Standards

What is a Signed Market-State Attestation (SMA)?

A Signed Market-State Attestation (SMA) is a cryptographically signed claim about the current trading state of a regulated venue at a specific moment in time. Every response from Headless Oracle is an SMA: a structured payload describing whether a market is open, closed, in pre-auction, in lunch break, or on an early-close schedule, together with the exchange's ISO 10383 MIC code, an RFC 3339 timestamp, and an Ed25519 signature over the canonical form of the payload.

The design goal is simple: make market state a signed, checkable record rather than an unsigned claim. A smart contract, trading agent, or compliance process can independently validate an SMA against Headless Oracle's published Ed25519 public key, without ever calling back to our service. If the public key verifies the signature, the payload is exactly what Headless Oracle signed. It records Headless Oracle's observation, not a guarantee of fact.

SMAs are short-lived by design. Each attestation carries a 60-second time-to-live, after which downstream consumers must refuse to act on it. This bounds the window in which a stale reading can drive an incorrect decision — a critical property for autonomous systems handling real capital.

Headless Oracle co-authors the IETF draft family defining environmental constraints for Verifiable Intent.

Regulatory References

Two regulator documents shaped this design and are cited here as references, not as approvals: CFTC Staff Letter 25-39 on tokenized collateral (December 2025) and the SEC Crypto Task Force Project Blueprint on Tokenized Collateral (November 2025). Both discuss cryptographic attestation and multiple independent oracles as architectural building blocks, and this operator took its direction from them. No regulator has reviewed or endorsed this service.

Multi-Oracle Verification

A single oracle is a single point of failure — and a single point of trust. For high-value settlement and tokenized collateral flows, we recommend consuming attestations from three or more independent oracles and acting only on majority consensus.

Multi-oracle consensus converts the question "do you trust Headless Oracle?" into "do you trust that three independent operators all signed the same claim?" — a materially stronger guarantee. Divergent readings are a first-class signal: they indicate an upstream venue issue, an oracle outage, or an attempted data-integrity attack, and should trigger a fail-closed response in downstream systems.

Open Standards & Family Specs

environment.market_state is a proposed member of the environment.* constraint family. Sibling implementations cover adjacent constraint surfaces, and an IETF Internet-Draft filed May 11, 2026 formalises the family and vocabulary layer.

28 Global Exchanges

Coverage spans the primary regulated venues across every major time zone, plus the derivatives and 24/7 crypto venues most relevant to autonomous settlement. Every venue is addressed by its ISO 10383 MIC code.

Total: 28 venues.

Built for the Agentic Economy

Human-facing market data APIs assume a human operator will handle ambiguity, read documentation, and retry on error. Autonomous agents cannot. Headless Oracle is designed for consumers that must act on the response without human mediation.

For Developers

Every resource below is designed to be consumed by a build tool, an agent runtime, or a CI pipeline — not just a human reading a docs page.

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