No oracles means your contract doesn’t accept claims about the world; it accepts things the chain can check itself—either onchain state, or a compact proof that says “I computed X from Y” and verifies in a few steps.
No middleware means there’s no special keeper network that has to stay online and behave correctly for your app to work; anyone can submit the same verifiable receipt, and the chain is the judge.
Put together, intelligent onchain logic stops being “who do we trust to tell us the answer?” and becomes “what can we prove, and how cheaply can we verify it?”
This is starting to look practical, not theoretical: SP1 Hypercube reported proving 99.7% of Ethereum L1 blocks in under 12 seconds using 16 RTX 5090 GPUs (Nov 2025). (blog.succinct.xyz)
And Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade (May 7, 2025) increased blob capacity (target 3→6, max 9) and Galaxy observed a post-upgrade median blob object cost around $0.00000000035, which makes “ship the proof, not the story” economically realistic. (galaxy.com)
Bottom line: treat the chain like a strict accountant—feed it proofs and onchain facts, not messages from middlemen.
