Oblivious Transfer
Oblivious Transfer is a fundamental protocol in secure computation where a sender transfers one of many pieces of information to a receiver, but the sender remains oblivious to which piece was transferred. Conversely, the receiver learns nothing about the other pieces of information.
In financial applications, this is used to allow a trader to query market data or price feeds without the provider knowing which specific data point was accessed. It is a core primitive that enables the secure interaction between participants in a multi-party computation.
Without this mechanism, private exchange of data would be impossible to secure against malicious participants. It ensures that data requests remain confidential in adversarial market environments.