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The Future of Oracles
TL;DR the oracle problem is solved. An end-to-end decentralized general-purpose oracle system basically exists for use today, in the form of Shintaku. While future research can surely improve components of the system (ask my old research group if they’re working on anything in this area if you’re excited about this stuff!), in large part the long-standing problem of getting external data for on-chain consumption is a solved one.
I expect improvements to things like on-chain general-purpose random number generation to be a hot topic in the coming years, which is something that, if done correctly, will be very useful for Athena/Shintaku-based oracles and a multitude of other decentralized applications.
Closing Thoughts
With the oracle problem out of the way, my primary focus going forward is on scalability tools. First- and second-layer scaling solutions and tools have been under active research for several years, and I think it’s a very exciting area with lots of open questions. Some “experts” believe that the future of blockchain is in permissioned chains, and that scaling can be solved by trusting large corporations. Others, who actually know what they’re talking about, believe that scaling must be done in a decentralized manner—which of course makes things much harder.
