In the era of Web3.0, why can't there be no Chainlink?

「Crypto is eating the world.」

How will the encrypted world intersect with the traditional world? This sentence, which is widely circulated in the encrypted world, illustrates such a trend: the distance between the encrypted world and the Internet, the technology industry, and the traditional world is getting closer and closer, and may eventually swallow up the old Web2.0 system. In this process, some traditional industry elites who perceive this trend are already joining this wave.

Not long ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said. "Eric's experience and insights in building the next generation of innovative global software platforms will be invaluable as we help developers and institutions usher in a new era of economic fairness and transparency."

As a well-known oracle project, Chainlink provides an appropriate way and method for off-chain information to enter the chain. As Schmidt puts it, “The introduction of blockchain and smart contracts has shown great potential for building new business models, but it’s clear that lack of connection to the outside world is also one of its biggest challenges.” And oracles, especially It is a decentralized oracle machine, which improves this situation to a certain extent.

An encryption attempt by the technology giant elite

Schmidt was not only a business leader, but a brilliant engineer. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and he soon joined Sun Microsystems (the Sun Microsystems that was once popular in the last century), and became the company's CTO for a while. Subsequently, he worked in technology companies such as Novell and Google.

A distinguished business leader and software engineer, Eric Schmidt was well-known in the internet industry before joining the crypto world. He served as Google's CEO for a decade from 2001 to 2011. After stepping down as CEO, he remained within Google's framework as chairman of the board of directors of Google's parent company Alphabet until 2019.

When it comes to Google's history, Eric Schmidt is a figure that cannot be avoided. Under his leadership, Google's main search business has grown rapidly, and it has also launched services such as Gmail, Maps, and Chrome. On the route of mergers and acquisitions, decisions that are crucial to Google have also been made-acquisitions of YouTube and Android.

It is not difficult to find that it is difficult to erase the influence of this person on many of Google's heavyweight products. Eric Schmidt undoubtedly has outstanding business talents and a keen sense of technology industry trends. He created a precedent for Google's transformation from a Silicon Valley start-up to a global technology leader. Under Schmidt's leadership, Google has dramatically expanded its infrastructure and product diversification while maintaining a strong innovation culture. His official departure also represents the end of an era in the history of Google.

Oracle, Creator of Trust

As a representative giant company of the traditional Internet, Google provided people with the ability to find information from the vast amount of information on the Internet in the old days and data paths. Without Google, a huge amount of data is in front of users, and it is difficult for users to sort out valuable information from it. It can be said that Google is the way to connect information and users, and it is Google that connects users and the vast ocean of Internet data.

In the encrypted world, the circulation of data is even more important. Although the information on the chain is open and transparent, how can the information on the chain be obtained under the chain? How does this chain obtain the information of that chain? Between on-chain and off-chain, and between chains, data and information still need a way to communicate.

Chainlink is neither a chain nor an application, but a protocol and framework used to build a decentralized oracle network.

Although smart contracts can only be executed inside a chain, some products can connect external data with the chain through external APIs, thus endowing smart The ability to execute contracts automatically based on real-world factors (market conditions, weather, game results, or anything else). Such products are called oracles.

Chainlink is a representative of the oracle. As a middleware, it provides infrastructure-level services for applications, connecting closed on-chain data with countless different types of data sources in the off-chain world. These data sources power global finance, technology, commerce and trade. In the future, these data inputs may all be connected to the blockchain in some way, all facilitated by Chainlink’s oracle network.

The wide application of Chainlink in the encryption world is obvious to all, we just take the last two months as an example:

On November 4, the incentive lending platform Kanpeki announced that it will integrate Chainlink price feed. On the same day, Aurora, the Ethereum expansion solution based on NEAR, integrated Chainlink to feed prices.

On November 7th, the BSC ecological NFT game LittleGhosts announced the integration of Chainlink VRF.

On November 8, Saber, the Solana ecological decentralized trading platform, announced the integration of Chainlink price feed service.

On November 20th, Celer Network, a layer-2 expansion platform, announced its sponsorship and integration of the Chainlink price feed service.

On November 22, Chainlink Keepers was officially launched on Polygon’s PoS mainnet.

On December 3, ClearDAO, a DeFi derivative, will integrate Chainlink price feeds on the Solana blockchain.

On December 7th, Amara Finance, Polkadot’s ecological multi-chain asset lending agreement, announced that it will integrate Chainlink’s price feed.

On December 12, Atlas DEX, a Solana-based cross-chain DEX aggregator, integrated Chainlink price feeds on Solana, Ethereum, and BSC.

On December 13, according to official news, the decentralized reserve currency protocol Vesq will integrate Chainlink price information and Chainlink Keepers in Polygon to minimize slippage and help reduce various attacks.

On December 21st, Lido, a liquidity staking protocol, announced the adoption of stETH/USD Chainlink price feed.

...

We cannot list exactly how many applications have integrated Chainlink, but what is certain is that Chainlink is already one of the most popular oracle solutions in the crypto world . Since the launch of the Chainlink mainnet, more than 700 Chainlink oracle networks have come online, providing more than 1.1 billion on-chain data points for more than 10 different blockchains. The total value guaranteed (TVS) of the Chainlink network has exceeded $75 billion.

In the past year, what breakthroughs and innovations has Chainlink made?

After years of development and construction, we have finally entered a new multi-chain era. Against the background of Ethereum’s increasingly congested, a variety of new public chains have been popular in the market in the past year, and have successively detonated EVM-compatible chains such as BSC and Avalanche, and non-EVM-compatible chains such as Solana and Terra. hot. According to Defillama data, there are already 15 public chains with locked positions of more than 1 billion US dollars. In the entire encryption world, we have more than 100 public chains in use.

Although we cannot say which chain will win in this public chain battle, in the foreseeable future, the number of new public chains may will still continue to increase. In the multi-chain era, the importance of some infrastructure is not the same. Oracles and interoperability protocols are also becoming increasingly important as middleware that connects information between chains, on-chain and off-chain.

In the past year, Chainlink has also carried out several targeted developments and deployments in the context of multi-chain era. Published the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), released the "Chainlink 2.0 White Paper", and introduced the concept of a decentralized oracle network (DON).

Cross-chain communication open source standard: CCIP

When users freely shuttle in the multi-chain world, if they can seamlessly use the unique functions and assets on each blockchain in one application, This will greatly promote the development of cross-chain smart contracts. When the decentralized oracle service emerges and connects off-chain data and secure off-chain computing resources, it also promotes the vigorous development of DeFi, NFT and on-chain game economies.

CCIP is a major initiative for Chainlink this year. In response to the increasing demand for cross-chain solutions in the blockchain ecosystem, it emerged as the times require. Its purpose is to establish a universal connection between hundreds of public chains and private chain networks, so that originally isolated tokens can circulate among all chain ecologies, and realize cross-chain applications.

Compared with the existing cross-chain interoperability protocols in the market, the CCIP developed by Chainlink introduces a brand new concept - anti-fraud network. This is an innovative risk management system. The Anti-Fraud Network consists of multiple decentralized oracle networks with the sole purpose of monitoring CCIP services for malicious behavior that may result in the loss of funds.

A more secure design is that anti-fraud monitoring and cross-chain services are completely independent. Security and anti-fraud are the most critical elements of cross-chain services in securing high-value contracts. As a verification layer, the anti-fraud network has an emergency shutdown mechanism, which can shut down cross-chain services under special circumstances to effectively protect user funds from potential black swan events.

The introduction of CCIP helps to quickly promote developers to innovate on the chain. CCIP simplifies the technical process of cross-chain transfer of tokens, provides stronger security guarantees for user funds, and maximizes DeFi revenue opportunities for users.

This unique design brings a new application scenario for cross-chain applications. For example, an application can simultaneously use the scalable computing power on public chain A and the multiple tokens on public chain B. The storage capacity of the public chain C... This allows developers to easily create tokens that can be used on different public chains at the same time, and make full use of the unique advantages of different networks. The result is a powerful hybrid smart contract application.

Strive to support developers and promote ecological development

In the past year, not only has Chainlink's development progressed brilliantly, Chainlink is also broadly supporting the developer ecosystem - and not just supporting Chainlink development developers, but developers of multiple networks, multiple languages, and multiple ecologies throughout the encrypted world.

Taking the just-concluded Chainlink 2021 Autumn Hackathon as an example, this year’s Chainlink Autumn Hackathon broke various records: a total of more than 7,800 people signed up, 280 With multiple project submissions, Chainlink awarded prizes totaling $550,000 to outstanding teams from around the world. These projects span various vertical application scenarios such as DeFi, NFT, and DAO.

Chainlink holds hackathons every spring and autumn, and also sponsors hackathons hosted by other organizations, such as the famous ETH Global hackathon The Chainlink prize pool and Chainlink prizes are set up separately. Not just cash rewards, Chainlink also provides developers with sufficient educational resources to help these new developers get started quickly, so as to promote the overall development of the industry.

The future depicted by Chainlink2.0

As the leading oracle project in the market today, Chainlink has not stopped. In the Chainlink 2.0 white paper, Chainlink gave a more advanced concept for its own development.

In future plans, Chainlink will quickly and reliably connect smart contracts to any off-chain data sources and off-chain computing resources while ensuring privacy. In order to realize this vision, Chainlink 2.0 proposes a new concept of decentralized oracle network (DON).

DON is a network maintained by a group of Chainlink nodes. Based on the consensus agreement of the committee, the nodes can flexibly choose and deploy any oracle function. The proposal of DON expands the original functional oracle into an oracle cluster, realizing the evolution of the oracle topology from point to mesh. The biggest advantage of DON is that it can quickly launch new blockchain services without the need to develop a new dedicated network for each blockchain or each service. In this way, no matter how the new application scenario changes, DON can respond quickly and access it in time.

As stated in the Chainlink 2.0 white paper, with the help of the advantages of DON, the Chainlink network can provide external data and develop trust for the chain through DON in the near future Minimized off-chain computation. To realize this vision, the Chainlink network has released a series of services based on Chainlink oracle computing, including Keepers, verifiable nonces, off-chain reporting, external adapters, and cross-chain interoperability protocols.

In addition to the development of technology, a well-designed node economic incentive mechanism is also particularly important. In the Chainlink 2.0 white paper, explicit and implicit economic incentives are adopted respectively. Explicit economic incentives are staking rewards that have been widely adopted, while implicit incentives are future income opportunities, that is, only nodes with high service quality and good reputation can attract potential users and obtain future income opportunities.

Reviewing Chainlink’s performance this year, based on the Chainlink 2.0 white paper and CCIP, hybrid smart contracts are constantly developing. Chainklink helps build a brand new trust system that allows off-chain data to seamlessly enter the on-chain world. In the encrypted world, which is a permissionless and decentralized world, the builder of oracle trust and the provider of trust mechanisms are extremely important.

At the end of the article, let’s turn our attention back to Chainlink’s new advisor, Schmidt. In a 2008 speech by Schmidt at an event at the Economic Club of Washington, Schmidt made this assessment of innovation: "It is possible to build a culture around innovation. Google is one example, but by no means the only one. We This is how we can run our country, this is how we can run the world."

“So, let us be revolutionaries. Let us seize this opportunity to use technology to change the series of changes before us. Let us change business , communications, and the way we interact." 

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