Decentralized oracles are still highly talked about in the crypto sphere. The rise of Decentralized Finance brought them to the mainstream. Despite the current crypto crash, Oracle crypto projects are still a hot investment vehicle. In this article, we take a look at the top 5 oracle crypto projects.
Oracle crypto projects solve real-world problems of blockchain and smart contracts. They allow on-chain smart contracts to get reliable off-chain data, often necessary for contract execution. An oracle sources reliable data from multiple independent sources, filters it for inaccuracies, and transmits it across. It also ensures that data isn’t tampered with while delivering it to where it’s required.
Why are Crypto Oracles Important?
Smart contracts are one of the basic building blocks of the blockchain world. Contrary to popular belief, they are actually not that smart. They enable complex logic executions once implemented, but they don’t have default access to real-world data, that is required to make decisions, such as temperature, price of an asset, etc…
This on-chain off-chain data communication is necessary to enable complex decision making, and has use cases in finance, securities, exchange services, smart wallets, recovery, predictions, gaming, gambling, etc… Here are the top 5 decentralized oracles solving this issue.
5. Decentralized Information Asset (DIA) – Marketcap $78.2 Million
We kick off our top 5 oracles with Decentralized Information Asset or DIA. According to the project itself, “DIA is an open-source, data and oracle platform for the DeFi ecosystem. DIA leverages crypto-economic incentives to drive supply, share and use transparent, crowd-verified price data and oracles on financial and digital assets”.
The service is freely accessible, validated by a community of stakeholders and highly scalable. DIA Labs runs this project. According to the official documentation “DIA is an ecosystem for open financial data in a financial smart contract ecosystem”.
The crypto DIA currently sits at a token price of $0.4. The current crypto market crash had its toll on this token, which made it crash along the entire cryptocurrency market.
4. DOS Network (DOS) – Marketcap $3.6 Million
The DOS Network is another layer 2 chain agnostic decentralized data oracles network, which can support multiple mainstream blockchain protocols. It also offers real-time data feeds, connecting DApps and smart contracts with reliable data sources and high computation power.
The DOS Network is extremely fast, completing off-chain process in less than 1 second. However, DOS is often limited by the performance of the base layer 1 protocol.
The token’s main use cases are staking and fees. Node operators require to stake DOS before starting to provide data, and oracle service requesters need to pay service providers in DOS tokens. Additionally, the DOS token is used for governance.
3. Aeternity (AE) – Marketcap $39.3 Million
Unlike most decentralized data oracle projects which run as layer 2 applications on other blockchains, Aeternity is a smart contracts blockchain protocol with native integration of oracles. It is a Turing complete, highly scalable, and sharding-enabled blockchain. Aeternity allows off-chain contract executions.
This native decentralized data oracle support is especially important and interesting because it eliminates the need to trust any other source. No other mainstream blockchain protocol currently has this functionality.
2. Band Protocol (BAND) – Marketcap $169.1 Million
The closest competitor to Chainlink and the second most valuable decentralized data oracle project is Band Protocol. BAND is also a cross-chain (compatible with multiple blockchains) data oracle project that provides and manages real-world data to smart contracts.
It enables the provision of secure and reliable feeds, which are tamper-resistant and don’t have a single point of failure. Organizations such as VC firm Sequoia Capital and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance back this project.
1. Chainlink (LINK) – Marketcap $7.6 Billion
The leading decentralized data oracles network by far is Chainlink. This crypto project connects smart contracts to off-chain real-world events information. The oracles are secure, resistant to manipulation, and thus reliable. The Chainlink project is at the forefront of decentralized data oracle innovation and constantly introduces new data pairs/services to advance the field. Its value accrual secures the node operators, as it must pay in LINK and most crypto-based services need reliable/secure data for their smart contracts, for effective and stable operation.
A vital component of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi), it has partnerships with 200+major companies and teams. The Chainlink data oracles integrate with nearly all Ethereum-based DeFi projects, and have profited from the recent DeFi boom. The platform’s native LINK token has performed admirably, year to date, despite the economic crisis and the stagnant prices of most top crypto-assets.
>> Want more news and price analyses? Join CryptoTicker on Twitter <<
