Oculos - general-purpose trustless oracle

Hyperion HyperHack Ideathon
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Problem Statement

Trustless smart contracts and dApps require reliable off-chain data to function properly.

Existing blockchain oracles either cater specifically to financial contracts or suffer from limited scope, complex integration, sluggish dispute processes, and poor adaptability to broader use cases outside DeFi. In today’s open web3 environment, any statement about the world — from sports scores to court case outcomes to environmental readings — should be verifiable and incorruptibly recorded on-chain.

However, no current system enables rapid, transparent, user-driven credence/conflict/gamified validation of arbitrary real-world claims while economically incentivizing honest truth at scale.

Solution overview

This project is a general-purpose, dispute-driven oracle for dApps, empowering anyone to submit or verify real-world facts on the blockchain.

Project Description

Unlike traditional oracles limited to financial data, this platform supports any verifiable statement — from news and sensor data, to accreditation and event outcomes.

Statements are publicly registered and automatically considered as “truth” unless disputed within an open challenge window. When challenged, community members resolve conflicts through tokenized staking and voting, with honest participation rewarded. The process is transparent, decentralized, and encourages fast, reliable validation of information crucial for smart contracts and digital communities.

The truth will be enforced through staking. Both proposers and disputers risk losing their bonds. The stake of a malicious player will be slashed during manual resolution. The outcome is determined by a majority vote among the project’s token holders.

To ensure transparency, all proposals, disputes and votes are recorded on-chain. The quadratic voting process will be used to balance the influence of ‘whales’.

By providing incorruptible public attestation to global facts, this project is paving the way for beyond-DeFi on-chain trust. This will enable new, impactful use cases across industries, from auditing and insurance to reputation management and collective record-keeping. It will also empower the next generation of blockchains and DAOs to agree on the truth.

Community Engagement Features

  1. Every statement remains “up for challenge” during a clear dispute window. Any community member is empowered to flag misinformation by staking tokens and disputing a claim, making fact-finding participatory.
  2. Disputed statements are put to a community vote or delegated randomly to jurors. Honest voters receive protocol rewards, fostering transparent and accountable consensus on disputed topics.
  3. A history of accurate submissions/disputes and truthful voting is openly recorded, allowing members to earn status, gain badges, or unlock increasingly meaningful protocol rewards. Participation losses for incorrect/malicious actions actively deter low-quality engagement.

Getting Involved

Anyone can submit statements or facts they want affirmed on-chain, enabling users from any community or domain to propose data relevant to their interests.

Community members help define policy (staking rates, dispute timing, eligible data types) by participating in governance, ensuring that the rules align with collective values as usage grows.

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Hello @majus , How long is the typical dispute window, and how is it decided for each type of data?

and What kind of rewards do honest voters or truth-seekers receive?

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Thanks for sharing this is a much-needed step toward expanding on-chain trust beyond just DeFi! Really like the focus on transparency and community-driven validation.

Quick question:

How do you plan to prevent sybil attacks during the dispute resolution or voting phase, especially with token-based participation?

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Thank you for the interest!

Let me approach each question separately:

It must be sufficient to choose a fixed window regardless of the data type, e.g. 24 hrs. This should give everyone the opportunity to vote, regardless of their physical location. And it can be adjusted by the protocol governance.

Ideally, the protocol would need to handle different data types differently, but it’s hard to predict all possible use cases with the generic oracle.

The reward comes from slashing the stake of incorrect voters. The proposer’s stake is also slashed and distributed among the voters in the event of a dispute confirmation. In the opposite scenario, the stake of the disputer is slashed and distributed among the honest voters.

Additionally, non-participating voters are penalised to encourage the community engagement.

For the initial implementation, I’ll choose a technique that is easier to integrate — most likely the token-weighted voting technique. While this won’t protect against the ‘whales’ influence, it will enable me to complete the MVP within a reasonable timeframe.

Essentially, one of the well know anti-sybil techniques would need to be adopted. This could be a random jury selection or quadratic voting. I’ll have to research and analyse which technique produces the best results in existing on-chain protocols.

None of this is final and is open to discussion. I’m happy to receive any suggestions or feedback you might have :handshake:

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Got it, that makes sense.

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