Enshrined oracles through top-of-block scheduled transactions.
Scheduled transactions enable recurring, conditional invocation of smart
contract functions, at the top of a block, without the need for external
keepers.
To read in-depth about scheduled transaction implementation, reference the
architecture page.
Scheduled transactions have privileged inclusion at the top-of-block.This enables priority execution for critical, automated operations like oracle
updates that must execute before other state accessing transactions (think,
a price update from an oracle that must be triggered before users deposit or
withdraw from a lending protocol).Uniquely, this enables:
Priority execution for critical, automated operations like oracle updates
Predictable update intervals for automated, recurring operations like
price updates
Guaranteed execution for critical operations with separately priced
inclusion fee markets
Via
modular computational integrity primitives,
scheduled transactions can enshrine on-chain model outputs and off-chain data
sources with verifiable provenance and authenticity.
Commonly, on-chain protocols (especially DeFi protocols) rely on oracles to
fetch real-time data from external sources. This data is then used to update
protocol parameters, such as interest rates or exchange rates.With Ritual’s scheduled transactions, we can create a new class of oracles that
execute
classical ML inference
operations at fixed frequencies, consuming on-chain and off-chain data to
periodically update protocol parameters.
Another example of verifiable oracles are TEE-based data oracles, which
collect off-chain data at fixed intervals via scheduled transactions,
enshrining requested data validated by TEE attestations. The flow looks
something like:
A scheduled transaction requests data from a TEE image at a fixed interval