Let’s learn about N1Chain. #9 - Oracle Previously, I wrote about N1’s TCGX, but what I was even more curious about was this: “How do you assign a single price to something like trading cards?” BTC and ETH have real-time prices and high trading volumes across exchanges. But trading cards are completely different. Some cards rarely trade at all. The same card can have different prices depending on its condition or version. And if someone sells one expensive card at an odd price, it doesn’t mean the entire market has gone up. Thus, creating a perpetual contract for such a market ultimately hinges on oracle design. Looking at how N1 built TCGX, I was surprised by how much thought they put into it. First, they didn’t just include any random cards. Instead, they carefully selected 160 cards with frequently updated price data and observable real-world price movements. The composition is: Pokémon: 48 cards Magic: 80 cards One Piece: 16 cards Lorcana: 16 cards But they didn’t allocate weights based purely on card count. Doing so would have given Magic half the index weight simply because it has more cards. Instead, the actual index weights are set separately: Pokémon: 45% Magic: 42% One Piece: 11% Lorcana: 2% Personally, what I found most interesting is how they handle outlier prices. If one card suddenly spikes tenfold, and TCGX follows suit, that would obviously be problematic. So N1 uses a Huber estimator to limit the influence of prices that deviate excessively from the mean. In a test where all 160 cards were given equal weight, when one card’s price spiked tenfold: - A standard log average would cause the index to move by ~1.45%. - But with N1’s method, the index moved by only ~0.50%. Conversely, if the entire card market rises uniformly by 5%, the index follows exactly that 5% move. In other words: It reflects overall market trends, while preventing a single outlier from dominating the entire index. Seeing this helps me understand why Discovery Markets isn’t just about “listing quirky assets.” The first and most critical requirement for turning previously illiquid assets into perpetuals isn’t UI, or leverage, but creating a trustworthy price. Regardless of whether TCGX succeeds, if N1 plans to keep creating markets for previously untradeable assets, this custom oracle technology will likely become a foundational pillar.