Hello all crypto enthusiasts and fanatics! Our analysts never fail to update you on the latest news from the burgeoning crypto world! We are thrilled to present our fresh Biweekly report on Chainlink which is considered one of the top blockchain technologies. It’s well known for providing reliable and highly secure oracles to leading companies like Google and a big number of other widely acclaimed enterprises and projects! Chainlink made rapid progress in 2019 and the team have proudly announced that it will continue to be a project to watch during 2020.
The Chainlink Network provides the largest collection of secure and decentralized on-chain price reference data available. Use the new Chainlink price reference data for DeFi to explore and gain access to this growing list of cryptocurrency, fiat currency, and commodity prices available on-chain and secured by Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks.
The applications integrating Chainlink are now increasing almost on a daily basis. The team have recently announced new collaborations. The ICON Foundation is planning to integrate with Chainlink’s oracle network. Since interoperability is ICON’s main focus, the integration with Chainlink allows all blockchains connected to ICON to access decentralized oracle data from Chainlink nodes. Moreover, BetProtocol is connecting with Chainlink oracles to provide decentralized Esports and Sports Oracles on all of BetProtocol gaming platforms. Chainlink will provide close support during the integration phase when their oracle solution is connected to BetProtocol’s service offering. What’s more, Alkemi has integrated with Chainlink to leverage its market-leading network of decentralized oracles. Chainlink also plans to collaborate with iExec, a decentralized cloud computing solution, to address the complex off-chain needs of next-generation decentralized applications.
Read on to find out more recent news about Chainlink!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Social encounters
Upcoming events
- Creating a Smart Contract with Chainlink
Thursday, February 6, Dallas
Join the meetup to find out how to create a smart contract which makes use of the Chainlink network. All the details are here.
- Connected smart contracts
Wednesday, February 12, Denver
Join 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. Click here to learn more details about the meetup.
- Smart Contracts: What They Are and How They Can Revolutionize the Future
Wednesday, February 12, Arizona
The following questions are going to be discussed:
What is a smart contract? How do they work under the hood? What is the value of smart contracts? Which industries are most applicable to smart contract adoption?
- Chainlink Fireside Chat: Ari Juels & Sergey Nazarov
Tuesday, February 18, San Francisco
Join a fireside chat with Sergey Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink along with Ari Juels, Professor at Cornell Tech and Chainlink Advisor. They will be discussing connected smart contracts, decentralized oracles, and the most recent research on Mixicles (privacy-preserving decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments). All the details are here.
- Blockchain Demystified with Chainlink & Web3: Future of DeFi and Smart Contract
Friday, February 21, Singapore
You will learn:
- what is a smart contract
- how will smart contracts revolutionized our future economy
- how oracles will connect smart contracts to the real world for production/live use cases.
- what DeFi means and why it matters.
You’ll also discover popular financial applications on Ethereum, deep-dive into the concepts behind decentralized lending, and eperience a live demo of DeFi lending and borrowing.
Learn more about the meetup and the speakers.
- 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
- Visualizing Public Blockchain; #Finance#Oracle#Interchain
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions (information from Etherscan.io):
Chainlink Price Reference Data for DeFi
The DeFi ecosystem now has access to the largest collection of on-chain market data in the entire existence of building open financial products on Ethereum.
Use the new Chainlink Price Reference Data For DeFi to explore and gain access to this growing list of cryptocurrency, fiat currency, and commodity prices available on-chain and secured by Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks.
Collectively, these decentralized oracle networks secure over 100M USD in value for a variety of leading DeFi products across numerous financial markets, such as ETH/USD, BTC/USD, XAG/USD, MKR/ETH, and more.
Chainlink’s Price Reference Data oracle networks vastly expand the amount of secure and reliable data accessible to Ethereum Dapps, greatly accelerating the rate at which new DeFi products can be successfully launched. Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks for Price Reference Data are a shared community resource supported by its users, who pay less for using these oracle networks than it would take for them to broadcast the same data individually, while benefiting from a significant increase in the security created by the decentralization of oracle networks.
The Need for Chainlink Reference Data
DeFi requires constant access to real-time market data, especially prices, to reliably execute the logic underpinning applications. For instance, money (Ampleforth), derivatives (Synthetix), lending (Aave), and decentralized exchange (Loopring) protocols are all examples of applications that need to quickly know the price of certain assets before performing a core on-chain function.
Even if the contract logic is composed of high-quality code, the outputs of the smart contract are fully dependent on the quality of the inputs received. This means that securing accurate market data is as crucial to the security of decentralized finance as the underlying smart contract itself.
While a few Dapps can operate solely using on-chain data, conservatively, 90+% of DeFi applications need a steady connection to off-chain data to function in a trusted, robust, and economically sustainable manner. Most price discovery happens outside of blockchain networks (off-chain), such as on major exchanges, and prices vary across these platforms. As a result, obtaining the most reliable price for an asset requires aggregation from multiple off-chain data sources.
The Underlying Design of Oracle Reference Data Networks
Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks are composed of security-reviewed, Sybil-resistant, and fully independent nodes. These nodes are run by leading blockchain DevOps and security teams, many of which have extensive experience running POS nodes that secure millions of dollars in value across multiple blockchain networks.
Every time there is a request for an on-chain price update, each node in the network is tasked with retrieving and submitting the current price. The responses are then aggregated together off-chain and pushed on-chain as a single price update. Incorporating decentralization at the node level ensures high availability for all Chainlink-powered price reference data oracle networks.
They also maintain data quality via redundancy, by having each node retrieve the price from an API such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, etc., which aggregates data from many sources. Currently, there are seven data aggregators being used on most networks. Thus, the on-chain price update is a cumulative aggregation of individual nodes that retrieved the price from a trusted data aggregator. This ensures that DeFi applications constantly interact with high-quality market data.
Supporting projects can call these reference contracts to access up-to-date price feeds that trigger the execution of core product functions. The on-chain updates can be programmed to occur based on time (hourly, daily, etc.), price deviation (such as every 1% change in price), or a customized combination adapted to the specific user’s needs.
The article is focused chiefly on:
Roadmap
The team does not publish a roadmap but you can follow progress on Pivotal Tracker and Github.
Partnerships and team members
Chainlink allows developers to customize how their smart contract communicates with anything off-chain using varying levels of decentralization, data aggregation, and oracle selection. It gives smart contracts secure and reliable access to data providers, web APIs, enterprise systems, cloud providers, IoT devices, payment systems, other blockchains and much more.
Upon completion of this integration, anybody building on the ICON Public Blockchain will have the ability to bring real-world data into their blockchain based business using a secure and decentralized oracle network provided by Chainlink.
The initial application is securing the ICX/USD price feed so ICON Dapps can build financial products based on the USD equivalent of ICX.
Integration with Chainlink has exciting implications for the ICON Ecosystem. Read more detailed info about the integration and find out a few ideas on how developers could utilize it.
https://twitter.com/chainlink/status/1220136684114923520?s=20
Why ICON’s Upcoming integration with Chainlink is Important
The integration allows BetProtocol to leverage Chainlink technology to develop oracles for gaming platforms. These oracles enable operators to use off-chain data (data that exists outside the blockchain) to reliably settle bets.
Chainlink will provide close support during the integration phase when their oracle solution is connected to BetProtocol’s service offering.
With this added value, Sportsbook and Esports operators on BetProtocol will have Chainlink oracle integration as their default setting. Operators using Chainlink as their oracle will have priority certification and on-boarding with BetProtocol.
Esports platforms are going to be the first to be released on BetProtocol, and the launch is planned for early 2020.
BetProtocol enables anyone in the world to create gaming platforms in minutes. No coding required. Thanks to BetProtocol’s blockchain technology, these platforms are secure, scalable and regulatory compliant. Its vision is to enable anyone in the world to dream of being a gaming platform owner one morning, and actually be one that same day.
Chainlink’s protocol is facilitating trusted marketplaces for obtaining quality oracles, which is quickly becoming the de-facto standard in the Oracle-as-a-Service category. By utilizing Chainlink, Alkemi will benefit from a highly precise and reliable stream of crypto-asset price data, positioning the company well as an open prime broker that meets the stringent requirements of institutional capital allocators.
As an open network, Alkemi cannot rely on off-chain price information from a single corruptible source of truth. Chainlink, operating as a fully decentralized network, decreases the likeliness of false or inaccurate data reporting while simultaneously preventing network downtime by aggregating data responses from multiple oracles that query a variety of data sources. As articulated in Chainlink’s whitepaper, “this limits the need for trust in any single party and allows the tamperproof quality valued in smart contracts to be extended to the end-to-end operation between smart contracts and the APIs they rely on.”
Other factors that made Chainlink a natural choice for collaboration with Alkemi’s Network:
- plans to move to off-chain data aggregation and computation to reduce costs associated with carrying out these activities on-chain;
- strong guards against multiple attack vectors (e.g., sybil attacks such as freeloading), with the use of a commit-reveal scheme where each oracle commits its encrypted answer and is decrypted only when enough oracles have submitted their answers;
- reputation system where good behavior is incentivized because performance and reputation is public, and bad behavior incurs penalties (this also ensures high availability and performance);
- designed with modularity in mind as every system component is upgradeable so they can be replaced when better techniques and competing implementations arise.
Alkemi has initially integrated Chainlink for the lock-and-release mechanism contained within its user-generated smart contract token reserves (wallets). The user (liquidity provider) can specify a time duration for their assets to be locked into these token reserves.
In addition, they can specify a price threshold, which once breached, causes the assets to become unlocked and available for withdrawal ahead of the time expiry lock. An oracle price feed is needed in order to determine if the price condition is met for funds to be unlocked. Chainlink provides Alkemi with a way to securely fetch off-chain data via its network of decentralized oracles without the need to run its own.
Both Alkemi and Chainlink are built on Ethereum making integration quite simple. Looking ahead, there is strong alignment on vision as both companies aim to eventually become blockchain agnostic in an effort to foster wider adoption and interoperability.
Alkemi is an open finance prime brokerage platform, addressing a $4 billion immediate market opportunity to bridge the gap between institutional capital allocators and fragmented digital asset liquidity. The Company’s infrastructure facilitates open access to liquidity and streamlines settlement for our customers (e.g. asset managers, market makers, and funds) and partners (exchange venues and third-party providers), solving the problem of digital asset market inefficiency. Alkemi counts Outlier Ventures, Xpring (Ripple), Coven.VC (ConsenSys), 100x Advisors, Techstars and ARC Fund, as its backers to-date.
Looking at Chainlink’s long-time focus on high-quality data and the expertise of iExec in heavy computation with confidential compute and trusted execution environments, it’s only natural that Chainlink and iExec collaborate to allow developers to easily leverage their technologies together as a complete off-chain solution for the next wave of decentralized applications.
Technical Integration
The below diagram illustrates an off-chain request that uses both Chainlink and iExec to access a comprehensive set of services in one transaction, all paid in LINK and RLC tokens through the Orchestrator smart contract.
Workflow illustrating how Chainlink and iExec couple their technology stacks to respond to a complex off-chain request
Here is a description of each step composing the workflow:
- A decentralized application (smart contract) sends an off-chain request to the Orchestrator smart contract, which implements “ChainlinkClient” as well as “iExecHub” to take care of holding the utility tokens used for payment.
- The Orchestrator smart contract creates a request to the Chainlink network.
- The on-chain request is picked up by Chainlink nodes.
- Chainlink reaches out to multiple data sources as specified in the request.
- Chainlink responds on-chain.
- Orchestrator contract is triggered to create a request to iExec.
- iExec picks up the request.
- iExec processes the work order off-chain (leveraging CPU/GPU, TEE enclaves).
- iExec responds on-chain with the computed result.
- The Orchestrator relays the result back to the decentralized application (the requester).
Use Case: Decentralized Car Insurance
Prior to contracting a new user, the insurance smart contract would have to compute his risk profile. Here is the expected workflow:
- The user reveals just enough information about his location to allow the Chainlink Node to fetch car accident statistics from the driver’s region. Given Chainlink’s integration with Google Bigquery, we can find an example of a dataset available in Bigquery for the city of New York, including more than 1 million motor vehicle collisions.
- The driver installs an application on his smartphone that collects all kinetic data reflecting his driving behavior. Given the high degree of confidentiality of such data, it would be locally encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud.
- An iExec worker uses the following datasets: Chainlink’s dataset, the applicant’s encrypted dataset, and a neural network as an input to run an AI application. The AI software will compute the applicant’s risk profile, which ultimately translates into the insurance premium of that specific user. Thanks to iExec trusted compute, all of this confidential data is processed in a highly secured environment (such as Intel® SGX enclave), ensuring that no one, not even the untrusted host machine carrying out the computation, is able to access it.
- Finally, the information about the insurance premium is pushed back into the insurance smart contract, which informs it how much the new subscriber should be charged.
Such a workflow could be re-run after a 30 days period, reacting to risks changes; hence being able to adjust the cost of the insurance over time. In case the user believes their risk profile improved, they could take the initiative of triggering a new computation ahead of the fixed time period, and cover the costs associated with the extra computation as he would benefit from the resulting insurance cost reduction.
The second part of an insurance product is the policy specification detailing exactly how an accident is compensated. Most of the compensation rules can be translated into smart contract code, particularly if the insurance is of parametric type (ie: the level of compensation directly depends on an index). However, assessing the damages after an accident is the most difficult part to automate. This traditionally requires the human intervention of a “claims adjuster”.
Thanks to the advent of electronic vehicle health check (eVHC) and IoT devices, it is now conceivable to measure the level of damage, and report the health check result in a way that cannot be tampered. With every claim, there will be new fresh data inputs training the neural network, ensuring the AI’s model of producing output results continuously improves over time. Eventually, based on these measurements and the parametric insurance rules, the smart contract will automatically trigger the payment to the driver, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to compensate for their loss, at a fraction of the cost of traditional motor insurance.
Product Manager and Developer Evangelist at Chainlink Johann Eid on leveraging their experience of years working on the oracle problem.
EEA Mainnet Working Group forms Task Force “EMINENT” (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises)
Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink:
“We’re excited to work closely with the EMINENT Task Force to continually push the boundaries of what’s possible in public blockchain environments. Developing mainnet integration standards that take into account the specific challenges of enterprises is key to the EMINENT Task Force being able to leverage the unique advantages of public blockchains, while seamlessly and securely incorporating their current systems of record and key data sources.”
More useful links:
“Chainlink now has 25 oracle price feeds running on Ethereum’’
“Chainlink has three big reasons to feel good about 2020”
from decrypt.co
The Founders of Synthetix and Chainlink on DeFi, Derivatives and 25 New Decentralized Price Feeds
A special interview episode with Sergey Nazarov and Kain Warwick, the founders of Chainlink and Synthetix.
The main discussion topics:
- The evolution and goals of Synthetix, a novel type of derivatives exchange where users can interact with any asset with a price feed
- The challenge Synthetix faced around spinning up their own oracles around price feeds
- The history of their collaboration and how Synthetix came to work with Chainlink
- Chainlink’s approach to building decentralized oracles for data such as price feeds
- Chainlink’s announcement about the new published price reference data for 25 oracle networks
- The state of the idea of decentralization, and how what was previously a concept is becoming operationalized
- One thing that gives them pause or scares them about DeFi and crypto and one thing that makes them excited for the future
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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