Pythia: The Oracle Machine

To understand how Delphi works (and the value we provide), first one must appreciate the role of the oracle in smart contract contexts, and the power that these oracles necessarily possess. Since a contract’s data provider ultimately determines its execution result, a centralized oracle solution makes for a centralized smart contract. Recognizing this, we can see that the only way to truly preserve the benefits of decentralization is to make sure that the oracle itself is decentralized. Pythia allows us to do exactly that.

The basic structure of Pythia is inspired by standard multisignature wallet contracts, featuring signature weight and weight-threshold extensions to increase the power, flexibility, and usability of the design. This allows users and service providers to easily deploy and manage decentralized oracle solutions, which can then be used to call other contracts and supply data input where it is needed.

Pythia represents a novel and practical approach to the oracle problem, providing a highly versatile model and framework and laying the foundations for our oracle ecosystem. The oracles deployed through Pythia can be used to arbitrate the inputs to other contracts directly, or alternatively to supplement other oracle solutions, decentralizing and strengthening them. They might link directly to the contracts that rely on their data input, or to intermediary contracts which aggregate and broadcast oracle outputs from different source providers. In short, Pythia is the basic underlying engine that allows us to generate and manage distributed oracle contracts.