RCN is excited to announce that the RCN protocol has successfully integrated Chainlink as its sole oracle provider! After over a year maintaining its own oracles, RCN has embraced Chainlink for its superior security, reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability. The integration already supports all the currencies currently available on RCN’s Credit Marketplace, with future plans to integrate new price feeds not only for other ERC-20 tokens but also for fiat currencies, making RCN the first project to bring fiat-denominated P2P borrowing to DeFi.
The initial integration is already live on mainnet, with RCN’s smart contracts feeding from Chainlink-powered price feeds for RCN/BTC, BTC/ARS, USDC/ETH and BTC/ETH as a means to include RCN, ARS and USDC on the Credit Marketplace. These same oracles (of which the first two were custom created for RCN) will now be leveraged to complete the upcoming listing of ETH and BTC. Further listings of additional crypto and, especially, fiat currencies will be conducted on a community-driven basis, letting the Credit Marketplace current and potential users decide which assets they want to be integrated next.
This integration marks a major milestone in the development of the RCN protocol, as it allows one of its key components to become more decentralized, robust and capable to support its future growth. Since switching to Chainlink Price Reference Data, the price feeds currently sourced by the Credit Marketplace have maintained accurate, stable, and tamperproof valuations, providing its users with a stronger assurance that they are operating with up-to-date market prices for both crypto and fiat currencies.
To ensure that price feeds reflect the real-time market value of their underlying assets, Chainlink oracles leverage off-chain data (that is, information generated outside the Ethereum blockchain) from multiple sources (including data aggregators like BraveNewCoin) and bring it on-chain. This data is then aggregated together to create a weight-adjusted measure that RCN’s smart contracts use to accurately define exchange rates between the different borrowing, lending, and collateralization currencies used on the Credit Marketplace.
But while extremely valuable, decentralization is far from being the sole advantage of this approach: since Chainlink oracles are capable of harnessing any type of off-chain data, they can provide the RCN protocol with price information of assets external to any blockchain, including fiat currencies. This is the case with the Argentine Peso (ARS), which thanks to the BTC/ARS Price Feed can now be used by the Credit Marketplace’s borrowers to denominate debt when requesting a P2P DeFi Loan.
This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, with RCN now being able to offer DeFi users from around the world the chance to request loans in their local currency, regardless of whether a related stablecoin exists or not. In turn, this has the potential to speed up DeFi adoption in countries whose currency has not yet been adopted by the industry, which has inevitably increased the friction for those residents interested in joining the ecosystem.
“Chainlink has helped RCN provide accurate, decentralized, and secure price feeds for the Credit Marketplace while reducing their maintenance costs. However, the most interesting edge created by this integration is scalability potential. Chainlink’s Price Reference Data framework will not only reduce time to market for new asset listings on the platform, but also allow RCN to expand its value proposition with strategic fiat currencies that were unreachable up to this moment.”
— Manuel Gvirtz, Product Owner at RCN.
Why Chainlink is RCN’s Oracle Network of Choice
Before integrating it as its sole oracle provider, RCN evaluated and verified Chainlink’s outstanding potential to fulfil its present and future needs across four main metrics:
- Security: Besides being maintained by leading blockchain DevOps and security teams with verifiable experience in the field and having overcome a rigorous security review process, all Chainlink nodes supplying data to RCN meet high transparency standards, with abundant information about them being accessible at market.link and reputation.link. In addition, Chainlink nodes possess credential management capabilities, which allows them to harness password-protected, high-quality APIs as data sources, reducing their exposure to data manipulation attacks.
- Stability: With hundreds of listed nodes contributing to its oracle networks, Chainlink stands out for its high degree of decentralization and the safeguards it offers against data corruption and network downtime. Each Price Reference Contract integrated by RCN gathers data from multiple independent Chainlink nodes, with price updates occurring whenever a small price deviation is detected from the previous on-chain price.
- Cost Efficiency: Having a decentralized economic model in which multiple projects collectively finance shared price feeds, Chainlink Price Reference Data contracts allow RCN to both decrease its oracle maintenance costs and better align itself with the rest of the DeFi ecosystem. Thanks to this system, RCN has decreased the cost per user of the price feeds it has joined, as will future users of the price feeds created by RCN.
- Scalability: Being the most widely used oracle network in the DeFi ecosystem and supporting over 60 different price feeds, Chainlink’s price reference framework can be used to quickly and efficiently integrate almost any new crypto or fiat currency the RCN community wants to include in the Credit Marketplace.
Taking into account these reasons, Chainlink’s long term record as a battle-tested oracle provider servicing smart contracts worth billions of dollars, and its current position as a true standard for the DeFi ecosystem, RCN is confident that this new integration will provide its protocol with accurate, tamper-proof, and transparent price data for its oracles
Because of this, RCN looks forward to working with the Chainlink community to maintain its current price feeds, onboard more of the existing ones, and build new ones to accomplish its mission of bringing fiat-denominated P2P borrowing to DeFi.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universal smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.
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