Accepting and registering consumer job requests to perform an off-chain data retrieval. 
• Relay job request information to oracle nodes within the Orakuru network, and aggregating the results which are then passed on to the client. 
• Management of Orakuru oracle nodes, in particular, assigning a score to each based on their demonstrated commitment to the network, and applying ‘slashing’ of their stake in case of poor performance

When a consumer smart contract wants to request off-chain data, they submit a job request using an Orakuru provided proxy that interacts with the OrakuruCore smart contract, together with a payment in $ORK tokens aimed at rewarding nodes for processing the request in a timely and accurate manner. 

Orakuru’s architecture for processing job requests is based on a Request-Event-Response model. Once the client job request is received, its information is published and broadcasted as an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) event by the OrakuruCore smart contract, which is then intercepted by Orakuru oracle node operators that are eligible to process the request. This depends on how many $ORK tokens they have at stake and/or their reputation in the network. The published event also contains metadata related to the job request, including callback addresses that are to be used to accept the results from the job execution.

After the eligible oracle node operators process the consumer job request (e.g. fetching the weather information in Paris, France), the results are published back to the OrakuruCore smart contract, which is then responsible for aggregating the different results (e.g. in case of an asset price, applying an average), rewarding node operators and slashing the deposits of misbehaved nodes.

Orakuru Oracle Nodes and Reputation System 

Orakuru oracle nodes are operators running the Orakuru oracle software, and registered through the OrakuruCore smart contract, which requires operators to stake $ORK tokens in the contract for a fixed number of epochs (with a minimum of 6 months). In order to incentivize good behaviour from oracles within the network, Orakuru employs a reputation system which is used to assign a reputation number to each node operator, based on the number of tokens they have committed (staked) to the network, as well as their past performance in serving customer’s on-chain requests.

The $ORK token 

Orakuru’s $ORK token is deployed on Binance Smart Chain and follows the BEP-20 token standard. $ORK has multiple use cases: 

• Payment – Digital asset token to pay for services on the Orakuru network
• Reward – Reward node operators for serving job requests to clients
• Regulator – On-chain governance to regulate different aspects of the network.
• Various Services – Clients can utilize Orakuru for price feeds, VRF, and ad-hoc requests
• Staking – Liquidity Pool Farm allows anyone to earn tokens while supporting the ecosystems by staking Liquidity Pool (LP) tokens.

Governance

Using designated token reserves, Orakuru optimizes for: 

• Creation of new feeds and data points 
• Onboarding of new nodes 
• Partnering with dApps 
• Improvement of product 
• ‘Self-eating innovation’ – whereby the community identifies value 

Decisions will be made on-chain by delegating $ORK tokens to proposals. 

Unlike other large oracles such as Band and Chainlink which are open-source but centrally controlled, Orakuru’s mission is to move the governance to completely community owned and controlled. 

That comes through a deliberate and transitional change of building up the amount of contributors and builders, at each stage, based on community demand and ideals. 

What’s Next for Orakuru?

The inclusion of price-feeds from lesser-known L1’s (layer one blockchains) in Orakuru’s mainnet is one of the new updates planned out. This is a smart move on their part and lets them attract new, innovative projects from poorly covered L1’s. This will give them a big boost in developing their clients base.

Orakuru views crypto gaming as a market with huge growth potential. Many such games rely on certain mechanisms. Orakuru plans to build a feature called Verifiable Random Function (VRF) for such games. Recognizing that on-chain computation and ad-hoc requests are currently in high demand and the oracle is dedicating resources to develop these functions. They recently tested both in a test-net game where players predict the outcome of world events.

Conclusion

Oracles are vital within the blockchain ecosystem because they extend the reach and functionality of smart contracts. Smart contracts would have minimal utility without blockchain oracles since they would have access to data only from inside their networks. 

For the global adoption of blockchains, a secure platform that enables contact between smart contracts and the external world is crucial. Smart contracts will have to rely only on knowledge already within their networks without blockchain oracles, which would considerably restrict their capabilities. 

Orakuru aims to expand the capabilities of the Binance Smart Chain network by delivering accurate and timely data that is critical when operating on the blockchain.

FAQ

Sources:

https://boostylabs.com/cases/orakuru

https://cointelegraph.com/explained/blockchain-oracles-explained

https://morioh.com/p/64d9f946d2b7

https://cryptoslate.com/bsc-oracle-orakuru-begins-its-dao-transition/

The post Orakuru: Community Driven Oracle appeared first on Boxmining.