Much to the community’s anticipation and pleasure, the Chainlink mainnet was launched on May 30th with great success. We would like to thank the team for their enormous effort in both developing the Chainlink network and building the ecosystem from top-down through partnerships.

Three weeks have passed since the launch, and we have seen both significant mainnet activity and a boost in activity on the Ropsten testnet. In this report, we will briefly present our observations.

Why are we doing this?

We rely on long-term predictions to develop our business. Before the mainnet launch, these predictions were mostly based on insights. Now that we have access to real usage statistics, we will incorporate these into our planning processes to make even better informed decisions. We expect both traditional and blockchain companies to have great demand for independent reports on the current state of the Chainlink network for the same reason, which is why we plan to provide these as a part of our consulting services.

The Chainlink traffic is going to be a good representation of the usage of real-world smart contracts in general. Both smart contract developers and API providers are very interested in learning the types of applications that will bring home the bread, which can be identified by analyzing the Chainlink traffic. API providers are further invested in seeing which smart contracts use their data, where their data is being listed and who is serving their data. Again, we are planning to work with these members of the Chainlink ecosystem as a part of our consulting services.

Finally, we believe that it is our responsibility to inform the general Chainlink community with independent reports. You can consider this as one of these.

Methodology

We only used public on-chain data. We only looked at the number of requests, and did not check if they were fulfilled, or reverted by the requester. We only counted the requests made to standard oracle contracts. We took the first Chainlink request on mainnet as the time of the mainnet launch, which was on May 28th. The data was collected on June 17th. We do not guarantee the correctness of our public reports, regard them as rough estimations and do your due diligence.

Ropsten before mainnet launch

We will only be looking into Ropsten, as it was the testnet that was used the most by far. The Ropsten contract was deployed on April 28th, 2018. A total of 265 oracle contracts fulfilled at least one request before the mainnet launch and 1390 unique contracts made these requests. We can safely assume that these requester contracts were deployed by the oracle contract deployers and were distributed uniformly. A total of 53,350 requests were made before the mainnet launch, and 16,952 of these were made to a single oracle contract.

Ropsten after mainnet launch

There is a significant uptick in usage after the mainnet launch, because one of the requirements for having a node reviewed by the Chainlink team is to prove availability by periodically polling the node. The number of active Ropsten oracle contracts since mainnet is 221, and these oracles were used by 367 unique contracts. The difference in the ratios compared to before the mainnet launch indicates that this traffic is mostly created by node tests, rather than smart contract tests. Note that smart contract developers can also test on private chains.

A total of 56,684 requests were made (a great number for just three weeks), of which 6,338 were made to our oracle as a part of the review process. In summary, we can say there has been more activity on Ropsten in the last 3 weeks compared to the 13 months before the mainnet launch.

Mainnet

We all know about the Chainlink, LinkPool and Fiews nodes (shoutout to Fiews for providing EaaS to our nodes), but we are sure you are wondering if there was any other activity. There have been 10 active oracle contracts and 12 requester contracts on mainnet. However, the most active of these “hidden” oracles have been used 7 times.

There were a total of 15,550 requests made on mainnet. The number of requests not made by the heartbeat was 29. The total payment made was 5,205 LINK.

What does the current state of the traffic say for Honeycomb?

As we have expected, there is no traffic for independent oracles on mainnet. We have pointed out some of the reasons at the node-side as the difficulty of providing valuable data easily and legally, and the difficulty of proving that you do not constitute a Sybil attack risk. The lack of public listing services can also be pointed out as another important reason. However, note that these problems do not apply for trusted oracles (i.e., where the requester and the oracle know each other), yet there is no traffic for that either. We think this is because there is not enough (independent) smart contract developer attention yet to drive the demand for data served over the Chainlink network.

Those of you who have read our whitepaper already know that we regard smart contract developers as one of the three pillars of the Chainlink ecosystem. Foreseeing that Honeycomb is going to have to create its own demand, we have focused on smart contract developers for some time now. Stay tuned for an announcement about these efforts.