On April 28, Tom Schmidt and Ashwin from Dragonfly Capital announced the release of oracles.club.
1/ Today, @ashwinrz and I are excited to launch https://t.co/tbzR2Dpz9i, the only site you need to get the best, most up-to-date data on oracles on Ethereum. (via @dragonfly_cap)
— Tom Schmidt (@tomhschmidt) April 28, 2020
Oracles.club is a site where anyone can access up-to-date Ethereum oracle data. It provides transparency into the state of oracles for platforms including Maker, Chainlink, Compound, Uniswap, Coinbase, and Dfusion.
Additionally, oracles.club will serve as a community-owned resource for aggregating oracle information. Anyone will be able to learn more about specific oracles and perform audits when necessary.
As with most DeFi projects, oracles.club is open source and encourages community contributions on their GitHub.
What’s to Know?
Oracles are a mechanism for accessing real-world data on blockchains like Ethereum. The security and decentralization that comes with the underlying blockchain tech do not apply to oracles, meaning they are only as secure as the mechanism used by the provider. This has led to oracles becoming a major attack vector for DeFi protocol as every added feature that references data from an oracle raises the stakes and increases the importance of security.
Best highlighted back in February 2020, an attacker exploited an oracle dependency on Kyber Networks’s decentralized exchange price feed in the bZx smart contract. By taking out a loan and manipulating the price of sUSD, the attacker was able to borrow ETH against the inflated sUSD price on bZx and took home a profit of 2,378 ETH.
Why Should I Care?
Attacks like the bZx oracle manipulation emphasize the need for oracle transparency, security, and detailed risk modeling. However, there are not many tools that provide easy access to the state and data coming from oracles.
This is why oracles.club was created – to increase the transparency of the oracles that power rapidly-growing DeFi applications. Providing a single interface that displays the up-to-date state of multiple oracles allows users to quickly compare the data and gather insights. Over time, transparency will harden the system and increase security across the DeFi ecosystem – ultimately creating a safer environment for DeFi to draw from and leverage real-world data.
Each oracle on oracles.club has a community-sourced set of data with a detailed description of the oracle and how it works, related links, pros and cons, and a list of the protocols that utilize its data. Aggregating and updating this information over time will provide a valuable resource for DeFi developers and users alike, allowing due diligence before using an oracle or trusting funds with a specific protocol.
Stay up to date on oracles.club through Tom, Ashwin, and Dragonfly Capital on Twitter.
