Chainlink: Why I’m Bullish
I plan to do a write-up for several blockchain technologies that I find interesting, that I will be following over the course of 2021 and beyond. Obviously given my namesake, I am particular towards Fantom. However Chainlink is somewhat of an origin story for me so this is a soft spot. Buckle up for a long-winded story, I’m going to start with with a ‘diary’ post so skip ahead for the tech info & industry connections-
I was just tech-literate enough
to hear about Bitcoin when it was trading at around $300. I remember at the time Googling “Bitcoin Forum”, finding one and asking them: “How do I set up my computer to mine Bitcoin?” I got overwhelming replies of: “Just buy it dude. Don’t even bother trying to set up to mine it’s not worth it. Just buy it on the market and hold onto it.”
“Psh.” I thought. “Bitcoin is $300 I’m not just gonna buy some. I want to mine it and if these people wont help me, forget it.” And I did forget it. The Story picks back up years later, after the spectacle that was the ‘2016 Presidential Election’ for us Americans, I found myself on my usual prowl for ways to make money with “side hustles” online. I had some marketing and SEO forums I would frequent, but one day I happened to find myself exploring a place I had never been before. /Biz/
I was familiar with 4chan. I had frequented /b/ back when I was a young teenager, huddled around a glowing screen with friends late on weekends, laughing and recoiling at the humor and horrors that lie behind 4Chan’s ‘Random’ board calling Gamestops to inquire about Battletoads, but I had never really ventured outside of /b/ and especially didn’t realize they had a “Business and Finance” section of 4chan. I was interested in entrepreneurship, and was curious as to what insight these people might have. As it turns out, /biz/ once was actually a place to discuss drop-shipping and SEO marketing and other ways to earn money, but by the time that I had stumbled upon it in the August / September of 2017 it was wall to wall cryptocurrency mania madness.
They had quickly convinced me that the previous batch of folk who told me to “Just buy Bitcoin” when it was $300 were right
It was apparent I had missed a serious opportunity, and I would not make the same mistake a second time. I immediately FOMO’d and threw money into Bitcoin, as well as several meme tokens I was shilled. DOGE, BITBEANS, ZEC, VERT. “Moon mission, FOMO, FUD, Marketcap, Shitcoin, ICO, Whitepaper, cold wallet, hot wallet, exchanges, DEX, tokens, ERC20, SATS.” There was a whole new universe of lingo to try and understand, and to work I went. After a couple days of Googling, and just observing / listening I had started to pick up on what the fuck was going on in this confusing maelstrom of chaos, shitcoins, bagholders, shillers, pumpers & dumpers, scammers, and genuine bros.
I came across a post that had directed me towards Chainlink. It had just finished it’s ICO and had hit ETHDELTA a day or two before, and they had posted a bit of reading for people to do their own research into why it was worth a bother. I am a bit of a laser-focused individual with obsessive tendencies, that can border on manic. I began digging. There was the SIBOS connection- I had never heard of SIBOS before in my life if I was being honest, but an evening of Googling had me realizing they were serious players in the financial industry, and to have a blockchain tech demo there was absolutely massive. I took everything I had at time in crypto (a whopping $200) and went over to ETHDELTA and bought as much Chainlink as it could afford me. I think it was $0.19 at the time so I had about a 1,000 Chainlink, give or take.
I’m by no means a wealthy man. I’ve basically worked entry-level jobs my whole life and, I come from a family that isn’t living paycheck to paycheck, but we weren’t taking any nice vacations. White bread served my family as everything from hotdog buns to garlic bread when seasoned and toasted. I don’t come from a lot of money per say, but I recognize I’ve had it a lot more comfy than a majority of people on the planet. One Day on /biz/ I found myself going to a URL that looked like a tumblr url about Chainlink, and it immediately redirected my browser to ETHDELTA and I closed the webpage but it was already too late.
Somehow the individual had managed to put a javascript injector into the URL and it redirected to ETHDELTA and scanned for private keys. At the time I had no idea about OPSEC and I had left my open private keys on my browser history and this URL was able to grab them and before I knew what was happening my precious Chainlink was being sent to another wallet that I did not own. I was just digitally robbed by a Tumblr link. What the fuck? It was everything I could have afforded to put into crypto at the time over the course of a month of paychecks. I was prepared to quit crypto in a fit of despair.
Somebody asked me to message them privately and provide proof of my situation, and I did such. Without hesitation he sent me $200. Not life changing money financially, but the emotional / mental impact of a totally random stranger sending me $200 like it was nothing, right after a different total random stranger robbed me, was profound.
Crypto was turning out to be a wild ride, (I hope you’re a millionare by now Videobro.) You restored my faith and saved me from wanting to just walk away from crypto broken and defeated. I hope to pay forward some day, the favor you did me those years ago.
I remember staying up late nights, watching videos of Sergey speaking anywhere I could find it. Sergey in 2014 talking about smart contracts as ceo of NXT (Video) Sergey giving talks at a Bitcoin dev seminar (Video). Reading everything I could get my hands on related to Chainlink, who they were working with, who was talking about them, what they were looking to do, what they had already done, I was obsessed.
So.. What is Chainlink?
Klaus Martin Schwab, a German engineer and economist best known as the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, published a book in 2017 titled ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ where he specifically mentions on page 248, by name, “Smartcontracts.com”
This happens to be Sergey Nazarov’s Chainlink, for which he registered the website in 2008. For a frame of reference, Bitcoin was released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, 6 days AFTER Sergey registered his domain for Smartcontracts.com
Since then, Chainlink has relentless. It was featured at the 2017 SIBOS convention where it executed a successful proof of concept, making notable use of interest rate data from Barclays, BNP Paribas, Fidelity, Societe Generale and Santander.
To show off the proof of concept, Chainlink’s oracle was used to move interest rates from each of the 5participating financial institutions, into what the startup called its “Market Rate Smart Contract.”
That contract aggregated the data into a single rate, that was then used in a virtual representation of a $1 million smart contact bond. An on-chain payment transaction was then translated into a Swift payment message.
To be able to send that translate the transaction into one Swift could handle, the startup built its platform to comply with Swift’s ISO 20022 standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions.
It is my personal belief
That in the years to come, Chainlink will become the defacto industry standard for decentralized oracles, utilized by both blockchain and legacy companies moving forward. I don’t believe it will be the only working decentralized oracle service in the years to come, but I do believe they will be the most prominent. They continue to grow and absorb both technology and developers that are some of the strongest in the field.
Sergey Nazarov at a 2018 Devcon, announced that their company will be acquiring Cornell’s Town Crier project. Chainlink will be primarily adopting the technology and further lead the development of the trusted hardware-based oracle system on the Chainlink network.
Town Crier is an interesting project that came out of Cornell University and IC3 to ensure data privacy and security for smart contracts. The project outlines a novel way to process transactions and use encryption to verify the processing without leaking any sensitive information in the process.
There is already a link to Chainlink as the research for Town Crier was co-authored by Ari Jules, who is a co-author of the Chainlink whitepaper. Now, this announcement is seen as an important step forward for the two projects as it is the start of a consolidation of smart contract oracle projects. -Forbes
Sergey Nazarov continues to acquire tools that will set them apart from other oracle solutions. Since it’s inception, the Chainlink team has been all development and zero hype. For years you’d see people try to label it as a “dead team” because they weren’t marketing towards regular retail investors. I’ve been following the team since that fateful September of 2017 and they continue to push fresh development and new surprised.
In June of 2019 a Google Cloud Developer Advocate published an article:
Adoption of blockchain protocols and technologies can be accelerated by integrating with modern internet resources and public cloud services. In this blog post, we describe a few applications of making internet-hosted data available inside an immutable public blockchain: placing BigQuery data available on-chain using a Chainlink oracle smart contract. Possible applications are innumerable, but we’ve focused this post on a few that we think are of high and immediate utility: prediction marketplaces, futures contracts, and transaction privacy.
“Possible applications are innumerable”
Google isn’t the only legacy company Chainlink has caught the attention of. IBM and Microsoft also saw the value inherent in the decentralized oracle standard:
“The move underscores a growing effort among enterprises to use digital assets of all kinds, from cryptocurrencies to tokenized loyalty points, real estate and artwork, in a standardized environment.
According to the announcement,
“What is required is standardization at the business level, which would allow companies to be able to agree on distributed business models without choosing a platform first. The InterWork Alliance will set the standards for building distributed applications, including appropriate frameworks for tokenizing items of value, writing contracts over those tokens, and privacy-preserving analytics of multi-party data.”
Says InterWork Alliance President Ron Resnick,
“Companies want to be able to create token-based business models without having a platform technology in mind. For this approach to work, standards are urgently needed around defining what a token is and how its contractual behaviors will work. … the Alliance can deliver a proven, standard approach that is required to bring consumer trust into this space.”
Launch members include Accenture, R3, ING, Nasdaq, Neo and Hedera Hashgraph, among others.”
-Businesswire of Berkshire Hathaway released the announcement in June of 2020.
Amazon and Kaleido are working together to provide a
“SaaS platform for creating and operating blockchain networks, accelerating the entire journey from PoCs to live production business networks. Going beyond the chain, Kaleido provides a full stack of tools & services to build complete solutions for today’s modern business networks.”
Through the Kaleido marketplace, businesses have access to AWS services like private networking and data backup, other common blockchain services like HD wallets, and industry products like Chainlink (for smart contracts), Viant (for supply chain management), and OpenLaw (for legal contracts).
The company said in a statement that early adopters of the platform estimated that Kaleido eliminated 80% of the custom code that would otherwise have been required to build their blockchain solutions.
And who else did Kaleido decide to partner with and utilize? That’s right, Chainlink. (Forbes)
Easily the best technical breakdown of Chainlink can be found here:
Recently Grayscale, the largest crypto asset manager in the world who manages more than $25 billion worth of assets across its products, announced that they will begin building a Chainlink fund (Source) and true to it’s roots: Chainlink is still being talked about by the World Economic Forum, as they call it “The missing link between blockchains and enterprises” (Source)
Note- none of this is financial advice, just my personal perspective on things. Thank you for reading
