Chainlink: Top Korean Banks Become Chainlink Data Providers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems Is Now A Chainlink Node Operator, Binance Smart Chain Integration, Chainlink To Power A Cross-chain Stablecoin Protocol Built On The Elastos Ethereum Sidechain
Biweekly update 12th July — 26th July
Hello, and welcome to our fresh biweekly update on Chainlink! As always, we are here to provide a recap of news and events that happened within the Chainlink ecosystem over the past two weeks. So let’s have a quick look!
To begin with, three new price reference feed pairs are live on the mainnet — they are XAU/USD, ENJ/ETH, and REN/ETH. This is just a case in point of many Chainlink price oracles that developers can use to expand DeFi beyond cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, following the usual trend, Chainlink was involved in numerous partnerships and integrations. CenterPrime, a private Hyperledger based chain with unique access to the Korean open banking API, shares foreign exchange rate data from top Korean banks, including Hana Bank, Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, and Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) to Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. Moreover, Fusion and Chainlink will provide a plug and play component for blockchain interoperability, greatly enhancing the capabilities of DeFi. Pairing Chainlink’s decentralized oracles with Fusion’s recent protocol developments substantially increases developers’ toolset to build next-generation Dapps and digital finance solutions on Fusion. Next, Binance Smart Chain’s testnet blockchain has integrated Chainlink oracles, which will bring real-world data on events happening outside the Binance ecosystem into Binance Smart Chain in a secure manner. This also empowers developers using Binance Smart Chain to build smart contract applications that connect to reliable real-world data feeds from Chainlink. Another significant milestone — a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom called T-Systems has become a Chainlink node operator. By operating a Chainlink node, T-Systems MMS will provide reliable real-world data to Chainlink network users and decentralized applications on Ethereum, further supporting the vision of public blockchains as a foundation for numerous use cases.
Another integration was made with FirmaChain, developer of electronic contract solution duite., a blockchain-based Dapp that sets out to solve the problems of traditional paper contracts and existing cloud-based electronic contract platforms. Chainlink will allow users of FirmaChain to check whether specific terms and conditions of a contract were fulfilled in a highly secure and reliable manner. This vastly expands the contract’s functionality, turning it from a static agreement to a dynamic agreement that can understand what’s happening in the outside world and execute automated actions based on this information.
KardiaChain on-boards Chainlink as its recommended oracle solution that will consequently allow dApps to connect to real-world data and traditional infrastructure in a highly secure and reliable manner. KardiaChain’s immediate focus will be using Chainlink to obtain sporting outcomes and statistics for their eSports Incentive Platform.
As it was recently stated by Cointelegraph, Chainlink sees consistent improvement in social media presence. The platform is widely highlighted in various media, in social networks and forums. In tweet posted, Weiss Ratings, the US-based investment analysis firm, says the oracle network ChainLink is well-positioned to leverage the burgeoning growth of smart contracts and decentralized finance. You can also check a recently published podcast with Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, where he shares how his experiences as an early Web 3 entrepreneur led him to solving the oracle problem. He additionally talks about how Chainlink has successfully abstracted away its complexity to unlock the potential for reliable’ universally connected smart contracts’ to become the dominant form of digital agreement that allows enterprise and end-users to control their relationship to their money and data.
The number of subscribers in social networks and active participants in chats is growing sharply.
Exciting enough? Check the update below for more, and see you in two weeks!
Development
Developers now have access to the consistently updated on-chain price of gold. This is just one of many Chainlink price oracles that developers can use to expand DeFi beyond cryptocurrencies.
Gaming developers can use this reliable price feed when minting or exchanging Enjin-based digital assets.
Social encounters
- The Economic Impact of Random Rewards in Blockchain Video Games in an article by Chainlink
Key Takeaways:
- Randomness in games falls into one of two categories: input or output
- Blockchain-based games have the potential to expand the gaming market into the trillions, particularly by issuing economic rewards via input randomness
- Blockchain gaming rewards are scarce, immutable assets that can trade in secondary markets and may soon be used across multiple different games
- Current randomness solutions are highly limited and not suited to secure the value they will create
- Chainlink VRF is purpose-built to generate a source of randomness for blockchain games that users can independently verify is authentic
The US-based investment analysis firm Weiss Ratings says a billion-dollar crypto revolution is underway, with one cryptocurrency set to take center stage. In tweet posted, Weiss Ratings says the oracle network ChainLink is well-positioned to leverage the burgeoning growth of smart contracts and decentralized finance.
“DeFi platforms are red-hot with nearly $1 billion in collateral pledged. Oracles empower not only DeFi, but just about everything that 2nd & 3rd-generation cryptos do. So, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that Chainlink will lie at the heart of the crypto revolution going forward.”
In brief:
- Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov says the oracle provider is helping to drive growth in DeFi.
- Chainlink has announced multiple integrations with DeFi startups, offering more secure, decentralized retrieval and delivery of data.
- Nazarov sees gaming as the second biggest use for blockchains after finance.
- Founders of Web 3 Podcast: Powering the DeFi Boom through Universally Connected Smart Contracts, Sergey Nazarov of Chainlink
Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, shares how his experiences as an early Web 3 entrepreneur led him to solving the oracle problem. They talk about how Chainlink has successfully abstracted away its complexity to unlock the potential for reliable ‘universally connected smart contracts’ to become the dominant form of digital agreement which allows enterprise and end-users to take control of their relationship to their money and data.
A video Q&A with Richard Yan, the Co-founder and COO of Vite Labs. The discussion is centered on 1) Why ViteX has better performance than other DEXs, 2) ViteX’s approach to trans and liquidity mining where the coins earned entitle users to proceeds from the exchange, 3) Future plans for ViteX.
A video Q&A with Gareth the DaoChemist, Head of Business Development of MCDEX. The discussion is centered on MCDEX integration with Chainlink and a deep-dive into MCDEX’s launch of liquidity mining.
Chainlink, as one of the best-performing altcoins in 2020, is seeing consistent improvement in cryptocurrency community sentiment and social media presence.
Upcoming Events
- 27 July 2020 — Meter.io and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 28 July 2020 — Reflexer Labs and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 30 July 2020 — Kyber Network 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
- 06 August 2020 — Euro-on-Ledger and Tokenization of Industrial Assets: Blockchain Innovations that will Change the World with Dr. Philipp Sandner
- 11 August 2020 — Matic Network and Chainlink Live Q&A
- 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
In order to realize the multi-trigger and interoperable smart contracts discussed in Fusion’s white paper, a key requirement is to have oracles that can attest to events in the physical and digital worlds. After researching numerous oracle solutions, Chainlink stood out because of its large pool of security-reviewed Sybil resistant nodes that have credential management capabilities for connecting to premium APIs. Additionally, Chainlink has experience bootstrapping provably secure and reliable decentralized oracle solutions in production that now secure hundreds of millions of dollars in value in DeFi. Pairing Chainlink’s decentralized oracles with Fusion’s recent protocol developments substantially increases the toolset available to developers to build next-generation Dapps and digital finance solutions on Fusion.
As Binance Smart Chain nears its mainnet launch, it has started collaborating with Chainlink, and this is good news for developers and the overall blockchain industry.
Specifically, Binance Smart Chain’s testnet blockchain has integrated Chainlink oracles, which will bring real-world data on events happening outside the Binance ecosystem into Binance Smart Chain in a secure manner. This empowers developers using Binance Smart Chain to build smart contract applications that connect to reliable real-world data feeds from Chainlink.
T-Systems’s world-class infrastructure team secures a large amount of enterprise value today & is now on mainnet helping secure Chainlink’s oracle network. As a Node Operator, T-Systems MMS ensures the reliable connection of external data to smart contracts and earns digital assets for doing so. By operating a Chainlink node, T-Systems MMS will provide reliable real-world data to Chainlink network users and decentralized applications (dApps) on Ethereum, further supporting the vision of public blockchains as a foundation for numerous use cases such as Decentralized Finance.
Over the past year, the team at Revolution Populi has been quietly putting the pieces together to challenge the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and others in Big Tech who have come to capture the internet, and control the sovereign property, the data.
Rob Rosenthal, CEO of Revolution Populi stated: “We’re going to return the internet back to the people to whom it rightfully belongs, and to do that, we’re going to integrate Chainlink’s powerful smart contract middleware throughout the project, which will secure point to point transactions across this new digital ecosystem and social net.”
Revolution Populi’s digital ecosystem will rely on Chainlink’s smart contracts for a litany of transactions, whether to get users paid for their social media activity or to get record companies direct digital payments for the use of their content.
Additionally, Chainlink’s infrastructure will allow any app to safely and securely — with scale and speed — attach itself to the decentralized, public database, one that is neither owned nor controlled by any entity or person and is modeled on tenets of democracy, where the people own, control and sell their data as they see fit.
The Cyber Republic ETH Task Force will deploy an ELA/USD decentralized price feed using Chainlink’s Price Reference Data framework as the basis for collateralization checks on users’ Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs), thereby ensuring full stablecoin collateralization. An Elastos stablecoin will bring much-needed stability to both the Elastos ecosystem and the greater DeFi space, providing users access to a reliable form of cross-chain payment and collateral that is not vulnerable to market volatility. This integration represents one of many DeFi implementations developers may leverage via Chainlink, including exchange rates for trading synthetic assets and issuing loans, as well as non-DeFi use cases such as content monetization and reliable price algorithm development for web Apps.
Chainlink’s decentralized price oracle provides ENS smart contracts and UI with reliable exchange rates, allowing ENS name registrations and renewals to be priced in USD at a stable and predictable price, but with the purchase of those names still being paid for in ETH. Most importantly, this is done in a decentralized and transparent manner allowing users to monitor the current price and future updates directly on-chain.
CenterPrime, a private Hyperledger based chain with unique access to the Korean open banking API, is sharing foreign exchange rate data from top Korean banks including Hana Bank, Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank, and Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) to Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network.
This integration with Chainlink marks a major breakthrough for the Korean fintech industry. For the first time in history, applications will be able to access decentralized foreign exchange rates compiled by the best banks in Korea. Projects will be able to access high quality Korean bank sourced exchange rates in the local currency KRW. This opens the floodgates for a massive expansion in blockchain-based fintech applications operating cross-border and DeFi applications building homegrown products priced in the local currency KRW.
This will allow dApps to connect to real-world data and traditional infrastructure in a highly secure and reliable manner. KardiaChain immediate focus will be using Chainlink to obtain sporting outcomes and statistics for their eSports Incentive Platform. This data allows to reliably settle user-created prediction markets, such as determining who will get “first blood” in their ‘Arena of Valor — Lien Quan’ multiplayer game. Additionally, they will be actively exploring the use of Chainlink oracles for DeFi applications, real estate contracts, and various other enterprise and government focused projects.
Tiny Boxes — immutable, animated pieces of art stored forever direction on chain — will use Chainlink VRF to determine the features and variations of each NFT-backed Tiny Box, as well as their animation algorithms. Additionally, the Tiny Boxes minting contract will include a new feature allowing users to create their art pieces using either ETH or LINK tokens, allowing greater accessibility and ease of minting for collectors. Together with Chainlink, they’re thrilled to be pushing the NFT art space forward with experimental generative art that, from creation to curation, exists 100% on-chain.
Chainlink’s ETH/USD Price Reference Data oracle network will provide a reliable price feed for RAI, the first reflex bond (or otherwise known as a Generalized Ethereum Bond). RAI, a reflex bond collateralized solely by ETH, is the first asset deployed live on the Kovan testnet as part of their beta launch. It is designed to slow down ETH’s price moves and thus provide a more “stable” alternative to Ether as DeFi economic bandwidth. The motivation for building a dampened version of ETH is to offer DeFi users more time to exit their positions and thus avoid liquidation.
With Chainlink’s “oracle” network integration, FirmaChain can add-in the DMV’s license database API on duite. Now the only thing the owner of the rental company has to do is sign the rental agreement with the customer and receive his/her driver’s license through duite. which will automatically be cross referenced with the DMV database. If the license were to turn out as fake, duite. will automatically nullify the rental agreement between the driver and the company and take necessary steps following the nullification of the agreement.
The ability of Chainlink to successfully bridge off-chain data with on-chain applications will open up a whole new frontier for FirmaChain and duite. in the world of contract management.
Also, read in the article — Chainlink’s latest partnership changes how digital contracts are verified
By integrating Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Randomness Function) in GET Protocol’s digital waiting line, ticket buyers for popular events are provided with an honest and transparent chance of buying a ticket.
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.
