San Francisco based crypto exchange, OKCoin, has launched on-chain pricing feeds for the burgeoning DeFi market. An announcement on July 15, the firm debuted ‘OKCoin Oracle' which will use API's to support interoperability with crypto markets for reliable pricing on digital assets.

According to the announcement, the OKcoin Oracle API's will be verified via public keys, leveraging smart contract infrastructure to integrate more price feeds. On this end, OKCoin is set to kick off this new pricing oracle in collaboration with leading DeFi protocol, Compound.

The former will use Compound's open oracle smart contracts to harmonize data from various points into finer industry medians. OKCoin's Communications Director, Will McCormick elaborated on the underpinnings of OKCoin's Oracle:

“OKCoin Oracle acts as a trusted source of market data, and anyone can publish OKCoin pricing on-chain. Once on-chain, OKCoin is verifiable as the source of the data, using the OKCoin Oracle public key.”

As more traditional assets find their way to decentralized economies, bad actors get a bigger window to swindle off the crypto markets' contributors. This has been on the rise especially within the DeFi ecosystem.

In Q2 alone, close to $26 million was compromised by malicious players, although most of it was returned in a surprising turn of events. An analysis of these events now reveals that arbitrage has found its way into Decentralized Finance via flash loans. Speaking to Decrypt, OKCoin CEO, Hong Fang, has emphasized on the seriousness of this threat:

“Earlier this year, some bad actors took advantage of fake pricing information guise as exchange pricing posted on-chain, which led to two hackers using flash loans to attack the margin trading protocol bZx, first in a $350,000 attack and later in a $600,000 copycat attack”

Therefore, a pricing feed solution was in line with the market needs according to OKCoin's latest move. Hang went on to note that.

“Oracle Price feeds ensure accurate pricing, which helps plug this vulnerability.”

OKCoin has been operational since 2013 and grown to over 1,000 employees within this period. This move towards a better pricing feed adds to the firm's portfolio which includes exposure to a wide range of crypto assets through its exchange and donations to the Bitcoin community like the recently launched ‘Let's Build Bitcoin Together' initiative which was allocated $10 million.

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