Price Oracles

Attention

Price Oracle functionality is part of the proposed XLS-47d extension to the XRP Ledger protocol. You can use these functions on test networks for now. Until there is an amendment in a stable release, the details documented on these pages are subject to change.

Blockchains can't inherintly interact with and "know" what's happening off the network, but many of its use cases in decentralized finance require this information.

Price oracles solve this problem. An oracle is a service or technology that gathers real-world information, such as market prices, exchange rates, or interest rates, and relays it to the blockchain. Like blockchains, most oracles are also decentralized and validate data through multiple nodes.

Note: Oracles aren't limited to only providing financial information. It can provide anything, such as what sports team won a game, or even the weather. Price oracles on the XRP Ledger currently focus on pricing assets.

How It Works

Most oracle blockchain interactions work like this:

An oracle validates data on its network.
The data is sent to the blockchain.
The blockchain uses that information to execute a smart contract, such as releasing funds from an escrow.

This process can also work in reverse, pushing transaction information to external systems.

Price Oracles on the XRP Ledger

XLS-47d implements a native, on-chain price oracle, enhancing the native DeFi functionality of the XRP Ledger. Off-chain price oracles send their data to XRPL oracles, which store that information on-chain. Decentralized apps can then query the XRPL oracles for price data; multiple XRPL oracles can be queried to minimize risk and inaccuracies.

By standardizing price feeds in this manner, all XRPL apps can access a dependable, shared data source.