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Price oracle

When an option settles, the protocol uses a single BTC/USD price. That price comes from the Internet Computer's Exchange Rate Canister (XRC), an on-chain price feed maintained as a system service.

How the price is determined​

The XRC pulls BTC/USD from multiple major exchanges and returns the median. The aggregation runs on-chain with consensus across many nodes, so the price every node agrees on is the price the protocol uses to settle.

A few properties make this hard to manipulate:

  • Multiple sources. Moving the result would require moving the price on several venues at once.
  • Median, not mean. A single outlier exchange can't shift the result.
  • On-chain with consensus. Every node verifies the result. There is no admin who can override it after the fact.

Verify on-chain: Exchange Rate Canister. Source: dfinity/exchange-rate-canister.