Paper 2025/2106

SoK: Blockchain Oracles Between Theory and Practice

Ghada Almashaqbeh, University of Connecticut

Abstract

Smart contract-based decentralized applications (dApps) have become an ever-growing way to facilitate complex on-chain operations. Oracle services strengthened this trend by enabling dApps to access real-world data and respond to events happening outside the blockchain ecosystem. A large number of academic and industrial oracle solutions have emerged, capturing various designs, capabilities, and security assumptions/guarantees. This rapid development makes it challenging to comprehend the landscape of oracles, understand their trade-offs, and build on them. To address these challenges, we develop a systematization of knowledge for blockchain oracle services. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide extensive study of oracles while empirically investigating their capabilities in practice. After examining the general design framework of oracles, we develop a multi-dimensional systematization framework assessing existing solutions based on their capabilities, trust and security assumption/guarantees, and their underlying design architecture. To further aid in this assessment, we conduct a number of empirical experiments to examine oracle deployed in practice, thus offering additional insights about their deployment maturity, usage popularity, performance, and ease-of-use. We go on to distill a number of insights and gaps, thus providing a guide for practitioners (on the use of these oracles) and researchers (by highlighting gaps and open problems).

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/2106,
author = {Colin Finkbeiner and Ghada Almashaqbeh},
title = {{SoK}: Blockchain Oracles Between Theory and Practice},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/2106},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2106}
}