Actors in a Blockchain Oracle Set-up

In this topic, we have a look at the actors and their roles in an oracle network. In some real-world cases, the distinction between single roles is not clear.

Data source: This is the place where the data comes from. It can be a crypto exchange, a website, a sensor, etc.

Reporter: A reporter is a node that retrieves the raw data from the data source and extracts the necessary information from it. It provides this information to the oracle service.

Oracle service: A node that collects data from one or more reporters, cleanses them (optional), aggregates them, and submits them to the smart contract The oracle service may consist only of a smart contract to where reporters send their data.

Customer: A user who buys the data provided by the oracle service. Typically, this is another smart contract.

Data source and reporter may be the same legal or organizational entity.  The same holds for oracle services and reporters, and in some cases, even data sources.