Protocol Development

As the onchain protocols mature, they will increasingly rely on external data to inform their smart contracts and manage financial risk. Today, oracle services dominate this space by supplying price feeds that help DeFi protocols such as lending markets gauge collateral values and automate liquidations. However, most of the feeds provided by oracle services today only offer basic price feeds, leaving protocols hungry for richer and more granular information.

Looking ahead, as crypto applications expand beyond simple trading and lending, we anticipate a growing need for custom datasets—ranging from historical volatility and on-chain ownership concentration to real-world asset metrics. Even existing lending protocols can benefit from additional data points when fine-tuning their collateralization logic. For instance, before issuing a loan, a protocol may want to incorporate an asset’s volatility profile or measure the degree of token holder concentration. Such nuanced data enables more accurate risk modeling than price feeds alone.

Portex’s marketplace aims to address this gap by offering protocol developers a broad selection of datasets, sourced directly from offchain providers, AI tools, and other specialized sellers. Critically, our architecture also aligns economic incentives. Rather than forcing protocols to spend treasury funds on expensive data feeds, Portex enables protocol developers to externalize these acquisition costs to their users. In practice, a protocol can structure fees (e.g., as a small service fee to borrowers) to cover the purchase of advanced datasets needed for risk assessments, effectively letting data costs scale with protocol usage.

This level of flexibility opens up entirely new use cases. A DeFi protocol, for example, could incorporate real-time sentiment analysis or environmental metrics tied to tokenized emissions markets, all without bearing the data costs alone. By operating as a well-structured marketplace, Portex not only reduces friction in discovering and paying for the right data but also provides the economic tools to ensure that protocols can sustainably access high-quality information in pursuit of more sophisticated—and safer—financial products.