🔮 Oracle Decentralization
The SportX founding team currently creates and resolves SportX betting markets by itself. This represents a single point of failure, and goes against the SportX founding principles of decentralization and community stewardship. It is, however, necessary at this junction given the lack of mature sports-focused oracle solutions.
The "Oracle Problem" - the problem of getting outside data trustlessly onto a blockchain - is one that plagues almost every project in the Decentralized Finance ecosystem. It is one of the hardest ones to solve, and one that mature multi-billion dollar projects like Compound still suffer from.
Rather than creating our own decentralized oracle solution, SportX will outsource this responsibility to a specialized oracle protocol. There have been a number of projects that have sprung up recently to address the oracle problem, such as Chainlink, UMA, and API3 (among others). Each of these projects have their own strengths and weaknesses.
We are currently working with the UMA team to decentralize the settlement of all SportX betting markets using the UMA Optimistic Oracle. The UMA design will allow SportX betting markets to still be rapidly resolved, but will take the responsibility of the core team's hands whilst also providing user with greater assurances around settlement.
