Learn
New to oracles? Start here. Four short guides take you from “what is an oracle?” to how REP keeps answers honest. No background needed.
Start here
Read these in order. Each guide builds on the one before and ends with where to go next.
What is an oracle?
Why smart contracts need someone to tell them what happened, and why that someone matters.
Read guideHow Augur answers a question
Ask, report, challenge, final answer: one example from start to finish.
Read guideDisputes, bonds and forks
Why each challenge doubles the bond, and what happens at the last resort.
Read guideWhat REP does
How REP secures answers, and what holders can choose to do.
Read guide
More guides
Focused explanations for when you need one specific thing.
Writing questions an oracle can answer
Clear outcomes, a firm deadline and criteria that leave no room for doubt.
When a question can’t be answered
What “Invalid” means, and how to avoid it.
How Augur Lituus, Zoltar and Augur Statoblast fit together
Three products, one token, and what each one is for.
Reading the Augur Lituus whitepaper
A guided walk through the January 2026 paper, section by section.
Key terms
The words you’ll meet most often, in plain language.
- Oracle
- A service that tells a blockchain what happened in the real world.
- Report
- A proposed answer to a question, backed by a REP bond.
- Challenge
- A different answer posted with a larger bond. It reopens the question.
- Bond
- REP put at risk behind an answer. Wrong answers lose most of their bond to the winners.
- Fork
- The last resort. REP holders move to the answer they believe; the total that moves decides the original oracle’s answer.
- REP
- Reputation: the token that secures Augur’s oracle.
- Universe
- A version of the ledger with its own REP. A fork creates one child universe per answer.
- Invalid
- The result for a question that’s malformed or can’t be answered.