Talk about the latest oracle systems in the blockchain world and you have Bridge Oracle raking up a major share of the limelight today. Bridge Oracle is the first ever dedicated public oracle system on the TRON blockchain network, implemented to serve smart contracts operating on TRON. Essentially a decentralized oracle, the Bridge Oracle is designed to source data from various sources and assures credible, tamper-proof and authentic information for the smart contracts. 

Bridge oracle supports a wide range of public data sources.  Data sources can be defined as reliable references like web API or website to which oracle carriers request for data based on user specifications. Each data source carries specific functionality and use cases and hence selection of the right data source is really crucial while providing information to smart contracts. So, what are the major data sources supported by Bridge oracle?

URL

This is a popular data which allows users to source information through https/http request APIs. The response comes in XML, HTML or JSON formats.

Complex URL

This kind of data source fetches a parameter from https/http request APIs which comprise of a single set of HTML/XML/JSON parameters. Now, there could be some special cases where one might find a series of multiple sets of HTML/XML/JSON parameters.

Random

This is another major public data source supported by Bridge Oracle.

As the name says, this information source works to generate random numbers and feeds them into users’ smart contracts. It’s to note here, random number is an extremely crucial data source especially for scientific and mathematical projects, including but not limited to- cryptography, computer simulation, statistical sampling, scientific calculation, completely randomized design and so on.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is a major computational knowledge engine launched by leading tech firm Wolfram|Alpha LLC. This particular data source works to redirect user questions and requests to the WolframAlpha engine on which the engine comes up with the desired computational intelligence answers and calculations that are then returned to user smart contracts. 

Nested

Unlike the ones mentioned above, this particular data source doesn’t operate as a single data source. Rather, it allows access to a mix of various types of data sources or diverse requests of the same data source which responds with unique results for user smart contracts. 

BTFS

Interestingly, BTFS serves as TRON’s decentralized storage system. This data source enables user smart contracts to interact with BitTorrent File System.

It’s to stress here each piece of information responds in its own way. For example, time-dependent data and time-independent data do not react in a similar fashion. Time-dependent data (say live price of TRX/USD) change continuously. But, time-independent information (say, context of some social media post which has stayed unaltered) do not change on a continuous basis. So whenever a user will fetch that data, irrespective of time, the result would be the same.So, what would be the response time of Bridge oracle? Well, the oracle supports 3 time-dependent options to request external data. These include on-time queries, scheduled queries as well as open-ending time queries.