CoinMarketCap takes a deep dive into one of the first oracles built on Binance Smart Chain.
Oracles have become an integral component in today’s decentralized landscape. They’re used for powering a wide range of blockchain-based financial products, including several stablecoins, synthetics issuance platforms, money markets and various decentralized derivatives trading platforms — and their utility is becoming clearer as time goes on.
But in the last few months, Ethereum-based oracle platforms have begun to suffer from congestion and high fees, limiting their usability. Now, as an increasing number of platforms begin developing on Binance Smart Chain, there is a gap for a low-cost, capable oracle that can serve its growing decentralized application (DApp) ecosystem.
This is exactly what Orakuru intends to do.
What Is Orakuru (ORK)?
Orakuru is a decentralized oracle service for Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It was built to provide a secure, reliable way to feed external data to smart contracts operating on BSC.
It is being built by an anonymous team, from a diverse set of backgrounds including product development, marketing, and engineering. The founding team members hail from a variety of prominent global organizations, including Badger, Airbnb, ConsenSys and Polygon (formerly MATIC), and have experience working with decentralized technologies.
Orakuru looks to become a community-governed oracle through an on-chain governance system, while also being open and accessible to anybody that wants to join the network as a validator by staking their ORK tokens.
The platform launched in April 2021, following an initial DEX offering (IDO) on KickPad. The ORK token is currently available to trade on PancakeSwap — currently the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX) on Binance Smart Chain.
How Does Orakuru Work?
In the Orakuru network, a decentralized network of nodes forms the intermediaries between smart contracts and external data sources. They are used to process on-chain data requests and act to securely, verifiably retrieve data from sources before providing it to the Orakuru aggregator smart contracts — which then relay it to the requester.
The OrakuruCore smart contract lies at the heart of the Orakuru network and is used for managing consumer job requests, passing job requests to oracle nodes and passing results back to clients, and managing oracle nodes.
Orakuru uses a reputation system to ensure fair play among oracle nodes. In order to participate in the data processing role, node holders must stake ORK tokens, and will be assigned a reputation score based on both their past performance and the size of their stake. This reputation system will help determine which validators are eligible to process requests.
As of April 2021, Orakuru is squarely in the earliest stages of its development and marketing roadmap. The team expects to have the alpha version of the network up and running by Q2 2021 with live price aggregators and data feeds for several markets. By the end of 2021, Orakuru should be out of beta, with decentralized onboarding of new validators and the Orakutu reputation system enabled.
What Makes Orakuru Unique?
As an oracle service built on Binance Smart Chain, Orakuru is designed to provide external information to smart contracts operating on BSC — opening up a range of potential new use cases, including decentralized insurance products, synthetic assets, DeFi lending protocols and more.
Orakuru incorporates a number of unique features to set itself apart from other blockchain oracles, including:
Built on Binance Smart Chain
Orakuru is billed as one of the first oracles on Binance Smart Chain — a smart-contract capable blockchain that operates in parallel to Binance Chain.
This enables Orakuru to provide oracle services to the rapidly growing number of DeFi applications on Binance Smart Chain, while avoiding some of the limitations that would have come with building on Ethereum — such as slow block times, high fees and congestion.
On-Chain Governance
As a community-governed platform, ORK holders will be involved in various decision-making processes relating to the development and evolution of the Orakuru network.
This might include deciding on which new feeds and data points to add, how nodes are onboarded and various other improvement proposals by delegating ORK in order to vote.
Fully Decentralized
Orakuru is also fully decentralized, as anybody can become an oracle and begin serving data requests by spinning up an oracle to participate in the Orakuru network. But as we touched on earlier, users will need to stake ORK and operate a node to do so. The platform aims to achieve a large number of oracles, helping to minimize the chance of incorrect data being fed back to requesters.
What Are Oracles, Exactly?
In a nutshell, oracles serve as data relays, and are used to connect decentralized blockchains with off-chain data sources, such as weather information, price feeds, sports results and practically anything else.
They are generally tasked with not only retrieving data, but also verifying it and cryptographically transmitting it to the requesting smart contract. This data can then be used for carrying out various pre-programmed tasks on the blockchain.
They form a secure communication bridge that allows smart contracts to take action based on real-world or otherwise inaccessible data, while also allowing blockchain-based data to be securely served to real-world applications.
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