With global regulators increasingly turning their attention to cryptocurrency, the licensed and regulated security token industry is on an ascent. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, security tokens represent existing financial assets, such as tokenized stocks and bonds, real estate, and precious metals.
Given the close connection with traditional assets, security tokens must be able to handle off-chain data involving real-world assets, providing a link between the blockchain and information outside of the blockchain.
What are Oracles?
Oracles form a bridge between the internet, stock markets and bank accounts, as well as variety of other resources searching for the answer to a blockchain query. It quantifies that information before reconciling it to send to the blockchain for payment or verification.
Not to be confused with Oracle, the data management giant, an analogy of a (decentralized) Oracle is sort of like a little octopus that has one arm in the blockchain with the other arms reaching out to the world through portals or nodes providing external information in response to a blockchain query.
There are several oracles that are available and many more that are being developed; each Oracle provider has their own unique way of determining if the data outside of the blockchain is credible and reliable.
How can Oracles help Security Tokens?
There are several types of oracles; Software, Hardware, Consensus based, Outbound and Inbound oracles, and many more.
Not all oracles are the same, let’s categorize them into 2 distinct categories.
A first type of oracle performs disclosure. Currently, various organizations evaluate certain types of assets in the real world, and disclose that data in reports and data feeds. This data can be used in the blockchain to determine the price of a security token that represents that asset type, e.g. an investment in oil.
The second category of oracles provides programmable logic. Instead of extracting information from the real world, this oracle type executes actions off the blockchain (off-chain). A security token could be used to represent shares of a company, and an oracle could distribute rewards automatically to token holders.
Conclusion
Most oracles generally have a similar goal of integrating real-world information with the blockchain.
Oracles tend to work closely with security tokens, due to its inherent features including the need for several data points to the real world. They provide an innovative solution to accessing traditional financial assets through security tokens and tokenized stocks.
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IX Swap is the “Uniswap” for STOs and TSOs, the regulatory and liquidity solution for security tokens and tokenized stocks.
IX Swap will be the FIRST platform to provide liquidity pools and automated market making functions for the STO/TSO industry. The platform will be the first DeFi platform to facilitate the trading of security tokens through licensed custodians and security brokers which will provide actual ownership and claim over these real world assets.
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