Chainlink: Huobi To Make Exchange Data Available To Smart Contracts, Nexo And Chainlink Collaborate to Accelerate The Adoption Of Digital Assets, Meter Will Use Chainlink Oracles To Provide Price Data to DeFi Applications, Expanding Access To Web3 With SMS
Biweekly update 28th June — 12th July
It’s a new series of biweekly updates on Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle network. As usual, the past two weeks were extremely vivid on the partnership and integration side. They were also widely highlighted in media: many articles, tweets, and videos were posted in various sources. So let’s have a short overview of news and events that happened within the Chainlink ecosystem.
Chainlink added fast Gas/Gwei price reference feed for developers. The latter can now use it for a decentralized on-chain source of the current fast gas price on Ethereum. Referencing Chainlink’s fast gas price at the point of execution ensures users don’t overpay for gas. Next, the Chainlink Oracle Reputation team shared some features they’ve been working on and the planned feature in their recent Monthly Update. The features mentioned include Ropsten Support, enhanced contract analysis, Aave & Synthetix Integration, and more!
Moreover, in the latest educational series, the Chainlink team explained how data and APIs power next-generation economies. Apart from that, a DeFi series article elaborated on how to bring more capital and less risk to automated market maker DEXs.
Also, don’t miss Chainlink in a video Q&A with Nate Hindman, Bancor Head of Growth, Asaf Shachaf, Head of Product. The discussion was mostly focused on Bancor’s integration with Chainlink and went deep-dive into Bancor V2. What’s more, some Chainlink meetups and Q&As are planned — check the recap below to stay updated!
Now, let’s look a bit closer at fresh partnerships and integrations. Huobi Wallet will be undertaking a two-part collaboration with Chainlink; Huobi will leverage Chainlink’s external adapters to make the Huobi exchange API available to smart contracts, allowing developers access price data from Huobi Global, one of the largest and most liquid cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Furthermore, FLETA is to integrate its blockchain into Chainlink’s network of decentralized oracles to provide trusted data to its decentralized applications and develop a system that allows medical professionals to more easily share health records. Nexo, the market-leading crypto lender, represented another integration. They are forming a collaboration that would add Chainlink data into Nexo’s lending and trading operations. Using Chainlink’s oracle networks would boost Nexo’s security and enable increased custody of user funds, more significant loan volumes, and a more active OTC desk. Additionally, Meter will use Chainlink oracles to provide price data to DeFi applications built on its platform. This provides Meter developers with access to the most extensive collection of on-chain price feeds for a wide variety.
In the same manner, Gelato integrates Chainlink, bringing reliable automation to Ethereum developers. Through Gelato, users will be able to specify the gas price conditions under which their automated transactions will execute. One more partnership covers Bullionix that will use Chainlink XAU/USD price feed to provide users with a highly reliable and manipulation resistant gold price within the innovative new gold intel hub. By the way, Kyber Network will use Chainlink as a part of its Katalyst Protocol Upgrade and KyberDAO.
It was just a takeaway summary — for more news and specific details, check the full update below! Stay safe and see You in two weeks!
Development
Developers can now use Chainlink’s Fast Gas/Gwei Price Reference Feed for a decentralized on-chain source of the current fast gas price on Ethereum. Referencing Chainlink’s fast gas price at the point of execution ensures users don’t overpay for gas.
New in this update:
- Nodes are now automatically identified in Flux Aggregator feeds
- Toggle job costs between USD & LINK, #PoweredByChainlink
- Ability to hide your node from search results
- API key management user interface
- UI tweaks & bug fixes including infinite scroll
Some of the newly introduced features are:
- Ropsten Support — Testnet monitoring functionality allows for node operators to monitor their performance before making the jump to the main Ethereum network. They’re delivering this with the belief that it will help create a competitive and high performing oracle network with well adapted operators.
- Enhanced Contract Analysis — Data visualisation is a fantastic mechanism for absorbing information. They’ve developed COR to offer a more comprehensive view of the contracts and their historical responses.
- Aave & Synthetix Integration — While the Synthetix reads were available prior to this update, they’ve since developed this further by highlighting Aave’s utilisation of the Chainlink aggregator contracts. Highlighting the utilisation of Chainlink’s resources is a fantastic way of truly realising the magnitude of the network’s potential.
The planned feature is:
- Customizable Queries — they’re currently working on providing the most granular analytics tool that allows for conditional analysis. It permits anyone to rank, score and analyse oracles with as much or as little detail as they see fit.
Social encounters
- Understanding How Data and APIs Power Next-Generation Economies — Educational Series by Chainlink
In this article, they take a deeper look into data and APIs, specifically:
- What is data and how does it drive a data economy?
- How data is produced?
- How is data exchanged through APIs?
- What is Big Data analytics?
Understanding the full scope of the off-chain data economy sets the foundation for the next article where they explore how to securely and reliably connect smart contracts to these resources using additional infrastructure known as ‘oracles’.
Enterprise adoption of smart contracts and blockchain technology is coming to a head soon, according to Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov and Interwork Alliance President Ron Resnick.
The pair were members of a Unitize 2020 panel earlier today and said they were optimistic that we are moving forward at an exciting rate with both enterprise adoption, and regulation and government acceptance of the technology. However they couldn’t say if 2020 will prove to be a turning point in adoption.
“Compared with a few years ago,” Nazarov stated, “there are more and more people that are ‘fast followers’ just waiting for a tech leader to make a first move.”
Hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore, the 30 minute session looked at the value propositions of blockchain as seen by enterprises and expanded on some of the major pain points that need to be addressed for large-scale adoption to occur.
Some of the key takeaways include:
- There are several AMM types: Constant Sum Market Maker (CSMM), Constant Mean Market Maker (CMMM), and advanced Hybrid CFMMs.
- Some of the key challenges that AMMs must overcome include impermanent loss, forced multi-token exposure, and low capital efficiency.
- Innovations by Bancor, Uniswap, Curve, and others are making AMMs more attractive to larger liquidity providers by improving capital efficiency, reducing volatility risk, and providing more capital deployment options.
- Using Chainlink oracles, Bancor aims to be the first to solve the problem of impermanent loss on volatile tokens in their upcoming V2 release.
The Bancor team and Chainlink in a video Q&A with Nate Hindman (Head of Growth), Asaf Shachaf (Head of Product) of Bancor. The discussion is centered on Bancor’s integration with Chainlink and a deep-dive into Bancor V2.
According to the latest report from Flipside Crypto, Chainlink is spending one million LINKs a month rewarding node operators, outspending Ethereum by a wide margin. At current prices, this support constitutes almost $5 million dollars a month or close to $60 million annually. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation is expected to spend $30 million this year. Meanwhile, Ether’s market capitalization is roughly 15 times that of Chainlink.
This aggressive spending has allowed the company to achieve key milestones such as an integration with China’s Blockchain Service Network and Tezos and the introduction of verifiable on-chain randomness. This has also allowed LINK to trade close to its all-time high. Recently, a co-founder of Framework Venture, Michael Anderson, said that he expects the price of LINK to exceed $25 in the foreseeable future.
- Front-Running as a Service by Ed Felten
- Hangzhou Chainlink Meetup
Upcoming Events
- 14th July 2020 — Dipole and Chainlink Live Q&A, China
- 22nd July 2020 — MCDEX and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 24 July 2020 — Vite Labs and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 30th July 2020 — DeFi Roundtable with Radix, Messari, AAVE, Maker and more
- 6th August 2020 — Hyperledger Avalon and Chainlink Developer Meetup
- 28th — 29th August 2020 — Smart Contract Virtual Summit
Finance
The Chainlink Network provides the largest collection of secure and decentralized on-chain price reference data available. Composed of security reviewed, sybil resistant and fully independent nodes which are run by leading blockchain devops and security teams. Creating a shared global resource which is sponsored by a growing list of top DeFi Dapps. Please feel free to look into the details of each Decentralized Oracle Network listed via the link below. You can easily use these oracle networks to quickly and securely launch, add more capabilities to and/or just greatly improve the security of your smart contracts.
New data shows that a massive spike in network activity is helping to drive the cryptocurrency higher, signaling that the latest leg of its multi-year high is being driven by fundamental strength rather than pure investor hype. The four highest network activity outputs in over a year have been posted by LINK throughout the past 6 days. This also comes as the cryptocurrency’s top investors continue adding to their positions — a trend indicated by the concentration of Chainlink tokens amongst the top one percent of investors.
“LINK Percent Balance of Top 1% Addresses just reached a 2-year high of 76.725%”
- Flyp.me accountless cryptocurrency exchange added Chainlink.
Roadmap
The team does not publish a roadmap but you can follow progress on Pivotal Tracker and Github.
Partnerships, Ecosystem and Integrations
Chainlink’s Partners, Clients, and Integrations in one huge document
Huobi Wallet will be undertaking a two-part integration with Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle network. Huobi will leverage Chainlink’s external adapters to make the Huobi exchange API available to smart contracts, allowing developers to access price data from Huobi Global, one of the largest and most liquid cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The first batch of price pairs will include the highly requested BTC/ETH, BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, and LINK/ETH. Once rolled out, they aim to make more available soon thereafter. In addition to offering price feeds, Huobi is now the first cryptocurrency exchange to run a Chainlink node. Huobi Wallet already has extensive experience operating PoS nodes, securing a total of over 10 million dollars in digital assets for projects like ATOM, Ontology, and LOOM. Huobi will bring its experience running secure infrastructure to the Chainlink Network and further decentralize the number of nodes available for oracle data services.
FLETA is to integrate its blockchain into Chainlink’s network of decentralized oracles to provide trusted data to its decentralized applications (dApps), and develop a system that allows medical professionals to more easily share health records.
Henry Hong, CEO of FLETA, said:
“Our blockchain’s scalability and the integrity of our smart contract data will be increased by utilizing Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. Also, by deploying Chainlink’s oracle solutions, we can more easily apply blockchain technology to more varied fields in the future.”
Nexo, the market-leading crypto lender, and Chainlink are forming a collaboration that would integrate Chainlink into Nexo’s lending and trading operations.
Using Chainlink’s oracle networks would boost Nexo’s security and enable increased custody of user funds, greater loan volumes, and a more active OTC desk. This additional security would be achieved through the blending of Nexo’s highly performant infrastructure, which secures over $600M in user funds, with the decentralized infrastructure of Chainlink’s price reference data oracle networks, which also secure hundreds of millions of USD in value. This collaboration acts as a key example of how decentralized infrastructure is accelerating the adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and various stablecoins.
Also read on Coindesl: Crypto Lender Nexo to Enter Prime Broker Race, Enlists Chainlink for Audits
The following section details a very simple architecture of using a smart contract deployed on Conflux Network, Chainlink oracles, and a SMS gateway from Twilio to create on-chain interactions via SMS. All of the code for the following demonstration can be found on Github: CFX + Chainlink Demo. Additionally, the Github repository has more detailed startup and installation instructions as well as additional links to Chainlink documentation.
When an on-chain event is emitted at a specific contract address, send the information in the event to a phone via SMS. Additionally, when an SMS is sent to a specific phone number, take the parameters in the SMS message and use it as the input parameters for a smart contract function call. Both SMS inputs and outputs are funneled to and from a smart contract on the Conflux Network through a Chainlink oracle node.
This provides Meter developers with access to the largest collection of on-chain price feeds for a wide variety of financial assets, including cryptocurrencies, FX rates, commodities, indices, and more. Additionally, developers can also use Chainlink’s large collection of Sybil resistant node operators and external adapters to quickly launch new decentralized price oracle networks connected to premium API data sources.
Gelato Network is now live on the Ethereum mainnet, providing developers with the tools to quickly build & deploy their own automated applications. A key part of making the Gelato Network function with high reliability is the integration with Chainlinkfor built-in access to its Fast Gas/Gwei Price Reference Oracle. Through Gelato, users will be able to specify the gas price conditions under which their automated transactions will execute. Chainlink’s fast gas oracle marks the first time that smart contracts have access to a reliable, decentralized on-chain source of fast gas prices. Gelato is leveraging their oracle to bring next-generation smart contract automation tools to developers, opening up use cases such as liquidation prevention, automated trading, dollar-cost averaging, and more.
Bullionix will use Chainlink XAU/USD price feed. This provides users with a highly reliable and manipulation resistant gold price within the innovative new gold intel hub.
Bullionix launched three months ago, introducing 3D gold-staked NFTs to the Ethereum landscape. They have been committed to making sure their dApp is just as innovative as the digital collectibles produced on it. Because Bullionix users are minting NFTs backed by actual gold (by staking Digix’s DGX gold tokens), it’s important that they have an accessible intel hub for all who are newly curious about the gold market.
The IWA is a member-led industry organization, where every member has an equal voice in moving objectives forward.
Cargo — the all-in-one NFT marketplace, showcase, and minting platform — will be integrating Chainlink, the market leader in providing decentralized oracle networks to smart contract applications, to offer Chainlink VRF (verifiable randomness function) as a whitelisted solution for enterprise gaming companies seeking to integrate blockchain features and RNG. This will allow companies to quickly and efficiently mint NFTs with randomly selected attributes, as well as distribute those NFTs as random rewards.
Polyient Games, the first investment firm focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain gaming, will be working with Chainlink, the market leader in providing decentralized oracle networks to smart contract applications, to drive innovation around the NFT asset class within the Polyient Games Ecosystem. To kickstart the collaboration, they will focus on bringing their Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Randomness Function) technology to Polyient Games Founder’s Keys (PGFKs), an upcoming membership NFT that will provide lifetime rewards and perks to holders within the Polyient Games Ecosystem. Chainlink VRF will be used to randomize the distribution of exclusive NFTs and various other rewards for PGFK holders.
DigiTix.io announced the integration of market-leading decentralized oracle Chainlink to provide stable ticket prices and safe ticket distribution. Already live consuming Chainlink’s ETH/USD Price Reference Data, DigiTix users can list ticket prices in USD in order to maintain price stability while still being purchased in ETH using a real-time exchange rate. Additionally, they plan to use Chainlink VRF(Verifiable Randomness Function) for highly secure and on-chain verifiable ticket generation to further harden against the creation of counterfeit tickets.
Social media metrics
The graph above illustrates changes in the number of Chainlink Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
