At Tezsure we are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle for our insurance platform: a decentralized oracle network on Tezos. During our research we learned that this piece of architecture could not only be beneficial to our project, but many DeFi projects in the (near) future on Tezos.

For insurance we rely heavily on off chain data. At the beginning of 2019 we developed a weather oracle for our first insurance demo. This took a while to develop in the first place, but in the second place, how could we guarantee users that the oracle data is correct? How can we justify using data from one source? Centralized oracles give us a single point of failure. We have to trust the oracle that it is providing data fairly, or we need to develop every oracle ourselves. By developing a decentralized network of trusted oracles, we avoid the described problems.

We continued development on other features of the Tezsure platform. Now more than a year has passed since that first demo and no good alternative is in place for getting off chain data on the Tezos blockchain, besides our own demo and the documentation of TQ Tezos (They have made a great first step in developing oracles on Tezos. From this starting point we are continuing the research and development).

Before the release of Tezsure, an oracle network needs to be in place on Tezos. As one of the first companies that started their development on Tezos, we need to think of a way to do that so that it will not only benefit Tezsure, but all companies relying on off-chain data.

Engaging the Community

To build an oracle network that developers want to use, we would like to work actively with layer 2 developers, people working on HLLs and other companies working on Tezos smart contract development. We want to ask as many developers as possible: What would you like to see in an oracle network that can help their business in the (near) future?

By engaging the global community of users and developers we can feel confident in developing the most robust decentralized oracle network in the blockchain space.

Great Artists Steal

During the last years many oracle solutions started their development. After researching their architectures we came to the conclusion that we should not reinvent the wheel. Many of them pushed innovation in the right directions.

One key difference that we want to highlight today: We don’t see any reason to integrate a shitcoin (or unregistered security) in the OrO architecture. We want to give the Tezos ecosystem more ways to use their Tez.

What’s next?

We have developed a prototype of OrO. Currently we are cleaning up the code and writing the first tutorials. We will share this open source codebase on our Github in the coming weeks.

We are looking forward to continue the development of OrO. Making smart contracts capable of extracting and pushing data, from and to off-chain resources, is necessary for making more applications possible on Tezos.

Thanks to Bernd Oostrum for contributing to this post.