A smart contract cannot look up an asset's price on its own. We explain how oracles deliver outside data to the blockchain, how their architectures differ and what failures and manipulation they face.
A trade's price can come from a queue of other people's orders, a pool formula or a market maker's quote. We look at how order books, AMMs and RFQ work and the trade-offs each model carries.
How settlement differs from clearing and booking, what actually makes it “on-chain” and which parts of the process can be verified on the blockchain and which cannot.
Why applications move transactions to layer 2 networks, how an optimistic rollup works and what trust assumptions come with a sequencer and upgradeable contracts.
Why trading protocols do not move everything onto the blockchain, which functions usually run on servers and which in smart contracts, and how to locate the trust boundary — using Variational’s documentation as an example.
