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 would be trusting that company not to make mistakes or cheat. Flare instead has roughly 100 independent providers each submit their own price every round — Providers lists the current field with its exact size. The protocol combines those submissions 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

• Roughly 1,000 feeds, most of them crypto pairs. We submit a subset of them; Feeds prints the count we cover.
• 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.

What accuracy is worth

Providers are paid for accuracy — landing close to consensus — not for showing up. A submission that falls outside a reward band earns nothing from that band for that round, and the shortfall reaches delegators directly as a lower reward rate on the FLR they delegated. That is the mechanism the reward bands lesson unpacks, and it is the reason we publish our own hit rate instead of an adjective.

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

Last reviewed June 2026

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