Announcing The Town Crier Service

We (Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City) are delighted to announce the (alpha) public launch of Town Crier (TC) on the Ethereum public blockchain. TC acts as a secure data pipeline between smart contracts and websites, or what’s commonly called an oracle.

Why do we need Oracles?

Smart contracts confined to on-chain data are like sports cars on local roads. They’re purring with latent power, but can’t do anything really interesting.

To unleash their potential, smart contracts need access to the wide open vistas of data available off-chain, i.e., in the real world. A financial smart contract needs access to equity, commodity, currency, or derivative prices. An insurance smart contact must be aware of triggering events such as bad weather, flight delays, etc. A smart contract allowing consumers to sell online games to one another must confirm that a seller successfully transferred game ownership to a buyer.Latent power waiting to be unchained…

Today, though, smart contracts can’t obtain such data in a highly trustworthy way. And they can’t achieve data privacy. These deficiencies are starving smart contract ecosystems of the data they need to achieve their full promise.

Source: Announcing The Town Crier Service

Announcing The Town Crier Service

We (Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City) are delighted to announce the (alpha) public launch of Town Crier (TC) on the Ethereum public blockchain. TC acts as a secure data pipeline between smart contracts and websites, or what’s commonly called an oracle.

Why do we need Oracles?

Smart contracts confined to on-chain data are like sports cars on local roads. They’re purring with latent power, but can’t do anything really interesting.

To unleash their potential, smart contracts need access to the wide open vistas of data available off-chain, i.e., in the real world. A financial smart contract needs access to equity, commodity, currency, or derivative prices. An insurance smart contact must be aware of triggering events such as bad weather, flight delays, etc. A smart contract allowing consumers to sell online games to one another must confirm that a seller successfully transferred game ownership to a buyer.Latent power waiting to be unchained…

Today, though, smart contracts can’t obtain such data in a highly trustworthy way. And they can’t achieve data privacy. These deficiencies are starving smart contract ecosystems of the data they need to achieve their full promise.

Source: Announcing The Town Crier Service