🔮 THE ORACLE

An innovative educational game about how decentralised oracles agree on truth — with no judge.

There is no central authority. So how does a crowd decide what's true? THE ORACLE lets you play the exact mechanism behind oracles like Kleros and UMA: you can only win by predicting the crowd, the crowd converges on the obvious answer, and that convergence — a Schelling point — is how trustless systems report truth with no referee.

The commit-reveal is real (live SHA-256 you can watch): you commit a sealed hash, then reveal, so you can't win by copying. And an honest bribe round teaches the catch — an oracle is only as truthful as it is expensive to corrupt.

Set right here at Web3 Summit / Funkhaus Berlin: the rounds ask where this crowd will gather (Studio 1, the Spree, the DJs), so the focal points are the room you're standing in. Hosted on a .dot domain no censor can take down.

Play

Consult the oracle. Each round, pick the answer you think the crowd will pick, commit it (sealed hash), reveal, and score by matching the majority. You never vote for what's true — you vote for what's obvious to everyone — and discover that's the same thing.

The mechanic is the lesson

No quiz, no lecture. You experience a Schelling point because you need one to win, and you feel why commit-reveal matters because you can't copy a sealed vote (Bogost's "procedural rhetoric": the rules carry the argument). The full research behind the design is in RESEARCH.md.

Mod this app (please do)

One self-contained index.html, no build step. Good first mods:

• Write your own questions — edit the ROUNDS array (Schelling, fact, or bribe rounds; re-theme for your own venue).
• Make the crowd real — wire Round.live (Polkadot Statement Store, sketched at the bottom of index.html) to swap the simulated voters for the actual people in the room.
• Tune it — crowd size, noise, bribe payoff, slash amount.

Deploy your own to .dot

gh repo create the-oracle --public --source=. --remote=origin --push
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paritytech/playground-cli/main/install.sh | bash
export PATH="$HOME/.polkadot/bin:$PATH"
pg login
pg drip
pg decentralize --path . --dot theoracle01 --playground --moddable

Code as law, not judges as law.