Curious about BUIDLing at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021 with Chainlink but wanting more details on their project? Get the scoop from their recent interview with ETHDenver:
What Is Chainlink?
“Chainlink is the standard for decentralized oracles and oracle solutions. Being able to do token transfers with contracts is great, right? But if we want to have blockchain be this new paradigm be this fundamental shift in our everyday lives, you know, we need to have agreements and contracts that can actually use data and that can actually replace our current corrupt systems.
So Chainlink, and getting decentralized data is really the next piece to unlocking smart contracts, making them token transfers, or just, you know, storing data to bring these superior digital agreements, they really unlock this. The power that blockchain and smart contracts really have. So, that’s why I think oracles, decentralized oracles and Chainlink as a project is so paramount to this entire industry, and where we’ll be going in the next couple years.”
What Else Should BUIDLers Know?
“If you want to do something with your smart contract, Chainlink is totally customizable. It can get any data you want into your smart contract. And it can do any input and any output. So it’s entirely customizable. Now, if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Well, I don’t really want to, I don’t need to be entirely customizable. I just want, you know, crypto data, I want some pretty standard data,’ well, then some of those data feeds are already prepackaged for you. And you can just say, ‘Okay, cool. I want these centralized Ethereum price data. I want to centralize bitcoin price data, I want to centralize gas estimates, I want the centralized oil data, right.’
All of these come prepackaged in Chainlink price feeds, which are decentralized points of reference for very common assets. And that library of assets is growing, more and more. To account for more and more different types of data, more diverse data, the next biggest use case actually is getting random numbers, this is another prepackaged solution for you. So getting random numbers in deterministic systems, and a blockchain historically, has been very difficult. You know, if you want to get a random number, you’re going to have to do some type of block hash, which relies on the miners being honest, and they can screw up your stuff. So instead of that, you use the Chainlink vrF, which they verify the random function, or which you can use to get an actual random number, right. And random numbers are obviously really important for gaming, you know, random sampling a lottery, whatever you want to do. So you can build these applications that rely heavily on random numbers. So that’s really exciting. And then obviously, the third bit again, is the fact that Chainlink is entirely customizable. So your smart contracts can take any input, work with the blockchain and get any output and also the reverse. And the output from the blockchain can kick out to the real world. So pretty much anything you want to do, you can do with anything, but the easier ones are going to be the price feeds and the vrF.”
What Resources Should BUIDLers Look At?
“So at the entry level engineer, I would say head over to the developer docs, they are fantastic. They do a great job if you know nothing about solidity. If you know nothing about Ethereum, we actually have a whole bunch of tutorials that literally walk you through step by step deploying and using a chain link smart contract. So I would say head over to the docs, that’s one of the first places to go.
And for the experienced devs, same thing, I would say head over the channeling docs. And, everything that you need is there, there’s a ton of blogs, and in sample repos out there too, you know, showing people how to make DeFi projects, how to make like, option trading, make lotteries, and just a whole bunch of random stuff.
You can also check out some of the big projects, you know, like Aave, like Synthetics, you could jump to their code, it’s all open source, and see how they use Chainlink on the back end, which is really exciting. Because you can literally just do exactly what you know, some other successful protocol does and go from there. But yeah, there’s, there’s a ton of projects on GitHub. If you go on GitHub, and you look for channeling projects, you’ll find a lot of sample projects.
And in the docs as well, we have a list of previous hackathon winners. So if you wanted to see you know what other people have done to be successful, you can definitely go check that out and then kind of it gets some inspiration from some of their code. And the other thing is jumping to the Discord. We have an ideas generation channel, there’s a whole bunch of channels to foster innovation and foster creativity. So if you get lost, just ask, the community is super responsive and there to help and somebody will point you in the right direction. So because there’s a plethora of tools for you to find and use to get started.”
Meet the team and learn more about Chainlink at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021, February 5–12! Apply today at ethdenver.com.
