Learn · Basics

What is an oracle?

An oracle is the bridge that brings outside-world data onto a blockchain in a way contracts can trust. On Flare, that bridge is the FTSO — and it is decentralised by design.

A smart contract is deterministic and sandboxed: every node must compute the same result, so a contract can't just call an exchange API — different nodes would get different answers and consensus would break. An oracle solves this by having data agreed before it reaches the contract, so all nodes see one canonical value.

Why decentralisation matters

If a single company fed prices to the chain, you'd be trusting that company not to make mistakes or cheat. Flare instead has roughly 100 independent providers each submit their own price every round. The protocol combines them into one consensus value and measures how tightly everyone agreed. No single provider can move the result far on its own.

How the FTSO delivers data

• ~1000 feeds across crypto, with room for more asset classes.
• Anchor feeds settle every 90 seconds via a commit-and-reveal vote, producing a weighted-median price plus an accuracy band.
• Block-latency feeds update incrementally roughly every block (~1.8s) for fast-moving use cases.
• Providers are rewarded for accuracy — landing close to consensus — not just for showing up. That's what the rewards lessons unpack.

Want to see it happen? The next lesson shows ~100 providers converging on a single live price, round by round. How a price feed forms →

Last reviewed June 2026