We’re super excited to announce this collaboration with Chainlink.

ThunderCore needs a high quality, reliable oracle service in order for smart contracts deployed on our chain to access necessary off-chain information to trigger certain transactions. For example, imagine a smart contract that executes a rider discount when an Uber driver is late. The component that obtains time-location-based data of Uber rides is the oracle, which then is used as an input to execute the smart contract on-chain.

That’s what brings us to Chainlink.

Chainlink is an industry leader and is becoming the de-facto middleware oracle service — a close collaboration with them was a clear and natural choice. In fact, Chainlink’s leadership in the Oracle middleware category was made even more clear by this article by Google and their use of Chainlink. By creating a decentralized oracle network for ThunderCore to securely access off-chain information, developers deploying their dapps on ThunderCore will have an added layer of trust and reliability because it does not rely on any one single entity.

Why Do We Need Oracles?

Smart contracts require an input, after which some logic is executed, and then an update is made to the blockchain. The unique thing about the blockchain is that transactions are not reversible. This requires extra diligence that the inputs obtained outside the chain must be correct and obtained in a trustless way.

Example Diagram Using Chainlink and ThunderCore with External Services

For example, imagine a dapp where users are able to wager on who might win a specific championship game. To obtain the actual winner of the game requires an oracle service to obtain data on who is the winner from outside the chain and then for the smart contract to execute who wins the wager based on the oracle input.

We’re excited for this collaboration with Chainlink; having this highly reliable middleware service will be valuable to developers that build on ThunderCore: builders will now have a service that will enable all sorts of new use cases and games.

Chainlink and ThunderCore — a Shared History

Because Chainlink and ThunderCore are founded on strong applied research, it’s no surprise that our co-founder Elaine Shi contributed quite significantly to the design on which Chainlink was built — the Town Crier paper. Elaine and Ari Juels both collaborated on that seminal paper — Ari is a technical advisor to Chainlink. The world is small indeed — and crypto is even smaller!

About Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. Chainlink is consistently selected as one of the top blockchain technologies by leading independent research firms such as Gartner. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to both large enterprises (SWIFT) and leading smart contract development teams.

About ThunderCore

ThunderCore is an EVM compatible blockchain, with 1,200 transactions per second and sub-second confirmation times. The ThunderCore team is focused on supporting developers by creating an ecosystem that enables them to turn their dapps into full-fledged businesses with users that come back to their dapps over and over again.