1. What are Blockchain oracles?

Blockchain oracles sound like something from ancient Greek mythology, and in a way, they function in a similar role. In ancient stories, people didn’t have enough information to make decisions and turned to oracles for information beyond their understanding.

In the same way, Blockchains like those of Bitcoin and Ethereum, do not have ready access to information outside of the chain, and so there is no direct way to validate the conditions that smart contracts are based on. An oracle is, simply put, a translator for information provided by an outside platform.

Oracles provide the necessary data to trigger smart contracts to execute when the original terms of the contract are met. These conditions could be anything associated with the smart contract - temperature, payment completion, price changes, etc. These oracles are the only way for smart contracts to interact with data outside of the Blockchain environment.