One morning, I woke up to a particularly quiet scene outside the window—not the dead silence, but a sense that something is quietly flowing beneath the water surface.

Many oracles in the blockchain space now give people this kind of feeling. They are rarely mentioned in daily conversations, but the entire ecosystem truly depends on them.

Oracles are essentially information bridges between the on-chain and off-chain worlds. Blockchains operate in a very closed environment and cannot actively query off-chain data—such as current token prices, weather forecasts, or economic data results. The role of an oracle is to reliably bring this information onto the chain, enabling smart contracts to automatically execute when certain conditions are met.

The most common application is price feeding—accurately bringing in data like token prices, commodity prices, and so on into contracts. But recently, more and more people are discussing the next stage of oracles: they may not just passively transmit numbers but also need to learn to perceive more complex real-world signals.

You can understand the difference like this:

Early oracles are like setting a timer to water your plants at 6 a.m.—it waters on schedule and then leaves—completely time-based.

But if a drip irrigation system connects to a weather API, it will first check the weather forecast and only turn on after the rain stops—that’s much smarter, as it can dynamically adjust strategies based on real-time conditions.

What some new types of oracles are doing now is exactly that: actively pushing data to the chain when it changes, rather than having on-chain applications poll repeatedly. This push model greatly reduces latency and overhead, making it especially meaningful for scenarios sensitive to timeliness, such as derivatives trading and clearing mechanisms.

This change is not only happening at the underlying public chain level. Mainstream smart chains like BSC and Polygon are also improving their oracle infrastructure, providing DApp developers with low-latency real-time data sources, thereby enhancing development efficiency and user experience. That’s also why more and more developers are willing to deploy applications on these chains.