Oracles

Oracles bridge real world events over to onchain smart contracts. It is an emerging field, but necessary for large parts of DeFi.

As an example, a farmer's crop is at risk for draught and wants to insure himself against a season with low rainfall. An Oracle combining multuple sources into a reliable tamper-proof network will provide the weather events of the area and the smart contract can use them even though it's on chain.

Chainlink appears to be well positioned in this space. Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper was recently published.

As part of the ThinkWeek I watched the "Chainlink 2.0 Whitepaper | Research Panel" video below

Earlier I've listend into the Lex Friedman podcast with one of the Chainlink co-founders Sergey Nazarov.