Partnerships and team members

ICON, a popular public blockchain from South Korea, is planning to integrate with Chainlink’s oracle network.

Chainlink allows developers to customize how their smart contract communicates with anything off-chain using varying levels of decentralization, data aggregation, and oracle selection. It gives smart contracts secure and reliable access to data providers, web APIs, enterprise systems, cloud providers, IoT devices, payment systems, other blockchains and much more.

Upon completion of this integration, anybody building on the ICON Public Blockchain will have the ability to bring real-world data into their blockchain based business using a secure and decentralized oracle network provided by Chainlink.

The initial application is securing the ICX/USD price feed so ICON Dapps can build financial products based on the USD equivalent of ICX.

Integration with Chainlink has exciting implications for the ICON Ecosystem. Read more detailed info about the integration and find out a few ideas on how developers could utilize it.

https://twitter.com/chainlink/status/1220136684114923520?s=20

Why ICON’s Upcoming integration with Chainlink is Important

BetProtocol is connecting with Chainlink oracles to provide decentralized Esports and Sports Oracles on all of BetProtocol gaming platforms.

The integration allows BetProtocol to leverage Chainlink technology to develop oracles for gaming platforms. These oracles enable operators to use off-chain data (data that exists outside the blockchain) to reliably settle bets.

Chainlink will provide close support during the integration phase when their oracle solution is connected to BetProtocol’s service offering.

With this added value, Sportsbook and Esports operators on BetProtocol will have Chainlink oracle integration as their default setting. Operators using Chainlink as their oracle will have priority certification and on-boarding with BetProtocol.

Esports platforms are going to be the first to be released on BetProtocol, and the launch is planned for early 2020.

BetProtocol enables anyone in the world to create gaming platforms in minutes. No coding required. Thanks to BetProtocol’s blockchain technology, these platforms are secure, scalable and regulatory compliant. Its vision is to enable anyone in the world to dream of being a gaming platform owner one morning, and actually be one that same day.

Alkemi has integrated with Chainlink to leverage its market-leading network of decentralized oracles.

Chainlink’s protocol is facilitating trusted marketplaces for obtaining quality oracles, which is quickly becoming the de-facto standard in the Oracle-as-a-Service category. By utilizing Chainlink, Alkemi will benefit from a highly precise and reliable stream of crypto-asset price data, positioning the company well as an open prime broker that meets the stringent requirements of institutional capital allocators.

As an open network, Alkemi cannot rely on off-chain price information from a single corruptible source of truth. Chainlink, operating as a fully decentralized network, decreases the likeliness of false or inaccurate data reporting while simultaneously preventing network downtime by aggregating data responses from multiple oracles that query a variety of data sources. As articulated in Chainlink’s whitepaper, “this limits the need for trust in any single party and allows the tamperproof quality valued in smart contracts to be extended to the end-to-end operation between smart contracts and the APIs they rely on.”

Other factors that made Chainlink a natural choice for collaboration with Alkemi’s Network:

plans to move to off-chain data aggregation and computation to reduce costs associated with carrying out these activities on-chain;

strong guards against multiple attack vectors (e.g., sybil attacks such as freeloading), with the use of a commit-reveal scheme where each oracle commits its encrypted answer and is decrypted only when enough oracles have submitted their answers;

reputation system where good behavior is incentivized because performance and reputation is public, and bad behavior incurs penalties (this also ensures high availability and performance);

designed with modularity in mind as every system component is upgradeable so they can be replaced when better techniques and competing implementations arise.

Alkemi has initially integrated Chainlink for the lock-and-release mechanism contained within its user-generated smart contract token reserves (wallets). The user (liquidity provider) can specify a time duration for their assets to be locked into these token reserves.

In addition, they can specify a price threshold, which once breached, causes the assets to become unlocked and available for withdrawal ahead of the time expiry lock. An oracle price feed is needed in order to determine if the price condition is met for funds to be unlocked. Chainlink provides Alkemi with a way to securely fetch off-chain data via its network of decentralized oracles without the need to run its own.

Both Alkemi and Chainlink are built on Ethereum making integration quite simple. Looking ahead, there is strong alignment on vision as both companies aim to eventually become blockchain agnostic in an effort to foster wider adoption and interoperability.

Alkemi is an open finance prime brokerage platform, addressing a $4 billion immediate market opportunity to bridge the gap between institutional capital allocators and fragmented digital asset liquidity. The Company’s infrastructure facilitates open access to liquidity and streamlines settlement for our customers (e.g. asset managers, market makers, and funds) and partners (exchange venues and third-party providers), solving the problem of digital asset market inefficiency. Alkemi counts Outlier Ventures, Xpring (Ripple), Coven.VC (ConsenSys), 100x Advisors, Techstars and ARC Fund, as its backers to-date.

Chainlink and iExec collaborate to address the complex off-chain needs of next-generation decentralized applications

Looking at Chainlink’s long-time focus on high-quality data and the expertise of iExec in heavy computation with confidential compute and trusted execution environments, it’s only natural that Chainlink and iExec collaborate to allow developers to easily leverage their technologies together as a complete off-chain solution for the next wave of decentralized applications.

Technical Integration

The below diagram illustrates an off-chain request that uses both Chainlink and iExec to access a comprehensive set of services in one transaction, all paid in LINK and RLC tokens through the Orchestrator smart contract.

Workflow illustrating how Chainlink and iExec couple their technology stacks to respond to a complex off-chain request

Here is a description of each step composing the workflow:

A decentralized application (smart contract) sends an off-chain request to the Orchestrator smart contract, which implements “ChainlinkClient” as well as “iExecHub” to take care of holding the utility tokens used for payment. The Orchestrator smart contract creates a request to the Chainlink network. The on-chain request is picked up by Chainlink nodes. Chainlink reaches out to multiple data sources as specified in the request. Chainlink responds on-chain. Orchestrator contract is triggered to create a request to iExec. iExec picks up the request. iExec processes the work order off-chain (leveraging CPU/GPU, TEE enclaves). iExec responds on-chain with the computed result. The Orchestrator relays the result back to the decentralized application (the requester).

Use Case: Decentralized Car Insurance

Prior to contracting a new user, the insurance smart contract would have to compute his risk profile. Here is the expected workflow:

The user reveals just enough information about his location to allow the Chainlink Node to fetch car accident statistics from the driver’s region. Given Chainlink’s integration with Google Bigquery, we can find an example of a dataset available in Bigquery for the city of New York, including more than 1 million motor vehicle collisions. The driver installs an application on his smartphone that collects all kinetic data reflecting his driving behavior. Given the high degree of confidentiality of such data, it would be locally encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud. An iExec worker uses the following datasets: Chainlink’s dataset, the applicant’s encrypted dataset, and a neural network as an input to run an AI application. The AI software will compute the applicant’s risk profile, which ultimately translates into the insurance premium of that specific user. Thanks to iExec trusted compute, all of this confidential data is processed in a highly secured environment (such as Intel® SGX enclave), ensuring that no one, not even the untrusted host machine carrying out the computation, is able to access it. Finally, the information about the insurance premium is pushed back into the insurance smart contract, which informs it how much the new subscriber should be charged.

Such a workflow could be re-run after a 30 days period, reacting to risks changes; hence being able to adjust the cost of the insurance over time. In case the user believes their risk profile improved, they could take the initiative of triggering a new computation ahead of the fixed time period, and cover the costs associated with the extra computation as he would benefit from the resulting insurance cost reduction.

The second part of an insurance product is the policy specification detailing exactly how an accident is compensated. Most of the compensation rules can be translated into smart contract code, particularly if the insurance is of parametric type (ie: the level of compensation directly depends on an index). However, assessing the damages after an accident is the most difficult part to automate. This traditionally requires the human intervention of a “claims adjuster”.

Thanks to the advent of electronic vehicle health check (eVHC) and IoT devices, it is now conceivable to measure the level of damage, and report the health check result in a way that cannot be tampered. With every claim, there will be new fresh data inputs training the neural network, ensuring the AI’s model of producing output results continuously improves over time. Eventually, based on these measurements and the parametric insurance rules, the smart contract will automatically trigger the payment to the driver, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to compensate for their loss, at a fraction of the cost of traditional motor insurance.

Study the whole article to find out about the Chainlink and iExec collaboration and the main features of the iExec network.

Product Manager and Developer Evangelist at Chainlink Johann Eid on leveraging their experience of years working on the oracle problem.

EEA Mainnet Working Group forms Task Force “EMINENT” (Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises)

Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink:

“We’re excited to work closely with the EMINENT Task Force to continually push the boundaries of what’s possible in public blockchain environments. Developing mainnet integration standards that take into account the specific challenges of enterprises is key to the EMINENT Task Force being able to leverage the unique advantages of public blockchains, while seamlessly and securely incorporating their current systems of record and key data sources.”

More useful links:

“Chainlink now has 25 oracle price feeds running on Ethereum’’

“Chainlink has three big reasons to feel good about 2020”

from decrypt.co

The Founders of Synthetix and Chainlink on DeFi, Derivatives and 25 New Decentralized Price Feeds

A special interview episode with Sergey Nazarov and Kain Warwick, the founders of Chainlink and Synthetix.

The main discussion topics: