Overview

The DLT Science Foundation is an international non-profit organisation committed to the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Our mission is to help create a more equitable society - one that fully utilises DLT and related web3 technologies. We seek to accomplish this by fostering an open, sustainable innovation ecosystem of developers, fellows, and leaders. Together, we will ensure our world reaches its fullest potential, powered by blockchain technology. Alongside our grant program for academic institutions, DSF also issues original research, engages with policymakers, and develops initiatives with web3 leaders.

Distributed ledger technologies are an important infrastructure solution where there is a need for high data integrity and security in a trustless distributed environment, where the participants - called nodes - do not necessarily know each other and can be geographically located in multiple places. The information is updated and stored on a ledger and replicated across the network via a mechanism called consensus, which allows nodes to agree on the correct data and order on the ledger. In their functioning, DLTs can use smart contracts, self-executing programs that can perform pre-determined operations when certain inputs are communicated to it.

A significant portion of smart contract use-cases calls for information about data and events happening in the real world (eg. asset prices in DeFi). A significant limitation of smart contracts is their inherent inability to access data outside of their blockchain environment. Oracles provides an architectural solution to this by allowing access to data sources in a safe manner that is coherent with DLT security requirements. They are effectively a universal gateway to off-chain resources while still supporting the important security properties of blockchains. Major industries benefit from combining oracles and smart contracts including sensors for supply chain, asset prices for finance, weather information, randomness-based applications, and much more.