How Should I Answer DeFi Interview Questions on Securing Price Oracles?

Honestly, if you’re heading into a DeFi interview and they ask about securing price oracles, just be real about what you know. I’d start by saying that most serious protocols use decentralized oracles like Chainlink or Pyth. They do this to pull price data from a bunch of DEXs and CeFi sources, which helps avoid price manipulation and single points of failure.

But if you want to show you really get it, talk about how teams use outlier detection to spot weird price spikes. Mention backup price feeds, too, so if one source fails, there’s a fallback. I always bring up emergency circuit breakers-protocols use these to freeze things fast if prices go crazy, especially during flash loan attacks or wild market crashes.

Don’t forget to mention TWAP oracles. They help smooth out short-term volatility, but they can lag behind when things move fast. That’s why good protocols combine them with other checks. Some projects are even trying UMA’s optimistic oracles, where the community can dispute bad data, or using zero-knowledge proofs for even more security.

If you can, drop a real example, like the Vow hack. It shows you’re paying attention to what can go wrong and how teams are always improving. That’s the kind of answer that feels real and shows you actually understand how DeFi protocols keep price data safe.