​What the hell is a 'crypto oracle'?​

Today we're talking oracles.

Not the Silicon Valley based company, not the lady from the Matrix films, but the type of crypto platform.

Oracles put data on the blockchain, that wouldn't usually be there (vague statement, but hear us out).

Ever bought a product after you saw a bunch of people talking about it online? Same!

For retailers, online chatter can lead to an uptick in sales - the same goes for crypto.

(Hell, the NFT space is built off the back of Twitter chatter).

The flywheel looks like this:

If enough people are talking about a project → others will buy into it → which pushes the price up → which encourages even more people to buy in...

So what if you could listen out for peaks and troughs in online chatter, and buy in before the price runs up?

You could sit on Twitter all day, scanning your feed for buzzwords....

Or you could use an oracle blockchain that listens out for keywords on the platform, and program it to buy ETH if "Ethereum" is mentioned more than X times in an hour.

Now...we just made up that specific function to fit our example - we're not sure if there's an oracle that tracks mentions of Ethereum on Twitter.

The point is: with an oracle blockchain, it could be done.

So why're we harping on about them? This linked article is all about the launch of Binance's very own oracle blockchain.

(And now you know what that means )