By Adán Sánchez de Pedro Crespo, Mario Cao, Gorka Irazoqui
Oracles are bound to bridge the gap—or abyss—between the realm of smart contracts and data coming from outside the blockchain. But, at the end of the day, achieving such ambitious goals boils down to removing the inherent indeterminism of real world events by aggregating, filtering and reducing multiple data points into a single one in a predictable way. This is no easy task—even more in the case of decentralized oracles.
In this talk we will introduce RADON: a domain-specific language that provides a new ontology and semantics to enable smart contract developers to define how external data will be retrieved, aggregated, filtered, reduced and reported to their contracts. In a learn-by-doing manner, we will reflect on the challenges that we faced and the quirky, wicked and hidden incentives that can be accidentally introduced by poorly constructed queries. Finally, we will also demonstrate relevant tooling for ergonomically creating and troubleshooting oracle queries within the context of existing Solidity projects.
