Oracle Announcement

An oracle announcement is the message an oracle publishes before an event occurs, committing in advance to sign its eventual outcome. It contains an event descriptor (what the event is and which outcomes are possible) plus one or more public nonces, also called R-values, that the oracle will later use to produce its signatures. By releasing this material ahead of time, the oracle gives contract builders everything they need to prepare a Discreet Log Contract (DLC) covering every possible result, without the oracle ever learning that any particular contract exists.

Why pre-committing matters

The nonce in an announcement is single-use and tied to one event. Schnorr signature math means that if an oracle ever signs two different outcomes using the same committed nonce, anyone can recover the oracle's private key from the two signatures. This turns equivocation into financial and reputational suicide for a reputable oracle, giving the system its accountability without any regulator or trusted platform. The announcement therefore acts as a binding, public promise: "I will sign exactly one outcome of this event with this key material." Anyone can archive the announcement and later hold the oracle to it, which is about as close to trustless as third-party data feeds get on Bitcoin.

What an announcement typically contains

Beyond the nonce, an announcement carries the oracle's public key, a description of the event (a question, a settlement time, and the set of possible outcomes), and the oracle's signature over the whole package so it cannot be forged or altered in transit. Numeric events, like a hashprice or an exchange rate, are usually decomposed digit by digit, with one nonce per digit, so a contract can pay out along a curve rather than on a single yes/no answer. Announcements are distributed however the oracle likes: a website, Nostr relays, or a simple feed. Nothing about them touches the blockchain.

Building the contract around it

From the announcement's nonce and outcome set, the two contract parties compute the adaptor points for each possible result and build a full set of pre-signed payout transactions. None of this requires the oracle's involvement or knowledge; the oracle cannot censor a contract it cannot see, and it cannot tailor its answer to sway a bet it does not know exists. When the event resolves, the oracle issues a separate attestation that unlocks exactly one of those transactions. An announcement with no matching attestation simply means the oracle stayed silent, and the contract's refund path eventually applies after a timeout, so neither party's funds are stranded.

Why sovereign Bitcoiners should care

DLCs let two parties hedge or speculate, on hashprice, on difficulty, on anything an oracle will attest to, using plain Bitcoin transactions that look like ordinary multisig spends on-chain. For a miner, that is a path to hedging revenue without an account at a custodial platform. The announcement is the keystone: it is the artifact you verify before entering a contract, and its quality, clear event definitions, sane settlement times, a well-known oracle key, is what you are actually trusting. The announcement is the front half of the oracle workflow that ends with oracle attestation and settles through contract execution transactions.

If you plan to actually use DLCs, treat announcements the way you treat firmware sources: collect them from multiple channels, verify the oracle's signature against a key you obtained independently, and archive what you verified. An announcement is a small file, and keeping your own copy means a later dispute never depends on the oracle's website still existing. The same habit protects against subtle substitution: a contract built from a tampered announcement settles against the tamperer's nonces, not the real oracle's. Five minutes of verification before funding a contract is the entire cost of doing this properly, and it is the difference between trusting a protocol and trusting a webpage.