At the beginning of 2023, I supported the introduction of a new type of solution for financial service providers: BLOCKSIZE ORACLE. This solution allows companies to outsource the creation and operation of the IT infrastructure for market data on blockchains to BLOCKSIZE oracle experts. BLOCKSIZE has been successfully active in the oracle market for more than 3 years and is now one of the largest oracle operators worldwide – with significant sales. Well-known institutions that make or want to make market data available “on-chain” in this business area.

While blockchains are technically tremendously powerful, their complexity makes developing solutions challenging. While smart contracts can communicate with API endpoints, any “off-chain” API endpoint, unlike the blockchain itself, is a “single point of failure”.

Blockchains with support for smart contracts have an incredible range of possible applications, which is only limited by the inventiveness of the developers. Not a few observers therefore attribute blockchains numerous innovations in the field of finance: there are currently numerous intermediaries who earn good money with their administrative function.

From a blockchain decentralization perspective, an API endpoint cannot be trusted: the interface could be offline, hacked, or unintentionally sending false data. Oracle networks such as Chainlink, Pyth Network and SupraOracles solve this problem: the aggregation of the data is usually decentralized thanks to several endpoints and several oracles. Ultimately, this should lead to reliable data being available “on-chain”.

An increasing number of data providers are currently playing with the idea of making their own data available via oracles on blockchains. This is not only be interesting for crypto market data, but also stock exchange data, ESG data, rating data, weather data or other information. The trend is clear in relation to “on-chain” data.

But there is a big gap between desire and reality: As a rule, the data providers have limited or no expertise in dealing with blockchain technology. The topic is also complex: you do not need only theoretical consulting know-how, but there are other challenges such as legal aspects or the practical implementation of the oracle.

BLOCKSIZE recognized the trend towards blockchain oracles as early as 2022 and developed a solution from it. Thanks to BLOCKSIZE ORACLE, data providers can outsource the design, creation, and operation of oracles. The idea is simple: the client provides the knowledge and the data, the rest is implemented in partnership with BLOCKSIZE. The customer can not only expect the flawless operation of the oracle, but also numerous supporting services:

• Whitelisting: Only smart contract developers who have gone through the BLOCKSIZE KYC process are allowed to process the data.
• Know Your Transaction: Each request to an oracle can be subjected to a compliance check to be evaluated for the identification of high-risk activities.
• Data encryption: On-chain data can optionally be encrypted so that it can only be read by users who have the appropriate data decryption capability.
• Token-to-Fiat Bridge: Oracle operators earn tokens by selling data on-chain. BLOCKSIZE offers a service that can automatically convert the token income into any fiat currency such as U.S. dollars. In this way, customers do not have to deal with currency conversions or the impact of token income from a tax perspective on their own business side.
• Financial reporting: All token revenue generated by an oracle must undergo a trusted price assessment in e.g. U.S. dollars. The Oracle token income can therefore be connected to BLOCKSIZE CONNECT price feeds to ensure token reporting is compliant with tax requirements.

Thanks to BLOCKSIZE ORACLE, financial market data providers now have an easy option for monetizing data on blockchains.

The work of BLOCKSIZE is not ending with the launch of the blockchain oracle: by creating documentation and specifically addressing developers and blockchain teams, demand for the information provided is generated. BLOCKSIZE also has a strength in this area, because the node operations team has had a large developer network since 2019.