Hello, and welcome to another biweekly update on Chainlink! As always, we are here to provide you with all the recent news and updates that happened within the project over the past two weeks. Chainlink continues to gain popularity among the members of the crypto community. Lately, there have been a lot of highlights in various social networks and media; Chainlink fans were also active in different chats. Not only the community side was vivid, but also, as usual, there were some significant partnerships and integrations. So let’s have a sneak peek of it! NEAR is now using Chainlink’s oracle solutions for its Open Web Ecosystem. One of the first use-cases for Chainlink on NEAR will be providing pricing data for DeFi applications by leveraging their Price Reference Data framework. Other use-cases include Open Web applications connecting to Chainlink’s Web2 counter-parties to query their data (e.g., marketplace data for real estate, insurance, music, etc). Furthermore, a Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle will be used to query the LTO Network blockchain and cross-reference a particular ETH address (public key) against the accreditation status for an ICO, IEO, or similar token sales. This will allow dApps to ensure full compliance with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations when dealing with financial transactions on a public blockchain. Apart from that, Chainlink’s decentralized oracle will be launching on Harmony. This integration will provide off-chain data resources via Chainlink oracles to users of Harmony, giving developers price feeds and other off-chain data to use in their applications. This move is critical, primarily as Harmony draws more attention to DeFi applications and cross-border finance. Another integration featured Sperax using Chainlink oracles to power its decentralized financial services. By integrating Chainlink, Sperax can finally bring real-world data into its ecosystem and connect to traditional non-blockchain systems. For more info on recent collaborations and integration, check the article below. For the growth of the ecosystem, the Chainlink Community Grant Program was introduced. It will provide vital financial resources to the many development teams building Chainlink, as well as the many additional developer resources that enable easy access to the network. The grant program’s goal is to deploy substantial financial support towards the creation of critical developer tooling, the addition of more high-quality data, and the launching of essential services around the Chainlink Network. The first grantee is LinkPool — they received a grant to fund improvements to the Chainlink Market — a resource hub for smart contract developers, data providers, and node operators to list and discover the necessary components to create next-generation smart contracts using the Chainlink network. By the way, don’t forget to check out all the upcoming virtual events not to miss them. Keep yourself updated with us, and stay safe!
Development
Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function) is a provably-fair and verifiable source of randomness designed for smart contracts. Smart contract developers can use Chainlink VRF as a tamper-proof RNG to build reliable smart contracts for any applications which rely on unpredictable outcomes:
- Blockchain games and NFTs
- Random assignment of duties and resources (e.g. randomly assigning judges to cases)
- Choosing a representative sample for consensus mechanisms
The blockchain “oracle problem” is fairly well known, as many articles have examined this subject in detail. However, the topic of “data quality” provided by oracles still remains largely unknown and misunderstood. The misunderstanding is rooted in the often held assumption that oracles are used to both transfer external data on-chain and generate high-quality data. In their experience researching and building secure oracle solutions, blockchain oracles are designed to transfer data on-chain and harden data against manipulation, not create the data itself.
The separation of these problems (data delivery vs. data quality) has been applied to the architecture of the decentralized oracle networks powering Chainlink’s Price Reference Data, which are the most used oracles in DeFi and power over 90% of Ethereum’s decentralized derivatives market. Based on the success of these oracle networks in providing high-quality data to live applications, they’ve identified five essential components to solving the data quality problem.
- Enable oracle nodes to connect to premium data providers to ensure user contracts have access to the highest quality data. This requires the oracle protocol to have password and credential management capabilities so all nodes can securely store API keys and manage account logins for paid subscriptions.
- Have nodes source price data from high-quality off-chain data providers that specialize in generating accurate price data; specifically data aggregators that maintain volume-adjusted market coverage across all trading environments. Using the oracle mechanism to generate a global market price from a collection of raw data feeds is extremely difficult and it opens the oracle up to numerous attack surfaces, such as rapid volume shifts and data outliers, both of which are not uncommon in cryptocurrency markets.
- Incorporate decentralization as an active part of the security and reliability guarantees provided by the oracle. Aggregate from multiple independent nodes to ensure the oracle mechanism is manipulation-resistant and highly available when delivering data to contracts. Source from multiple high-quality data providers without sacrificing on quality to bring additional decentralization to the data source level.
- Prefer systems that give both users and developers the ability to make informed decisions when designing an oracle mechanism by providing them with on-chain insights into the current and historical performance of each node and the decentralized oracle network as a whole. Avoid any security through obscurity approach to minimize hidden risks and ensure as many eyes as possible can spot any potential issues early on before they become substantial problems down the line.
- Steer clear of large risks such as using single exchange data sources and/or diluting high-quality data from secure oracle solutions with low-quality data from less secure oracle solutions. Decentralization without quality control standards exposes contracts to a larger attack surface with greater complexity, often leading to the unintended consequences of diminishing the high-quality oracle solution.
Learn how to deploy your first Smart Contract with Chainlink. We’ve created a step-by-step walkthrough that enables anyone to create a Chainlinked contract, deploy it to a testnet, and use it to consume off-chain data from an oracle.
Get started with Metamask, an Ethereum wallet that you’ll need to start building your decentralized applications. They teach you how to install, configure, and fund your Metamask wallet with Ropsten LINK and ETH.
Get introduced to the solidity programming language, which is used to build smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. They will also walk through Remix, the web IDE for solidity. This will be an example walkthrough using Chainlink, where you will learn how to deploy, fund, and interact with a Chainlink node.
Social encounters
- A Comparative Analysis of Band Protocol and Chainlink by SmartContent
This article is not an introduction to oracle technology, but instead focuses on Band Protocol and how it compares against Chainlink. For a high-level overview of the oracle problem and Chainlink, please read this introductory article here. In this article, they first explore how BandChain works from a high level in order to lay the foundation for a comparative analysis that details how it stacks up against Chainlink.
Read an article giving an overview of Chainlink. The long and short of it is this, Chainlink is an absolute juggernaut. Its recent bullrun could easily be compared to Tesla’s historic run on the NASDAQ. It is worth noting that other sophisticated projects are building their own price discovery solutions, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter, as the need for decentralised price feeds will become so omnipresent that the space will have many reliable and bad-actor resistant sources of truth. As it stands today though, one project is well ahead of the rest in terms of delivering on this.
- Kava Labs and Chainlink meetup in China
Join us for a video Q&A with Tom Bean and Kyle Kistner of bZx. The discussion will be centered on decentralized oracles meeting the needs of bZx, product roadmap, and their unique approach to decentralized finance (DeFi).
Q&A with Professor Dr. Philipp Sandner, Professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and one of the top economists in the world, who is currently working on building the Digital Euro and Euro denoted smart contracts.
A virtual meetup hosted by Hyperledger Denver featuring a discussion of the Hyperledger Avalon project and the Chainlink network.
Upcoming Events
- 31st July — 9th August — GameJam Hackathon. Governor Polis will kick-off the first-ever hackathon for new game development as Colorado re-imagines the Lottery. Innovating with partners ETHDenver, Chainlink, and IGT, participants of GameJam will create and pitch their proposed new game for a chance to win a top prize of $10,000, with a second prize of $5,000 and a $2,500 third prize.
- 10th August 2020 — Chainlink X Sperax Q&A
- 11th August 2020 — Matic Network and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 11th August 2020 — Community Workshop — Deploying and operating a Chainlink node on the Ankr Cloud Platform
- 18th August 2020 — Harmony and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 19th August 2020 — Near and Chainlink Live Q&A + Technical Demo
- 3rd October 2020 — An Evening with Ari Juels
- 28th — 29th August 2020 — Smart Contract Virtual Summit
Finance
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
You can view the TestNet repository and instructions, and in a few weeks, developers can start building applications that are integrating real-world data into their smart contracts. The goal is to be the leading computing platform for the Open Web by providing developers with the best infrastructure for building future applications (including dApps). Chainlink is the most versatile off-chain connectivity in Web3; they recommend it as it is the industry-leading oracle solution used by top DeFi teams such as Synthetix, AAVE, and many others. Integrating Chainlink provides developers access to a large decentralized collection of security-reviewed nodes, an integration framework for connecting to any premium data source derived from credentialed APIs, multiple proven data solutions that can be quickly deployed on the NEAR blockchain, and much more.
One of the first use cases for Chainlink on NEAR will be providing pricing data for DeFi applications by leveraging their Price Reference Data framework. Other use cases include Open Web applications connecting to Chainlink’s Web2 counter-parties to query their data (e.g., marketplace data for real estate, insurance, music, etc). Applications can ask for any generic data by creating a contract with the data provider nodes.
Users can publish the certification data (X.509, the basis of HTTPS and SSL) onto the LTO Network and associate this data with a specific Ethereum address. A Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle will be used to query the LTO Network blockchain and cross-reference a particular ETH address (public key) against the accreditation status for an ICO, IEO, or similar token sales. This will allow dApps to ensure full compliance with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations when dealing with financial transactions on a public blockchain. By leveraging the unique properties of LTO Network, Chainlink, and Ethereum, they are creating a flexible solution to solve one of the largest problems facing smart contract adoption in the traditional financial ecosystem; compliance.
Dedicating a portion of the $7M in grants for Chainlink based applications on Harmony focused on DeFi and Cross-Border Finance Applications. This integration will provide off-chain data resources via Chainlink oracles to users of Harmony, giving developers price feeds and other off-chain data to use in their applications. This move is critical, especially as Harmony draws more of its attention to DeFi applications and cross-border finance.
“Increasing utility and decentralization is critical for our long-term success. This integration with Chainlink is key in that journey and we’re so excited to see developers exercise creativity to build DeFi and cross-border finance on Harmony with Chainlink. My vision is to fund hundreds of projects with our generous $7m USD Grant Program.”
- Stephen Tse, Co-Founder, Harmony
It will provide important financial resources to the many development teams building Chainlink, as well as the many additional developer resources that enable easy access to the network. The goal with the grant program is to deploy substantial financial resources, towards the creation of critical developer tooling, addition of more high quality data, and launching of key services around the Chainlink Network.
The Chainlink Community Grant Program is meant to accelerate both of these virtuous cycles even further, by supporting the Chainlink ecosystem teams that are building the additional tools and services that will be used by data providers, node operators and smart contract developers interacting with the Chainlink Network.
Some key categories to consider include:
- Easier consumption of Chainlink networks by various smart contracts
- Accelerating the placement of additional data onto the Chainlink network
- Accelerating integrations with various blockchain environments
- Proving a Chainlink oracle network’s status, security and reliability to users
Any other category of Chainlink oracle network consumption and/or universally connected smart contract enablement that you believe Chainlink can be useful for
LinkPool, a leading provider of Chainlink network products and services, has been selected as a recipient of the Chainlink Community Grant Program. LinkPool is receiving a grant to fund improvements to the Chainlink Market — a resource hub for smart contract developers, data providers, and node operators to list and discover the necessary components to create next-generation smart contracts using the Chainlink network.
Arctic Seascape, the studio behind the award-winning grand strategy medieval game BLOCKLORDS, is proud to announce an upcoming integration with Chainlink VRF to power a Title incentivization rewards system for players on the Ethereum blockchain. This new system will allow warriors to move up the ranks of nobility and earn access to rare items, as well as cryptocurrency rewards based on their performance and achievements — all trustlessly distributed using smart contracts. This is a key integration towards their vision of creating a blockchain-based game that provides real-world value to users with scalability, decentralization, and deep gameplay, and we’re thrilled to be making it with Chainlink.
Sandbank is using Chainlink’s market-leading decentralized oracle networks for Price Reference data to bring transparent and more accurate on-chain prices to digital assets used in investment and credit line products. The first three Chainlink Price Reference Feeds they are using are live on the Ethereum mainnet for ETH/USDT, BTC/USDT, and USDT/USD.
They use these price feeds to perform hourly updates to the value of Sandbank users’ interest rewards on investments, margin call rates for crypto loans, and exchange rates in instant coin swap. Because Chainlink’s price feeds are decentralized, pull from high-quality data sources, and exist on-chain to publically monitor, the customers receive even greater guarantees that they are always getting the going volume-adjusted market rate for financial products without any fear of internal or external manipulation.
It was announced that human-readable usernames can now be used to handle deposits and withdrawals from a smart contract live on the Ethereum network. The new system ensures that a human-readable account name can withdraw blockchain assets to the right ETH address which can be changed at will off-chain and still be reliably identified during withdrawal through the use of Chainlink oracles and the War Riders API.
The system is a major breakthrough in helping dApps and other blockchain-enabled applications such as games achieve mainstream adoption because it retains the benefits of on-chain security while gaining off-chain scalability and lower costs when doing crypto transfers. This was made possible by combining the flexibility and reliability of the Chainlink oracles with a new robust server solution from War Riders.
They will integrate Chainlink into the Provide API, offering enterprises a low-code framework for building with Chainlink. This will allow developers to:
- Access Chainlink data feeds by way of the Provide API
- Enable simple turnkey deployment of Chainlink nodes into your own infrastructure
- Allow enterprises to consume premium Chainlink data without needing to acquire or hold cryptocurrency to interact with the network
In addition, this integration further positions Chainlink as the de facto standard for smart contract oracles within enterprise business process automation by way of the Baseline Protocol. Shuttle, the Baseline-as-a-Service offering Provide has developed, is the frontrunner when it comes to baselining existing systems of record using the public blockchain as a decentralized state machine.
AdEx is an advertising network with no intermediaries, which ensures less fraud, and with no cookies or tracking. It’s built on payment channels that run on the Ethereum blockchain, and as of mid 2020, they are the largest payment channel network in terms of total transactions processed. While AdEx depends heavily on real world data such as domain ownership, website content, and categorization, etc., most of the heavy lifting is done off-chain thanks to the payment channel system OUTPACE. For this integration, they will be using Chainlink’s oracles to request and receive data in order to verify the publisher’s domain ownership by calling into Cloudflare’s DNS over HTTPS. This will allow for a trustless way to verify publisher ownership, as well as enable automatic slashing in the event of domain loss.These use cases — deploying oracles to ensure validator uptime as well as verify website ownership — are among the first of their kind.
GamerHash has integrated Chainlink’s BTC/USD Price Reference Data feed into their systems to calculate the profitability of providing different computational resources on the platform. This is the first integration towards a much larger goal of seeding NFT adoption in the mainstream gaming community. Gamers are intimately familiar with interacting and trading valuable digital assets, making them a prime target to spark another wave of blockchain adoption through the integration of in-game NFT rewards. With over 480k users across 125 countries, GamerHash can introduce the concept of in-game NFTs to a large gaming community.
By integrating Chainlink, they can finally bring real-world data into the Sperax ecosystem and connect to traditional non-blockchain systems. This allows their developers to create smart contracts connected to off-chain data feeds, APIs, traditional payment infrastructure, and more, which greatly expands the number of use cases they can build solutions through DeFi and other large markets.
Consensus Cell Network has successfully completed an initial integration with Chainlink’s market leading decentralized oracle network live on the Ethereum mainnet, marking a major milestone in the Dapp development. The prediction market game is now live and leveraging Chainlink’s ETH/USD Price Reference Data fee to settle ETH price predictions made by users. This is the first step in a much larger integration of Chainlink’s Price Reference Data feeds in the upcoming decentralized lending platform set to launch later this year. By obtaining trusted off-chain data feeds via Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle networks, they are able to bridge the gap between blockchain environments and important datasets in the real world. This allows to create far more retail and enterprise-focused applications using Ethereum smart contracts.
The first of these integrations, which is now live on mainnet, is the launch of a Chainlink powered WOM/USD Price Reference Feed. This price oracle provides WOM protocol with a decentralized price feed that represents a volume-adjusted aggregation from all liquid trading markets and updates in a manner that follows price volatility. Not only does it provide price precision, but its decentralized architecture gives WOM access to a tamper resistant source of price data to display to end users and use within their rewards system to denominate rewards in USD. In addition to price oracles, WOM is actively working on a deeper level integration that will use Chainlink to bring authentication data about content creators on-chain. Since WOM is not a platform, but a permissionless protocol, it can authenticate data from a wide variety of platforms, including: social media, publishing, messaging, or e-commerce platform. Chainlink can then relay that data to any blockchain, which acts as an immutable, public database to store trusted metrics about the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns and content creators across platforms.
HodlTree will first leverage Chainlink’s popular ETH/USD and BTC/USD Price Reference Data feeds to track the prices of both BTC and ETH, and then expand out to many additional price oracles as new assets are launched on the network.HodlTree is a second-generation decentralized lending protocol. They have selected Chainlink’s Price Reference Data as the oracle mechanism to power HodlTree. It provides them with several guarantees:
- Accurate price data that reflects volume adjusted market coverage across all trading environments
- High availability and tamper-resistance delivery of data via its decentralized network architecture made up of secure node operators
- Time-tested reliability that currently secures around a billion dollars in value for many leading DeFi applications.
Chainlink VRF will be used to supply the randomness in a ‘coin flip’ user experience interface that will determine the appearance of special edition Bullionix NFTs, adding a new dimension to the minting process as well as encouraging users to expand their NFT portfolio by collecting whole sets of coins!
This development follows their previous integration of Chainlink’s gold (XAU/USD) price feed into our GoldLink education hub and is the next step in the mission to supply the NFT space with fun, dynamic collectibles backed by real-world assets. The first feature will include an animation of a coin flip during the minting process of a new NFT, and Chainlink VRF will determine if the coin lands ‘heads’ or ‘tails,’ with special designs attached.
Other
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.
