Oracles
Oracles are a critical infrastructure component of Helix, providing the price data that powers its decentralized lending and borrowing markets. Accurate and reliable asset pricing is essential for determining collateral values, computing borrowing capacity, managing liquidations, and preserving solvency across the protocol. Helix uses a modular oracle system designed to ensure price integrity, minimize downtime risks, and support a diverse range of assets, including stablecoins, wrapped tokens, and volatile cryptoassets. All oracle configurations are governed on-chain through the Helix DAO, enabling transparent updates and robust risk oversight
Each reserve (token listing) in Helix is associated with a dedicated oracle source. These sources are defined via the protocol’s governance and are upgradable through role-restricted administrative functions. The oracle system is composed of the following core components:
Provide real-time market prices for supported tokens
Monitors oracle integrity and sequencer uptime on Base
Maintained via the HelixOracle contract, which aggregates and routes price queries for all assets.
All price feeds are denominated in USD, ensuring a consistent valuation baseline for collateralization, liquidation thresholds, and health factor calculations.
Chainlink Prices
Chainlink is the primary oracle provider used across Helix reserves. Chainlink feeds aggregate prices from multiple data sources using a decentralized network of nodes. This architecture provides strong guarantees against manipulation, downtime, and single-source failures. Chainlink oracles are particularly well-suited for:
Highly liquid, widely traded assets (e.g., ETH, USDC, WBTC).
Stablecoins and large-cap tokens.
Assets with reliable off-chain price discovery
Correlated Asset Price Oracle (CAPO)
For assets that closely track the value of another token, such as staking derivatives (e.g., cbETH), wrapped tokens, or bridged representations, Helix may use CAPO. This oracle type references the price of a primary asset and applies deterministic logic to mirror its movement. CAPO is designed to minimize pricing discrepancies for synthetic or derivative assets that are expected to maintain a 1:1 or near-1:1 peg with an underlying token. Governance must carefully evaluate CAPO configurations to ensure:
Sufficient liquidity and peg stability.
Risk of depegging is low.
Market behavior aligns with the oracle assumptions.
Sequencer Uptime and Oracle Sentinel
Helix includes a Price Oracle Sentinel contract to enhance resilience against Layer 2 infrastructure risks, particularly sequencer downtime on the Base network. Sequencer outages can delay price updates, exposing users to stale price risk. The Oracle Sentinel introduces a grace period mechanism:
If a sequencer outage is detected, borrowing is temporarily disabled.
Liquidations are delayed unless a position is deeply undercollateralized (e.g., health factor < 0.95).
Once the sequencer resumes, normal oracle updates and operations resume automatically.
This feature helps protect users during network instability while maintaining the protocol’s solvency.
Price Redemption Ratios
Some tokens in Helix, such as staking derivatives or rebase tokens, may include redemption ratios that diverge from their nominal price over time. To support these tokens accurately, Helix can configure custom oracle logic or CAPO variants that incorporate the correct price reference and redemption behavior. For example:
cbETH: Might use a redemption adjusted CAPO feed to track ETH;
LSTs: May include dynamic conversion ratios in oracle pricing.
This ensures the protocol correctly values collateral and borrowed assets, even when token behavior diverges from standard ERC-20s.
Oracle Governance and Risk Management
Oracle configurations in Helix are managed by governance and enforced on-chain via the HelixOracle contract and admin roles such as AssetListingAdmin. These configurations include:
Assigning or updating an asset’s oracle source
Switching between Chainlink and CAPO feeds
Adjusting price verification logic
All changes to oracle sources undergo governance review to ensure:
Data source reliability
Sufficient on-chain liquidity
Resistance to manipulation or downtime
Additionally, Helix may implement caps (via the Supply and Borrow Cap system) on assets with less robust oracle feeds to limit protocol exposure.
Oracles are essential to Helix’s decentralized risk management framework. Through a combination of Chainlink feeds, specialized correlated asset oracles, and sequencer-aware logic, Helix maintains accurate and secure asset pricing for its lending markets on Base. By enforcing decentralized governance over oracle sources and integrating protective measures like the Price Oracle Sentinel, Helix ensures its users can participate in the protocol with confidence, even in volatile or uncertain market conditions.
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