Oracles are a critical piece of infrastructure for every blockchain ecosystem, yet there currently is no strong Cosmos-native oracle built to serve the greater Cosmos Ecosystem. Existing oracles often only provide price data for assets with the largest market caps like BTC and ETH and fail to acknowledge many of the smaller but important assets which make up the Cosmos Ecosystem like OSMO, JUNO, KUJI, and UMEE.
Cosmos developers are forced to rely on the price feeds provided on the chain they’re building on, or otherwise must build their own oracle module - an extremely difficult task with huge risk implications. With many developers choosing to build Cosmos app chains due to the developer-friendly open source tools readily available like IBC and the Cosmos SDK, there’s a clear need for a highly secure and widely accessible decentralized oracle network.
Reliability
Protocols are only as reliable as their oracles, and oracles are only as reliable as the sources they retrieve data from. With less-than-ideal liquidity available and minimal volume occurring on most Cosmos chains, the price feeds currently used across Cosmos DeFi applications are often inaccurate and/or highly vulnerable to attack. Price data in the Cosmos Ecosystem is commonly sourced from a handful of exchanges and can be relatively easy to manipulate when compared to the price data provided by Ethereum’s most popular decentralized oracle network.
Scope
Existing oracles mostly have narrow scopes, and are primarily focused on providing price information. The decentralized and trustless nature of blockchains combined with the composability of smart contracts makes web3 an attractive alternative to many traditional services beyond just finance, but application developers are constrained by the limited data feeds actively provided by oracles.
