With a reliable oracle solution now in place, TRON should enjoy greater success in luring dApp developers away from Ethereum.
TRON has revealed a partnership with Band Protocol that’s bringing oracles to the former’s defi ecosystem. As a result, external price feeds can now be built into TRON dApps, freeing developers to create an array of intriguing new applications that transcend their native blockchain.
Oracle integration is regarded as a sign of a blockchain maturing and growing in stature. While most crypto networks don’t boast oracle support from day one, it’s an extremely valuable feature to add further down the line, paving the way for more sophisticated dApps that can pull data from any chain or external environment.
BandChain Builds a Bridge to TRON
TRON’s partnership with Band brings new powers to TRON dApps immediately. The network’s development team has already integrated BandChain, a decentralized oracle network that can be used to obtain price feeds that have been pre-programmed. However, developers can go a step further if they desire and program custom oracles using BandChain that query various data points, be it the price of oil or the result of a presidential election.
With a reliable oracle solution now in place, TRON should enjoy greater success in luring dApp developers away from Ethereum. Solidity devs have grown frustrated at Ethereum’s inability to scale, which has led to prohibitive on-chain fees. With the cost of deploying a smart contract on the mainnet now running to several hundred dollars, ETH is getting priced out of the defi movement it spawned. Disaffected Solidity devs can now take their concepts to TRON, where they’ll find many of the same tools and applications with the added lure of low fees that make microtransactions feasible.
Why Oracles Matter
Blockchains are efficient at informing network participants of their current state – wallet addresses, transactions, block headers etc – but are incapable of acting upon events that happen on other chains, or off-chain altogether. Oracles provide a means to query external data, without reliance on centralized sources that could be compromised. For example, an oracle allowing the price of ETH to be read by a TRON dApp would pull its pricing from half a dozen exchanges simultaneously to prevent the possibility of price manipulation.
Projects such as Band Protocol and Chainlink provide this capability without weakening the decentralized nature of blockchains in the process. TRON founder Justin Sun is bullish on defi, and bullish on the partnership with Band bearing fruit, saying “TRON’s ecosystem is growing faster than ever and having Band Protocol secure our top applications helps us speed up the adoption of defi and dApps worldwide.”
One of TRON’s greatest strengths has been its ability to catch up fast and ship products faster than any other crypto network. In just three months, it’s made major headway in its plan to bring decentralized finance to TRON, provisioning distributed dApp storage via BTFS, launching Uniswap analog JustSwap, and enabling crypto-collateralized loans via JUST, and its eponymous JST governance token. Band Protocol will enhance the capabilities of these platforms while making it easier for devs to launch sophisticated TRON dApps, from options markets to sports betting.
