Author: 0xhhh
Blockchain is a revolution in trust, but its trust is closed.
It believes in mathematics, but not in the world.
Early blockchains resembled a logician: they firmly believed in reasoning but rejected perception.
Bitcoin trusts hashes, not people; Ethereum trusts code, not input.
So when a contract tries to ask "What is the price of ETH?", it falls silent.
This is not a technological flaw, but rather a boundary of philosophy.
The certainty of blockchain comes from its separation from the external world.
The source of trust is isolation.
But without a connection, there is no meaning.
The history of humankind building trust systems is a process of constantly allowing the "system" to see "reality" again.
The oracle is the first hand reaching out from this crack.
It is both a connection and a source of pollution;
It was both a breakthrough and the beginning of a crisis.
In 2015, Ethereum brought the concept of "code is law" to the world.
But the law requires evidence, and there are no "external facts" on the blockchain.
A "weather-based compensation" contract cannot know whether it will rain today;
A synthetic asset that "tracks stock prices" cannot see Nasdaq.
Smart contracts have become prisoners in Plato's Cave, only able to gaze at the shadows on the chain.
The very purity of blockchain technology has become its constraint.
How can we enable blockchain to see the outside world without being contaminated by it?
Trusting external data implies the introduction of subjectivity and centralization, and the purpose of blockchain is precisely to eliminate both.
Thus, "trusted input" becomes the first paradox of decentralized trust systems.
Blockchain makes trust logical; oracles make trust concrete.
Machines learned to "believe" for the first time, while humans began to define truth using algorithms.
The DeFi boom has made price feeds the lifeline of the system.
Liquidation, derivatives, stablecoins, and synthetic assets all rely on external prices.
However, price manipulation once could trigger a chain reaction.
The truth has become a resource that can be arbitrageurized.
Tellor makes the truth the equilibrium in the game.
UMA makes the truth the default state.
Kleros makes truth a social contract.
Trust is no longer a list, but the result of a game.
The truth was "marketized" for the first time.
In the era of high-frequency trading and clearing, latency is a risk.
When the truth is slower than a lie, the system will punish the truth.
Trust has shifted from "correct" to "timely".
Oracles have become "arbiters of time".
Delay becomes a new dimension of trust.
???? Trust Begins to Have a Price: The Awakening of OEV (2023–2024)
— The arbitrage difference between truth and time.
The moment a price is updated is not only an informational event, but also a value-driven event.
The order in which the truth is disseminated begins to determine the distribution of wealth.
The question is no longer "whether it is true or not", but "who benefits from the truth".
Chainlink OEV Network (2024): Creates an OEV auction marketplace that allows priority update rights to be bid on.
Pyth / SEDA: Suppressing internal arbitrage through timestamp signatures and random committees.
RedStone Pull Mode: Naturally eliminates time lag and leaves no arbitrage window.
OEV gives trust economic weight.
In the past, we discussed "who is telling the truth,"
Now we need to discuss "who benefits from telling the truth".
Trust extends from fact verification to value governance.
AI models can judge the market and analyze news, but their "truthfulness" cannot be verified.
When machines begin to determine the truth, how do we judge the machines?
When we ask machines to prove their rationality,
Oracle has transformed from "verifying the world" to "verifying intelligence".
Trust extends to the judgment layer.
AI agents already possess economic behavior capabilities.
They sign contracts, negotiate partnerships, and execute transactions.
But algorithms have no ethics, only inputs.
When intelligent agents become the main body of society, humans transform from "trust bearers" to "trust designers".
Trust between machines is not based on emotion, but on protocols.
Oracle has transformed from a data interface into a civilization structure.
All of this stemmed from a crisis of trust, and it also opened up new frontiers.
Oracle is no longer just a bridge, but a trust layer for intelligent civilization.
If blockchain is the memory layer of civilization, then Oracle is the sensory layer of civilization.
We are teaching machines something they've never done before: how to perceive honestly.
When the intelligent society truly arrives, Oracle will not only transmit data, but also the form of truth.


