Within the Flare Network lies a decentralised smart contract called the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) that, for all intents and purposes, acts as a Reward Manager. It, unfortunately, hasn’t operated as reliably as intended – leaving many users unable to claim previously unclaimed rewards. Unwittingly, The FTSO had put a time limit on the money owed to network users.
Network users weren’t automatically credited the rewards they were due. Instead, the rewards were stored in the FTSO Manager, to be collected after the reward epoch ends. But the bug prevented users from claiming their rewards after that point.
As such, the smart contract was deactivated and has since been replaced.
How is the Flare Time Series Oracle Supposed to Work?
The FTSO is a decentralized, secure smart contract programmed to make estimations of various data. This would require data providers to gather information from a wide range of exchanges, both centralized and decentralized, to feed and train the FTSO.
Account holders on the Flare Network can become providers. If they feed the FTSO valuable data, like price pairs, these users are rewarded as the blockchain records the new data.
As is typical with smart contract/proof of stake protocols, the voting power of a user is determined by their crypto balance (in this case, their wrapped FLR balance and delegations). The top 100 data providers with the highest voting power are selected per epoch to have their submissions considered.
Within a 3 minute price epoch, data is to be gathered and processed using any algorithms at the provider’s disposal. A hash of the data must subsequently be “committed”. Upon the next price epoch – for the first 1.5 minutes – the actual data can be revealed.
Rewards are distributed to the data providers and their delegators for each price epoch in which their submitted data is close enough to the median value.