If you’ve traversed some of the many online forums where people discuss the numerous cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects in existence today, you have almost certainly run into members of the Chainlink community — a group of breadcrumb-hunting smart contract enthusiasts and investors who collectively resemble, for lack of a better description, a force of nature. If you’re reading this in the beginning months of 2019, you yourself are most likely part of this community, or at the very least have a keen interest in seeing smart contracts change the world we live and do business in.

I myself became a member of this loosely defined, mostly online collective back in September 2017 when I stumbled upon the Chainlink whitepaper and was awestruck by the applications that the technology would enable for smart contract platforms such as Ethereum and, as a result, the world. This was a mere two weeks before the Link token sale event. Despite the short window of opportunity, after a careful yet quick (considering the personal magnitude of the following decision) consideration period where the endless possibilities for the tech seemed almost ludicrous, I did what many others have done since: I went all in.

Despite the devastating crypto market crash of 2018, the ride since joining the Chainlink community has already been one of the more exciting experiences of my life, filled with twists and turns that could likely fill a couple of full length novels — all despite the mainnet not even being out yet. At the same time, for well over a year now, myself and dozens of other Chainlink community members from various different professional and educational backgrounds have studied Chainlink’s technology and market applications almost non-stop, accumulating a wealth of knowledge on the opportunities decentralized oracles offer to smart contracts, but also connecting many of the dots that tie these technologies to the real world — to markets and industries we all work in.

It was from this community of smart contract enthusiasts brought together by the vision of a Chainlinked world, that we gathered the founding members of CLC Group — a community consulting and technology hub whose aim is to 1. Promote the utilization of real-world connected smart contracts at the enterprise level through consulting efforts, and 2. Foster the growth of the Chainlink network via the creation of scalable solutions that reduce friction between network members. Through these two areas of focus, our goal is to facilitate the emergence of a smart contract economy that is connected to real-world data and is powered by Chainlink.

Today as a group we are living in exciting times, and not only due to the imminent release of Chainlink on the Ethereum mainnet. In the following weeks to come, we will publish our whitepaper for the vision that we hold for CLC Group, as well as two of its first spoke projects: Honeycomb API marketplace and Nodary node certification service. It is our hope to build these projects in close cooperation with the broader Chainlink community, as we believe the collective wealth of knowledge on the subject of smart contracts and their applications in this group is close to unparalleled. This means that we want to welcome comments on our project from all members of the Chainlink community, as it’s clear there are some very bright minds among us.

So in short: Strap in, and let’s start building.

-Heikki Vänttinen

To learn more about CLC Group, you can visit our website at www.clcg.io, join our Telegram community at t.me/clcgio, follow our Twitter at www.twitter.com/clcgio and subscribe to our subreddit at www.reddit.com/r/clcgroup.