A price is a claim several parties are willing to be slashed for.
The oracle publishes a small-cap equity price only when a threshold of independent, collateralised operators agree on it. Everything else in the protocol is downstream of that.
M of N, or nothing publishes.
Each round, every operator pulls a price from its own market-data source, forms an attestation over the ticker, the price, the source timestamp and the round number, and signs it. The contract trims the extremes, takes the median of the remainder, and defines the consensus band around it.
If fewer than M attestations fall inside the band, no price is written. The previous price remains the last known value and is marked stale after two missed rounds; the venue treats a stale feed as a freeze and blocks position opens and liquidations against it.
Publication cadence targets three seconds during regular hours, thirty seconds in pre-market and post-market, and pauses entirely outside session hours. A round is also forced whenever the trimmed median moves more than 0.5% from the last published value.
Operators are paid to be right and charged to be wrong.
| Condition | Detection | Penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Attestation outside the consensus band | Automatic, at round settlement | 0.5% of collateral |
| Repeat deviation, three rounds in a rolling hour | Automatic, rolling window | 2% and probation |
| Missed rounds below the uptime floor | Automatic, weekly settlement | Reward forfeiture |
| Signing through a detected halt | Halt classifier plus operator review | 5% of collateral |
| Provable source sharing between operators | Dispute, resolved on-chain | Full collateral and removal |
Collateral is posted in the settlement asset, locked for the duration of the operator’s participation and subject to an unbonding period after exit so that a slashable action cannot be escaped by leaving. Slashed collateral is routed to the insurance fund, not to the remaining operators, so that no operator profits from another’s deviation.
What the AI layer is actually for.
Each classifier exists because a specific, observed failure mode in thin names produces a liquidation at a price that never traded.
Exchange status messages, quote withdrawal and volume collapse are classified together. On a positive, the feed freezes and the venue blocks liquidations until two consecutive clean rounds resume.
A reopen after a halt frequently prints far from the last quote. The feed publishes the reopen only after the auction settles, and the venue widens maintenance requirements for one session.
Coordinated book-walking is flagged from clustering, cross-venue divergence and depth withdrawal. The round is quarantined and operators are asked to re-attest from a second source.
A disputed round, end to end.
- 01Round 481,201 opens on SVLN. The last published price is $2.41.
- 02Nine operators submit between $2.40 and $2.42. Two submit $2.79 from a source that had already picked up an off-exchange print.
- 03The trimmed median is $2.41 and the band is $2.404 to $2.416. Nine attestations fall inside it; the threshold of seven is met, so $2.41 publishes.
- 04The two deviating operators are slashed 0.5% of collateral each at settlement. That collateral is routed to the insurance fund.
- 05One deviating operator disputes within the challenge window, submitting the source timestamp and payload behind its attestation.
- 06The dispute resolves on-chain against a recorded source hash. Because the payload was a genuine off-exchange print and not a fabricated value, the penalty is reduced to a deviation mark with no collateral loss, and the operator's deviation rate rises for the rolling window.
- 07No user position was affected: the published price was the in-band consensus throughout.
Publication record.
| Round | Ticker | Submitted | In band | Published | Band spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #481,204 | HYDX | 11 | 11 | $9.86 | 0.02% |
| #481,203 | OPTG | 11 | 10 | $18.72 | 0.04% |
| #481,202 | VRTX.D | 11 | 9 | $12.44 | 0.09% |
| #481,201 | SVLN | 11 | 4 | no publish | n/a |
| #481,200 | KLSR | 10 | 8 | $3.18 | 0.12% |
Placeholder data. No feed is live and no third-party integration is claimed.