Mar 20, 2020
Chainlink: Integration with TROY, Collabs with B-Harvest, Hdac Technology, Haven Protocol and BZx
Biweekly update: 6th March — 21st March
Hello to all Chainlink community members, fans and those interested in the Chainlink’s novel decentralized oracle solution. It’s the second series of our March Biweekly updates on one of the most progressive networks in the crypto world!
Chainlink is becoming the most widely used and trusted oracle protocols for not only the Ethereum network, but for all other blockchain networks. Chainlink has a reputation for security and reliability, used by large enterprises, major exchanges, and other DeFi projects.
We never cease to wonder at the number of Chainlink’s collaborations with other networks and node operators! The number of partnerships is growing and has probably hit a record figure! In the past two weeks Chainlink’s teamwork has been both effective and efficient as usual! Let’s start the ball rolling!
Firstly, TROY, a global prime broker specialized in crypto-asset trading and asset management, has recently announced a technology integration with Chainlink. Troy Network is designed to break the trading barriers of crypto assets by building a frictionless, integrated crypto asset trading ecosystem. Chainlink will help TROY build a secure and reliable oracle design for the trading platform. TROY will adopt Chainlink’s novel and advanced technology, which allows their critical smart contracts to be securely executed based on trusted off-chain market data.
Secondly, B-Harvest is joining Chainlink as a new node operator. B-Harvest participate in many different dPoS networks. B-Harvest will play an active role in the Chainlink community and continually searching for ways to enhance Chainlink’s oracle functionality to benefit the entire blockchain space. They believe that there are many features outlined in their whitepaper that need to be implemented. It includes not only technical improvements, but an extensive amount of active participation from the oracle node community.
What’s more, Hdac Technology signs technical partnership with Chainlink. Hdac Technology (“Hdac”) is Seoul — Blockchain company founded by Dae Sun Chung, Hyundai BS&C CEO and member of the Hyundai family. Hdac and Chainlink will jointly develop a system that filters off-chain data created by IoT services and other networks and delivers this credible data on-chain to Hdac’s blockchain-based DApps. They will collaborate on shared resources, infrastructure, solutions, and ecosystems, as well as cutting edge blockchain and smart contract technologies.
Moving on to other partnerships! Haven, a Monero-based protocol for creating private stablecoins and assets, is collaborating with Chainlink to provide a decentralized oracle service for XHV, xUSD, and all future xAssets. Chainlink’s services will be used for the mainnet launch of Haven’s first private stablecoin, xUSD. Chainlink is now able to assist Haven with this crucial piece of project infrastructure.Today Haven are launching the xUSD stagenet for public testing before mainnet launch. This stagenet incorporates a custom Chainlink oracle for XHV to xUSD exchanges. xUSD will act as the base layer for building out the Haven network to be a leading provider of private decentralized finance. More information about participating in the stagenet can be found further in the article.
Last but not least! bZx Integrates with Chainlink to prevent future price oracle exploits. BZx have decided to adopt Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks as the basis for their new price oracles over the long term. By using Chainlink’s decentralized oracle solution, each of their critical price feeds is secured by numerous independent nodes, which collectively source data from over 7 independent data aggregators. BZx will be using and sponsoring some of Chainlink’s Price Reference Data for DeFi, which already includes many of the critical data feeds they need.
Chainlink’s Price Reference Data Contracts are decentralized oracle networks made up of multiple independent, security reviewed, and Sybil resistant node operators. These decentralized oracle networks provide on-chain prices for a variety of important markets, such as BTC/ETH, DAI/ETH, SNX/ETH and more. On-chain prices are calculated by having each independent node retrieve data from one of ten different data aggregators, with every network containing several independent data aggregators.
Don’t forget to check out the videos of the previous meetups and live-streams! Please, visit Chainlink’s Community events page as well!
More news to follow!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Social encounters
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 Chainlink.
Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in NYC and a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He was previously Chief Scientist of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. He is currently advisor to Chainlink.
Chainlink/OffChainLabs Video AMA
Live Stream Q&A with Ed Felten Co-Founder of OffChain Labs discussing Arbitrum, scalability solutions, and the ability to use the Chainlink Network for off-chain computation.
Connected Smart Contracts: How Chainlink oracles fit in DeFi
Chainlink product manager Johann Eid talks through how Chainlink oracles fit in Decentralized Finance.
Connected Smart contracts: Berlin
follow the link to enjoy the video
Connected Smart Contracts: Introduction to Blockchain Staking — Stake.fish
Stake.fish Head of Infrastructure Cristian Lucera gives an introduction to blockchain staking & the involvement of stake.fish
Connected Smart contracts: Berlin
Connected Smart Contracts: Security for Oracle Operators at Scale
CEO & Co-founder of Certus.One Hendrik Hofstadt talks about Security for Oracle Operators at Scale.
Connected Smart Contracts: Berlin
Connected Smart Contracts: Honeycomb as a source of premium API data for DeFi applications
CEO of CLC Group Heikki Vänttinen talks about their Honeycomb marketplace as a source of premium API data for DeFi applications.
Connected Smart Contracts: Berlin
Upcoming events
All the upcoming events can be found on Chainlink’s Community events page
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.
Roadmap
The team does not publish a roadmap but you can follow progress on Pivotal Tracker and Github.
Partnerships and team members
TROY Collaborates with Chainlink
TROY has recently announced a technology integration with Chainlink.
Troy Trade is a global prime broker specialized in crypto-asset trading and asset management. They provide crypto brokerage services for institutional-grade capital and professional traders with revolutionary trading products. Troy Network is designed to break the trading barriers of crypto assets by building a frictionless, integrated crypto asset trading ecosystem.
Chainlink will help TROY build a secure and reliable oracle design for the trading platform. Through this integration, TROY will adopt Chainlink’s novel and advanced technology, which allows their critical smart contracts to be securely executed based on trusted off-chain market data. TROY can also provide Chainlink users from other platforms access to promising application scenarios, like trading marketplaces and settlement networks.
The system architecture of the Troy Network consists of four layers: the public chain protocol layer, the off-chain trading layer, the settlement network layer, and the application layer. In order to improve users’ trading experience, Troy Network will work with Chainlink to integrate an efficient and secure oracle, supporting the application layer by optimizing the trading process.
- Chainlink Price Reference Data Contract
- developer documentation
- join the technical discussion on Discord
- Troy Trade
B-Harvest is Joining Chainlink as a New Node Operator
B-Harvest is a blockchain validator. They participate in many different dPoS networks.
According to B-Harvest team, Chainlink is becoming the most widely used oracle protocol for not only the Ethereum network, but across all other blockchain networks. A trusted oracle protocol greatly extends the functionality of the smart contracts running on top of these various blockchain, opening up whole new sets of decentralized applications previously unavailable to developers. For this reason, they have chosen Chainlink, as it’s the market standard for decentralized oracle services.
They believe that there are many features outlined in their whitepaper that still need to be implemented. These features will provide more functionality and security to their already popular oracle infrastructure. It includes not only technical improvements, but an extensive amount of active participation from the oracle node community.
B-Harvest will be actively participating in the Chainlink community and continually searching for ways to enhance Chainlink’s oracle functionality to benefit the entire blockchain space.
Hdac Technology signs technical partnership with Chainlink
Hdac Technology (“Hdac”) is Seoul — Blockchain company founded by Dae Sun Chung, Hyundai BS&C CEO and member of the Hyundai family.
Hdac and Chainlink will jointly develop a system that filters off-chain data created by IoT services and other networks and delivers this credible data on-chain to Hdac’s blockchain-based DApps. They will collaborate on shared resources, infrastructure, solutions, and ecosystems, as well as cutting edge blockchain and smart contract technologies.
According to Yong-Wan Ju, Representative Officer for Hdac Korea, Hdac’s blockchain-based service providers will be able to develop various real-life use cases utilizing verified off-chain data thanks to the partnership.
Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink, said: “We’re excited to work closely with Hdac to securely integrate real-world data and systems into their premier enterprise blockchain. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network opens up a large number of enterprise use cases for Hdac applications, thanks to trusted data sourcing and delivery from key non-blockchain infrastructure.”
At the end of last year, Hdac has announced its participation in investment fund creation worth 32 billion Korean won with a venture capital company T Investment to lead the vitalization of various blockchain-based ICT integration services by discovering, investing, and fostering small but mighty start-ups that have platforms, technology, solutions, and etc.
Haven is collaborating with Chainlink to provide a decentralized oracle service for XHV, xUSD, and all future xAssets
Haven is a Monero-based protocol for creating private stablecoins and assets. Haven’s first private stablecoin, xUSD, will allow anyone to store and transfer their money with complete privacy.
Haven is the first Monero-based project to collaborate with Chainlink on oracle services.Chainlink’s services will be used for the mainnet launch of Haven’s first private stablecoin, xUSD. This is an important step towards their goal of decentralization and censorship resistance and reinforces Haven’s commitment to private decentralized finance.
The need for versatile and well-distributed data providers is something deemed essential for the launch of xUSD on mainnet. Chainlink is now able to assist Haven with this crucial piece of project infrastructure.
Chainlink is rapidly becoming one of the most respected and capable oracle solutions in the crypto space. They have a reputation for security and reliability, used by large enterprises, major exchanges, and other DeFi projects. Haven feel this is a great match for their ambitions and the projected growth they anticipate over the coming months and years.
Today they are launching the xUSD stagenet for public testing before mainnet launch. This stagenet incorporates a custom Chainlink oracle for XHV to xUSD exchanges. xUSD will act as the base layer for building out the Haven network to be a leading provider of private decentralized finance.
More information about participating in the stagenet can be found here:
Haven Launches xUSD Stagenet Utilizing Chainlink Oracle
Johann Eid, Product Manager on Chainlink, stated, “We’re excited to foster the growth of a privacy-focused project like Haven by providing their critical protocol with secure, decentralized price data. Their private stablecoin network contributes to user’s privacy in a DeFi ecosystem and we’re glad Chainlink can help make that a reality via quality market data sourcing.”
bZx Integrates with Chainlink to Prevent Future Price Oracle Exploits
BZx have decided to adopt Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks as the basis for their new price oracles over the long term. By using Chainlink’s decentralized oracle solution, each of their critical price feeds is secured by numerous independent nodes, which collectively source data from over 7 independent data aggregators. This gives their price oracles significantly greater exposure to true market-wide price discovery from top liquidity sources and introduces far stiffer security barriers thanks to decentralization at both the oracle and data levels. Thus combined, this eliminates any attack vector that can be easily exploited by vastly increasing the amount of capital and multi-party coordination needed to carry out any future attacks.
BZx will be using and sponsoring some of Chainlink’s Price Reference Data for DeFi, which already includes many of the critical data feeds they need. Those data feeds are also used and supported by other DeFi projects such as Synthetix, Aave, Nexus Mutual, and Loopring, and will likely expand to include more in the near future.
Chainlink’s Price Reference Data Contracts are decentralized oracle networks made up of multiple independent, security reviewed, and Sybil resistant node operators. 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.
These decentralized oracle networks provide on-chain prices for a variety of important markets, such as BTC/ETH, DAI/ETH, SNX/ETH and more. On-chain prices are calculated by having each independent node retrieve data from one of ten different data aggregators, with every network containing several independent data aggregators. The nodes’ individual responses are then aggregated together to form a collective response, which is then sent on-chain as a new price update to the reference contract. Updates can be programmed to occur in time intervals (hourly, daily, etc.), price deviations (such as every 1% change in price), or some combination of both.
This new model offers increased security since both the data delivery mechanism of the oracle and that actual data source itself is far more decentralized and accurate than any on-chain oracle mechanism. Since there are numerous independent oracles that secure each price feed, there is no single point of failure at the node level. This is beneficial towards maintaining perfect uptime, as well as avoiding a single oracle being the sole subject of truth or tampering with the price feed due to incompetence or bribery. Likewise, having numerous independent nodes source data from many independent, yet trusted data aggregators, the on-chain price used by Dapps to execute critical smart contract functions reflects the true market price since its obtained via an aggregation of the top liquidity sources for that particular market price.
This allows bZx far better exposure to true price discovery that cannot be easily manipulated by outside forces. While some coins simply have illiquidity even when aggregated across all exchanges, most coins have much stronger liquidity when combining the various liquidity sources across the market. Therefore, attacking all these at the same time is not only more complex, but also requires significantly more capital to carry out. Chainlink allows bZx to tap into market-wide price discovery, which will substantially harden bZX oracle mechanism against illiquidity attacks.
Even in the situation where a DEX has strong liquidity for a particular market, such a market is likely to have great market-wide liquidity given its general popularity. Therefore, the security guarantees are still much stronger when aggregating the price from all the top liquidity sources, as opposed to just one, even if it’s highly liquid. Important price feeds are even more critical to protect, given they can be used in more combination across DeFi with potential access to larger pools of capital.
Other
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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