If Ethereum is the king of smart contract platforms, then Chainlink is becoming the king of bringing decentralized oracles to all smart contract platforms of note.
On Thursday, April 30th, the Chainlink team announced it was working with the Tezos community’s development teams Cryptonomic and SmartPy to make Chainlink’s oracles “natively available to all developers building on Tezos.”
Chainlink’s already become something of a mainstay in Ethereum’s decentralized finance sector, so considering the blockchain-agnostic project’s other recent partnerships, it’s hardly surprising that Tezos’s insurgent developers are now embracing Chainlink’s oracle tech, too.
Indeed, Chainlink’s now the premier plug-and-go oracle solution in cryptoeconomy, so it makes sense the space’s second-largest smart contract platform is linking up with the project. The network effect is officially on, in other words.
Link Up on Tezos
Oracles are used to allow off-chain data to interact with blockchains, which is a crucial dynamic for extending the utility of public blockchains that are otherwise limited by the data they have on-chain.
Accordingly, thanks to the Cryptonomic and SmartPy teams’ recent integration work, any projects building on Tezos will be able to readily leverage Chainlink’s oracle tech to bring off-chain data on-chain. In an introduction post, SmartPy’s builders explained:
“Integrating natively with Chainlink allows Tezos developers to utilize decentralized oracle networks to securely and reliably access off-chain resources and use them in their on-chain applications. Oracles allow developers to build smart contracts that incorporate off-chain data, take advantage of external API services, trigger settlements on existing payment networks, and more.”
Later on in that post, SmartPy said the meld was a natural fit considering the fact that Chainlink’s oracles were already proven in having helped secure millions of dollars’ worth of DeFi transactions to date:
Chainlink is the only decentralized oracle network with a track record of servicing smart contracts live on mainnet worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This performance is easily verifiable on-chain and the reason why they are already used and supported by numerous top DeFi protocols.
Servicing Platforms Beyond Ethereum
The Chainlink team locked down major collaborations with Google Cloud, Thomson Reuters, and Oracle’s startup arm last year. These mainstream team-ups were big, but where Chainlink has really shined lately is in how far it’s stretched its reach throughout the cryptoeconomy.
To be sure, Chainlink is best known for its work atop Ethereum, but as mentioned before the oracle project is blockchain-agnostic by design. That’s lead to the project being tapped by several prominent smart contract platforms in recent months.
Tezos is just the latest platform in that trend, of course. But it’s far from the only one. Back in March, Ethereum Classic (ETC) gained its own Chainlink inroad when the Ethereum Classic Labs group revealed it had partnered with Chainlink to bring decentralized oracles to the Ethereum split-off.
One month prior to that, the rising would-be “Ethereum Killer” Polkadot announced that Chainlink had demonstrated an intergation with Polkadot’s Substrate tech, which allows projects to build customizable blockchains. The Polkadot team explained:
“By being the first Substrate-based oracle solution, Chainlink is set to become the first and primary oracle provider for all Substrate-based chains and eventually the entire Polkadot network. Polkadot developers can use Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks to quickly connect their smart contracts to all the inputs and outputs they need to run securely and reliably end-to-end, while avoiding the major pitfalls associated with trying to deploy your own oracles.”
In the spring of 2019, Chainlink also locked down a partnership with Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger project that is specifically focused on servicing the needs of large, private enterprises. Chainlink’s starting to run the gamut, then.