High-Level Design

Our platform will consist of three key parts:

LinkPool dApp (Website)

Ethereum Smart Contract

Node Network

dApp

As an end-user of LinkPool, this is the only part of the system which you will interact with. It will be the face of LinkPool and will show all the nodes on the network, the nodes you can stake on, how much has been staked while also keeping you up-to-date on how much passive income you’re earning.

Smart Contract

The contract will be the brains behind the whole solution. It will transfer any tokens you stake to the nodes; manage and calculate your shares of the passive payments and process any withdrawal requests amongst many other things.

To ensure complete security and confidence in what we’re providing, our smart contract will be audited prior to any main-net operation.

Node Network

The LinkPool network won’t be a single master node that holds all the tokens, rather multiple node instances. These instances will be scaled up and down based on the amount of transactions and holders who want to stake on the network.

The main reason for this is due to generating less passive income the more people stake. We envisage there being a hard-limit before the incentive of pooling tokens deprecates from the actual amount of shares you’d earn. This will be something that we monitor and adjust during real operation to ensure the most optimum splits of passive income in any given pool.

The metric we will basing this limit on will be the amount of tokens locked up as penalty payments during operation. The more tokens held, the more potential to facilitate more assignments at once, especially of a higher value.

Approach & Tooling

All the tools we’ve picked have been based on the functionality it provides and how secure/frequently updated it is. It’s also worth mentioning that all the tools we’ve picked other than AWS are open-source.

LinkPool dApp & Contract

Truffle: Framework for Solidity and dApp development. (link)

ReactJS: Javascript library for modern user interfaces, this will power our interface for the LinkPool dApp. (link)

Node Network

Amazon AWS: Cloud platform provider that will host all of our infrastructure. (link)

Chef: To describe our Chainlink nodes in code. This makes it easy to create more nodes, update nodes with no downtime and ensure all the nodes on the network are exactly the same. (link)

Docker & Compose: The chainlink nodes run in docker containers. We will expand on that by using docker compose to also containerise the node dependencies. (link)

HashiCorp Vault: Tool for managing all the secrets on the network, everything stored is encrypted with key authentication. (link)

Node Monitoring

Prometheus: Powering metrics and system alerting for node operation. (link)

Telegraf: Service which we will install on the nodes which will gather metrics and send to Prometheus. (link)

Grafana: Displays all the metrics from the above services in graphs and charts to be digestible. (link)

Security

The security of the platform is mine and Mat’s most important focus. We will ensure the infrastructure we’re building on AWS is thoroughly pen-tested and get our smart contract fully audited. Some of the security features include:

Only Chainlink ports exposed to the internet, all other services and dependencies won’t be internet facing.

Network access granted via VPN with MAC-address filtering rules.

Using HashiCorp Vault for all the LinkPool secrets including node and API keys. This will ensure any reference to any secret is completely encrypted.

Adaptor Development

To drive new functionality within the network, we will develop and release new external adaptors for the Chainlink network when needed. To be at the forefront of adaptor support and development, it should boost the overall network capability and possible use-cases while ensuring our nodes support the most connectivity options as possible.

Planned Release

As a project, we want to complete LinkPool to be ready for a private beta in-time so it can release alongside SmartContract.com’s main-net. We want to be there from the start to grow with the Chainlink network, bringing instant capacity.