Thales will integrate Chainlink price feeds to secure binary options outcomes
We’re thrilled to announce that Thales — a permissionless, non-custodial, and uncensorable binary options trading platform — will integrate Chainlink Price Feeds on Ethereum.
By integrating Chainlink’s industry-leading decentralized oracle network, Thales will have access to high-quality, tamper-proof price feeds needed to resolve the outcomes of binary options markets. Chainlink Price Feeds will provide our users with strong assurances that the resolution of the binary options markets is completed in an accurate and decentralized way, making them feel safe when interacting with markets created on Thales’ platform.
We chose Chainlink as our go-to oracle solution because its infrastructure is seamless to integrate and time-tested in production. Chainlink already secures leading DeFi protocols responsible for billions of dollars in smart contract value, maintaining robust security and high availability even amidst unexpected events such as exchange downtime, flash crashes, and data manipulation attacks using flash loans.
Securing binary options outcomes with Chainlink
As we shared in our initial blog post, Thales has secured an initial funding round from Synthetix to deliver a superior trading experience for binary options on Ethereum.
Binary options are a simple yet elegant solution for having a fixed-payoff derivative that’s both easy to understand and offers capped downside protection that’s incorporated directly in the instrument’s design.
You can read more about how binary options work in our Binary Options 101 article.
The Thales team is aware that in the past, scammers have used binary options as a front to lure retail users onto centralized platforms and then commit fraud, steal funds, or refuse to make payouts. This is why we believe in the importance of bringing this financial instrument to people in a secure, trustless, and permissionless way, showcasing its usefulness not only for speculating but also for building a diversified portfolio and hedging against possible downturns.
Our core model is based on a trading-first approach, where each individual market has decentralized order books with tradeable tokens that represent long and short positions.
Check out our vision for a re-imagined model on binary options.
In order to secure the price feeds that settle binary options markets, Thales requires access to fresh asset prices that are supplied directly on-chain in a highly reliable and secure manner. Fair market asset prices should reflect a volume-weighted average from all trading environments, so we need to make use of an oracle to fetch aggregated price data off-chain and deliver it on-chain to be consumed by Thales’ smart contracts.
After reviewing various oracle solutions, we selected Chainlink Price Feeds because they provide a multitude of critical features such as:
- High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that’s aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and wash trading. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates precise global market prices that are inherently resistant to inaccuracies or manipulation of any single or small set of exchanges.
- Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises. Chainlink nodes have a strong track record for reliability, even during high gas prices and extreme network congestion.
- Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, establishing strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or oracle network.
- Reputation — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical performance of node operators and oracle networks, as well as check the real-time prices being offered.
In addition to price feeds, we also plan to leverage Chainlink sports data to expand the scope of Thales’ platform into binary options based on the outcome of sports events, capturing part of the sports industry that’s forecasted to be worth 600 billion dollars by 2022. By integrating Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network, we give our users confidence that the results from any sport supported will be trustless, tamper-proof, and accurate.
“Working with the Chainlink Labs team, I can say this is the most organized group I’ve ever seen. They treat us like an equal in a very professional way, always leaving open ways to communicate with them. On a few occasions, they even reached out proactively. I love how they don’t give no as an answer and try to look for mutually beneficial situations.” — Danijel, Thales Co-founder.
“Chainlink is the most robust solution available for supporting the Thales protocol’s strict data requirements. The Thales team welcomes the support of Chainlink for settling markets in a decentralized way that eliminates single points of failure.” — Farmwell, Thales Co-founder.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry standard oracle network for powering hybrid smart contracts. Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks provide developers with the largest collection of high-quality data sources and secure off-chain computations to expand the capabilities of smart contracts on any blockchain. Managed by a global, decentralized community, Chainlink currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance, gaming, and other major industries.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations, from global enterprises to projects at the forefront of the blockchain economy, to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable oracle networks. To learn more about Chainlink, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter. To understand the full vision of the Chainlink Network, read the Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper.
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About Thales
Thales platform is bringing binary options trading into the Ethereum network.
Binary options are a simple and intuitive derivative, offering fixed payoffs for a wide variety of markets. They offer a limited risk environment with capped downside, making risk management more precise.
At launch, Thales will support markets for more than 60 different assets including cryptocurrencies, commodities, equities, and index products, as well as expand into sports markets with support from Chainlink data.
Thales will be the hub for spinning up new binary options markets, swapping binary option position tokens, market making on decentralized limit order books, and claiming the fruits of winning options positions and strategies.
Bringing this exotic derivative on-chain within a permissionless environment with re-imagined use cases is our aim.
Join us for the ride!
