"Test oracle which is writing nanoErg per US cent price from CoinMarketCap into R4 register of a box labeled with the “c402…” singleton token: Ergo Explorer
Details on how to run an oracle will be published on the ErgoForum soon.
With the oracle now financial contracts such as trustless LETS and loan contracts could be developed.
On decentralized pool, currently there’s controversy that a single party can control a lot of mining power hiding under many pseudonymous identities. While there are no evidences so far behind this theory, decentralized pools can make significant share of mining power visible but without possible issues of centralized pools (in regards with censorship). The Foundation also welcomes research in probing the Ergo network, finding geo distribution of mining power etc. Such research may be sponsored.
Core developers have enough material for couple of new releases, including support for wallet operations in new UI, updated (more efficient) ErgoTree interpreter, new API methods for applications development, and fixed P2SH addresses. Probably 3.1.3 will be out on Monday (Oct, 21st).
We are looking for external development teams willing to develop a decentralized exchange and a full-fledged (desktop?) wallet (with mixing and 3rd part applications support), please contact the core community members on that."
Update from Alex Chepurnoy