Hello, all crypto fans and evangelists! We’re thrilled to reveal a fresh Biweekly update on Chainlink! Chainlink never seizes to amaze its devoted community with a great number of new collabs, developments and events! If you have recently joined Chainlink fan club you may already know that Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that gives smart contracts secure and reliable access to data providers, payment systems, web APIs, enterprise systems, IoT devices, other blockchains and much more.
The Chainlink community rapidly expands and it’s burgeoning around the globe! Chainlink enthusiastic Advocates have done their best to spread the message of connected smart contracts globally. They have inspired more community members and developers to become part of Chainlink.
In the three months since the Advocate Program launch, the team have hosted more than 20 community meetups in different parts of the world, attracting more than 1,000 attendees.
Another excellent news is the launch of a Community Events page which enables everyone to stay up to date with upcoming meetups, and find all necessary information about online live streams, AMAs, and other ecosystem activity.
If you’re active, enthusiastic, passionate, share Chainlink’s vision and want to inspire more people to build key relationships and become a think tank which creates brilliant applications –grab this chance! Simply apply to be an Advocate right now!
Let’s move on to the latest events happening in the progressive Chainlink world!
In this Biweekly you’ll find out about Chainlink’s Meta Oracle Capabilities for DeFi which allow the combination of their widely used on-chain price reference data with any/all on-chain data. The goal is to give smart contract developers more choice when deciding which data resources will be used to build and improve their DeFi smart contracts. Read on to learn more.
Eager to know about all the recent Chainlink’s collaborations? Stay tuned!
Quantum-resistant QAN blockchain platform integrates Chainlink’s decentralized oracle framework to allow its developers to obtain tamper-proof real-world data for its multilingual smart contracts. QAN developers will be able to build more complex smart contract designs that leverage resources from outside the QAN blockchain platform.
Moreover, Chorus One is excited to join the Chainlink community to help make blockchain adoption for real-world applications a reality. Chorus One is building validation and staking infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks. They have valuable experience in working with networks that rely on price oracles. They will be supporting the network with their infrastructure and knowledge of staking systems. It will offer staking for Chainlink when it goes live.
Swipe recently collaborated with Chainlink. This integration will enable the Swipe platform to access Chainlink’s decentralized price feed oracles, particularly their ETH-USD Price Reference Contract and a custom-built decentralized price reference network for SXP-USD, representing Swipe’s native token. Swipe is a wallet application and card platform that grants users access to buy, sell, and pay with 20+ digital currencies.
Furthermore, the team are excited to be working with Offchain Labs on Chainlink oracles now able to operate as validators of Arbitrum’s secure off-chain computation protocol. This provides and guarantees a greatly improved, more scalable, and extremely cost efficient off-chain development stack for smart contracts.
More news to follow!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Social encounters
The Launch of the Community Events Page
As part of this community growth, Chainlink is launching a Community Events page! This new community resource enables everyone to stay to date with future meetups, locate upcoming conferences the team is attending, and find details about all online live streams, AMAs, and other ecosystem activity.
Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov on What DeFi Can Learn From Early Exchange Hacks
Sergey Nazarov joined a new episode of The Breakdown to discuss the role of price oracles in the recent DeFi attacks, plus what DeFi can learn from early exchange hacks.
Check out SergeyNazarov’s presentation at ETHDenver where he talks about how blockchain developers now have the powerful tools to redefine the industry, moving from one focused on tokens to one focused end-to-end secure, data-enabled smart contracts.
Follow the link to watch the whole video
Chainlink Fireside Chat: Ari Juels & Sergey Nazarov
Sergey Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink and Ari Juels, Professor at Cornell Tech and Chainlink Advisor discussing connected smart contracts, decentralized oracles, and the most recent research on Mixicles (privacy-preserving decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments).
The video is here! Check it out !
Connected smart contracts
Chainlink’s chat between Johann Eid, Product Manager of Chainlink, and Joe Petrowski, Research Analyst of Parity Technologies. You’ll learn about Polkadot’s novel blockchain ecosystem design and how Chainlink is integrating within it.
Enjoy the chat! Click here to watch the video.
Upcoming events
How to write smart contracts with Chainlink
Connected Smart Contracts
February 22, Turkey
A closer look at Private Key Management
Monday, February 24, Brussels
Join the meetup focused on crypto security and private key management as envisioned by Ngrave, Trustology and Chainlink. Learn more here.
Chainlink Minneapolis Think Tank Meetup
Monday, February 24, Minneapolis
Join the inaugural Chainlink Think Tank Meetup! Come hang with Chainlink Ambassador/Advocate and LinkPool Community Manager Eric (aka Linkederic) to discuss Decentralized Ledger Technology, Smart Contracts, Chainlink, and the future of the ecosystem. All the details are here.
Creating a Bitcoin External Adaptor using Chainlink
Connected Smart Contracts
March 2, Washington DC
Creating a Smart Contract with Chainlink
Connected Smart Contracts
March 5, Dallas
Durham Business School and Chainlink: Meetup on Connected Smart Contracts
Connected Smart Contracts
March 9, Great Britain
The Future of Decentralized Finance (DeFi): FutreSwap
Connected Smart Contracts
March 10, Toronto
Chainlink Meetup with AlphaAdvantage
Connected Smart Contracts
March 12, Boston
IC3 NYC Meetup with Arbitrum Hosted by Chainlink
Connected Smart Contracts
March 18, New York City
Visualizing Public Blockchain; #Finance#Oracle#Interchain
Decentralized finance (DeFi): A fireside chat with Aave’s CEO Stani Kulechov
Connected Smart Contracts
March 26, Great Britain
Find out more about all the upcoming events by visiting Chainlink’s Community Events Page
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions (information from Etherscan.io):
Chainlink’s Meta Oracle Capabilities for DeFi
Chainlink’s upcoming Meta Oracle capabilities allow the combination of their widely used on-chain price reference data with any/all on-chain data sources. This expands how existing on-chain data and off-chain data interact.
The meta oracle functionality extends Chainlink’s capabilities to aggregating and reacting to any/all on-chain data. It allows users to combine any on-chain values with Chainlink’s own high quality off-chain data sources, while setting key conditions about how a smart contract should receive, react to and rely on this larger combined data set. The goal is to give smart contract developers more choice when deciding which data resources will be used to build and improve their DeFi smart contracts.
Chainlink’s meta oracle functionality allows smart contracts to use Chainlink for creating complex aggregations of various on-chain data, as well as setting additional conditions for interacting with that on-chain data, such as decentralized exchange prices, other on-chain oracle reports, and any other data generated or placed on-chain. While Chainlink already provides highly accurate off-chain data for DeFi, insurance, gaming and many other industries, some of the data being generated on-chain can be usefully combined with data about what’s going on in the larger off-chain world. Combining this data using Chainlink’s off-chain aggregation or an on-chain meta oracle smart contract capability can sometimes provide useful functionality.
Learn how Chainlink’s Meta Oracles can be used to implement pricing bands and reduce pricing inefficiencies. Follow the link here.
Roadmap
The team does not publish a roadmap but you can follow progress on Pivotal Tracker and Github.
Partnerships and team members
Become a Chainlink Advocate
Those Interested in cultivating networks of individuals and equally excited about data-driven automation are welcome to apply to be an Advocate and take advantage of the extensive network of resources that will help you launch a community in your local area.
QANplatform Integrates Chainlink Oracles to Connect with Real-World Data
Quantum-resistant QAN blockchain platform integrates Chainlink’s decentralized oracle framework to allow its developers to obtain tamper-proof real-world data for its multilingual smart contracts. QAN developers will be able to build more complex smart contract designs that leverage resources from outside the QAN blockchain platform.
QANplatform is a quantum-resistant blockchain platform powered by blockchain fintech brand Centrum Circle. QAN uses Lattice-based cryptography, making it resilient to quantum attacks, which are expected within the next five years and introduce vulnerabilities to most major crypto networks.
While QANplatform offers numerous security properties that make it enticing for long-term viability, like all other blockchain platforms, it lacks the ability to interact with data and systems that are not on the QAN blockchain. Since the most trusted data sources often exist on non-blockchain systems, there needs to be a way to access them in a manner as secure as the blockchain itself. This is known as the oracle problem and Chainlink is the premier oracle solution for most of the blockchain ecosystem.
Through Chainlink, developers can protect against a centralized oracle being a single point of failure by decentralizing the data delivery process using multiple oracles to gather the same data point and then aggregate their responses together. They can also protect against one data source being the single source of truth by gathering data from multiple sources and aggregating them together using customized models, such as producing an average, tossing out outliers, etc.
By combining QANplatform’s highly secure, quantum-resistant blockchain with Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network, users get access to a secure and reliable end-to-end solution that is fully connected to the real world. This enables QANplatform’s developers to create logic based on real-world situations, which is a huge value-add to the network.
Some of the potential use cases we are considering once integrating Chainlink, include:
- Decentralized sourcing of the QARK/USD price to enable enterprises to calculate transaction fees in USD, yet pay with QARK on the backend.
- Secure connection to IoT devices to open up new insurance, supply chain, and logistics products
Chorus One is Joining Chainlink as a Node Operator
Chorus One is excited to join the Chainlink community to help make blockchain adoption for real-world applications a reality. Chorus One is building validation and staking infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks. They have valuable experience in working with networks that rely on price oracles. They will be supporting the network with their infrastructure and knowledge of staking systems. It will offer staking for Chainlink when it goes live.
A staking incentive model is in the works that will allow LINK holders to stake their tokens with trustworthy node operators. This will help create a permissionless, decentralized network focused on reliably providing accurate data to be consumed by blockchain applications.
Chorus One strongly believes that the protocol has a good chance of becoming the standard for providing off-chain data to blockchain applications. Their thesis is further supported by the transition of several major decentralized finance projects on Ethereum to the Chainlink network instead of running their own oracle implementations. Examples include Aave and Synthetix, which made this decision after their early price reference feed was exploited by a trader.
Chorus One looks forward to publishing further content around Chainlink and the planned staking implementation in the future.
Check out the official website of Chorus One here
Arbitrum and Chainlink
Arbitrum supports secure smart contracts using an off-chain protocol that gives smart contract developers the flexibility to move most of the work of smart contract execution off-chain, to nodes running the Arbitrum protocol, while maintaining the trustless security of Ethereum.
Arbitrum offers uniquely low cost and high throughput capabilities by computing solidity in a way that doesn’t have to be fully computed by every node on a single public network. Similar to how Chainlink applies scalable security to real-world data, Arbitrum provides a scalable security model for trust minimized off-chain computation. As the value of an Arbitrum off-chain computation increases, developers can always add Chainlink oracles/node operators to increase the number of validators securing their specific computation’s overall security.
Combining Arbitrum’s unique trust-minimized smart contracts together with Chainlink’s high quality node network as secure validators of those computations, as well as their ability to create secure connections to key external resources, provides a greatly improved, more scalable, and extremely cost efficient off-chain development stack for smart contracts. This makes it simple to launch highly secure, externally connected, and cost efficient smart contracts that can meet the demands of interoperability with other key systems, while being used for computationally intensive use cases that want to rely on the security of Ethereum.
Decentralized networks of Chainlink nodes running Arbitrum can validate a solidity smart contract, retrieve external data inputs, scalably compute the smart contract with associated correctness guarantees, push these contract outputs and proofs on-chain, and send a provable result to the user’s on-chain contract once the arbitration period has ended.
Chainlink nodes will be able to add an additional layer of security by staking LINK as collateral to back their computations. These crypto-economic guarantees will allow the system to scale to secure more and more value over time, especially given Chainlink’s unique ability to progressively add additional high quality nodes to secure any specific Arbitrum computation as it grows in value.
Arbitrum has full solidity support and accessing Chainlink data on Arbitrum will be just as simple as accessing it directly on Ethereum.
Swipe Leverages Chainlink to Bring Decentralized Pricing into the Swipe Network
Swipe recently collaborated with Chainlink. This integration will enable the Swipe platform to access Chainlink’s decentralized price feed oracles, particularly their ETH-USD Price Reference Contract and a custom-built decentralized price reference network for SXP-USD, representing Swipe’s native token. By collaborating with Chainlink, Swipe will effectively address the security problems for off-chain connections that currently exist for users of the Swipe Network Wallet-Contacts.
Chainlink’s oracle solution will allow Swipe to create a stable, yet decentralized bridge between reliable off-chain prices and Swipe’s on-chain transactions. This is accomplished by having multiple Chainlink oracles evaluate the same data point, thus eliminating one oracle By decentralizing the data sourcing around token price conversions for point of sale transactions, such as through the SXP-USD decentralized price feed, Swipe users get more secure, reliable, and accurate pricing when buying, selling, and spending SXP.
About Swipe
Swipe is a wallet application and card platform that grants users access to buy, sell, and pay with 20+ digital currencies. Through its proprietary Swipe Network, users are enabled to convert digital currencies to fiat currencies on-demand. Learn more about Swipe by visiting Swipe.io.
Etherisc to Leverage Chainlink Oracles For Decentralized Flight Insurance Product
Etherisc is proud to announce that they have a working decentralized flight insurance Proof Of Concept on Rinkeby, an Ethereum testnet, that incorporates reliable data feeds delivered by Chainlink. By combining the decentralized security of Ethereum with the decentralized oracle framework of Chainlink, users have access to a trust minimized insurance product that is secure end-to-end.
Parametric insurance built on top of decentralized infrastructure is one of the most exciting frontiers of innovation in the insurance industry. This insurance model foster new product designs and increase market participation, but it redefines underlying trust dynamics between insurance providers and policyholders.
Many of the problems in flight insurance revolve around inefficiencies and delays in claims processing that ultimately increase costs, extend process times, and cultivate mistrust between insurers and policyholders.
In the current model, users must manually file claims, which are then processed internally by the insurance company to verify whether or not the claim is entitled to compensation in accordance with their specific policy.
Blockchains can act as reliable and immutable engines for processing insurance claims thanks to their decentralized security. Smart contracts running on blockchains allow for the terms of an insurance agreement to be transformed into digital logic that executes based on predefined conditions, which neither party can tamper with. In the case of flight insurance, insurance policies can be programmed to process claims and make payouts once certain data is received, i.e. data about the flight’s status.
Etherisc: Learn more by visiting the Etherisc website.
Rumors
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
The graph above illustrates changes in the number of Chainlink Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
This report is not financial advice.
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