/biz/ - Business & Finance

Smart contracts are poised to revolutionize many industries by replacing the need for both traditional legal agreements and centrally automated digital agreements. Both performance verification and execution rely on manual actions from one of the contracting parties, or an automated system that programmatically retrieves and updates relevant changes. Unfortunately, because of their underlying consensus protocols, the blockchains on which smart contracts run cannot support native communication with external systems.

Today, the solution to this problem is to introduce a new functionality, called an oracle, that provides connectivity to the outside world. Existing oracles are centralized services. Any smart contract using such services has a single point of failure, making it no more secure than a traditional, centrally run digital agreement.

In this paper we present NuLink, a decentralized oracle network. We de- scribe the on-chain components that NuLink provides for contracts to gain external connectivity, and the software powering the nodes of the network.We present both a simple on-chain contract data aggregation system, and a more efficient off-chain consensus mechanism. We also describe supporting reputation and security monitoring services for NuLink that help users make informed provider selections and achieve robust service even under aggressively adversarial conditions. Finally, we characterize the properties of an ideal oracle as guidance for our security strategy, and lay out possible future improvements, including richly featured oracle programming, data-source infrastructure modifications, and confidential smart-contract execution.