What Are Blockchain Oracles?
A key factor for the success of almost every decentralized application (dApp) is the trustworthiness of the data provided to a dApp. Typically, the data provided are price feeds, such as ETH/USD price pair which is the most commonly requested price-feed. These data feeds are the building blocks which allow for complex behaviors to emerge within these applications.
Blockchain oracles are not all equal, with trade-offs existing as a result of their unique configurations. Here we break down the three blockchain oracles we think you should know in 2024 based on the recent advancements in the Web 3.0 space and are the best fit to push the blockchain industry forward.
#1 RedStone Oracles
In 2024 RedStone was the fastest growing Oracle in the industry, securing billions of dollars worth of assets in decentralized finance (DeFi) and supporting more than 1000 data feeds. In past months, advancements in liquid staking and restaking have resulted in key players establishing their positions such as EtherFi, Renzo, Puffer, Swell, KelpDAO and more – all of which are RedStone clients. Thanks to encapsulating the yield coming from the funding rate of perps market Ethena, another RedStone client, has emerged.
Platforms such as Pendle Finance or Morpho leverage RedStone and Chainlink feeds, capturing the potential of yield-bearing assets. At the time of writing, RedStone Oracles has more than 100 clients including Gearbox, DeltaPrime, Venus, Fraxlend and more. This is a result of our unique modular oracle design allowing us to adjust data flow to clients’ needs. Due to RedStone’s speciality in offering price feeds for newly listed assets that require new price discovery models, RedStone is a suitable option for new liquid staking and restaking projects and their associated tokens (LSTs & LRTs).
RedStone’s services are broad and help grow the entire industry supporting multiple EVM, non-EVM ecosystems, rollups, and appchains. At the core lies the belief that scalability is key for the success of Web 3. Therefore the team supports a variety of new blockchains, now supporting over 60 ecosystems.
In July 2024, RedStone announced its Series A round supported by several prominent venture firms and angel investors. Across all funding rounds, RedStone has been supported by the founders of Polygon, Aave, Avalanche, ZKsync, LI.FI, Etherfi, and many others. RedStone will be releasing the $RED token with more details incoming on the RedStone’s Twitter.
#2 Chainlink
Chainlink continues to be a formidable contender in the blockchain oracle market. Benefiting from its first mover advantage, Chainlink has successfully maintained a strong position in the crypto space, continuing to provide feeds for significant projects in the industry like Aave and Compound, and provides feeds for the greatest number of dApps. Chainlink has helped facilitate trillions of dollars of trading volume through its price feeds, and continues to support the most successful dApps to date. With Chainlink’s impressive name-brand awareness and existing partnerships, it continues to afford itself the opportunity to innovate and build new and improved features for its clients pushing forward the growth of the industry.
#3 The Pyth Network
Pyth has made impressive strides moving forward the industry emphasizing high data quality and low-latency data feeds on Solana, also supporting projects and blockchains across the industry. Supporting a growing number of assets with wide availability across the ecosystems for over 50 blockchains via a bridge, Pyth can be incorporated into a variety of Dapps on chains supported by Wormhole. Pyth is evidently committed to providing reliable market data and in a secure way, being audited by some of the most reputable auditing firms in the industry. Pyth supports projects like TradingView, Synthetix, and Kwenta.
Summary
The leading oracles of the industry today are different from each other, each with their own trade-offs. Pyth for example has excelled in the Solana ecosystem and uses Wormhole to safely send price feeds. Chainlink continues to provide feeds across the entire ecosystem for top performing dApps with name-brand recognition but faces difficulty in supporting new projects and token feeds. RedStone is the fastest growing with potential with the emergence of liquid staking and re-staking market along with its modular design being able to be leveraged across the entire ecosystem.
