We said the oracle explanation was coming in a follow-up. Apparently that already counts as "long awaited."
So — our sincere apologies for the long-awaited explanation. Here it is.
On oracles: if a chain truly wants to maximize its DeFi safety, the gold standard is paying @chainlink a few million to integrate. Or, for the budget-conscious: a "single TEE-attested node" — the kind already running in a bolt-on L2 lending protocol — for a few hundred dollars a month in server fees. (Just maybe don't run it in us-east-1. It goes down a little too often.)
But here's the thing, and it's common sense to anyone who's actually built one: a binary market needs no price data from an oracle at all. It needs a single bit — did YES happen, or NO. That bit comes from an LP multisig, or a user-bond vote. No feed, no 30-second refresh, no "fair price" to defend. One bit, once, done.
So even in that exact same worst case — a single node:
• Lending reads the price LIVE, on every interaction, with leverage, and the result is irreversible. One bad price mints bad debt and drains the pool. No undo button.
• A binary market touches the oracle ONCE, at a challengeable moment, capped at a single market's open interest — and anyone can merge YES + NO back into collateral and walk away before resolution.
A single point of trust is one thing we will never adopt. The full oracle design is coming with our third product — Touchstone, an optimistic oracle for feeding data to covenants.
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