Decentralized oracle network Chainlink continues to rack up high-profile mainstream embraces, with the latest oncomers being the startup arm of American computer tech powerhouse Oracle — one of the biggest software companies in the world.

Fernando Ribeiro, senior manager with Oracle for Startups, and Pablo Freitas, an engineer with Oracle’s Customer Innovation Labs, announced the meld on June 25th at the CloudEXPO conference in Santa Clara, California.

The collaboration, which Ribeiro said had been in the works months, entails Oracle’s blockchain experts working with the Chainlink team to help startups use Chainlink’s decentralized oracle tech to monetize APIs via smart contracts on the Oracle Blockchain Platform, the software giant’s “business-ready” distributed ledger.

We’re thrilled to work with great companies like Oracle and their @oraclestartup team, which has graciously offered to support 50+ Chainlink nodes/teams that will be providing high-quality inputs and outputs into Oracle’s various blockchain environments @fribeiro1 #smartcontracts pic.twitter.com/MqFW6faS5d — Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) June 25, 2019

Hundreds of thousands of clients could be reached through the initiative, as Ribeiro explained in his presentation:

“We are going to co-develop Chainlinks with 50 qualified startups to prepare them to sell their data to Oracle’s 430,000 customers in 175 countries on the Oracle Blockchain Platform. The startups are going to be announced in Oracle Code One in September.”

Oracle Code One is the tech company’s developer conference, with this year’s event having a focus on “leading-edge technology such as blockchain, chatbots, microservices, and AI.” More will be known then, but Ribeiro pointed to startups like smartrips.co, Increff, and iGeolise as examples of partners already onboarding with Chainlink’s middleware.

Come One, Come All

Notably, Ribeiro later added that the Oracle startups program would have an open-door policy toward prospects, with early participants being given free cloud credits, significant platform discounts, and unlimited support access to help Chainlink integrations:

“So any startup that is watching me right now […] can join the program. There’s no selection — any startup can join — any startup from country in any industry, it doesn’t matter if it’s B2C or B2B.”

The development comes as Oracle has been ramping up its blockchain activities. Earlier this year, the tech company rolled out new capabilities for its Oracle Blockchain Platform, all of which centered around making it easier for enterprises to build dapps upon it.

Arab Jordan Investment Bank and Nigeria Customs are among the entities currently using that platform to build applications.

News Comes Right After Google Cloud Demo

Oracle’s pivot to Chainlink marks the second time this month a major tech company has seriously eyed the network.

The first example came just days ago, when developer advocate Allen Day released an article detailing how hybrid blockchain-cloud apps could be built that use Chainlink oracles to ping data from BigQuery, Google’s serverless data warehouse, to Ethereum.

Day noted such a stack could be used to improve transaction privacy and prediction marketplaces, as well as to make blockchain-centric financial contracts via the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program, such as Ethereum gas price futures. As the advocate explained:

“Financial contracts […] enable enterprises to reduce/hedge their risk related to resources critical to their operation. Similarly, data about on-chain activity such as average gas prices, can be used to create simple financial instruments that provide payouts to their holders in cases where gas prices rise too high.”

Chainlink Having a Hot Year, To Be Sure

As the cryptoeconomy has turned bullish in 2019, LINK has been among its strongest recent performers alongside bitcoin and Binance’s BNB token.

Buy pressure around the token popped upward on June 25th as the Oracle news spread, with LINK rising to $2.41 USD before the presentation, before settling back down to around $2.17 as of this morning.

The token, which incentivizes the Chainlink network, is now up 77 percent on the month, up 594 percent over the last six months, and up 1,117 percent on the year. Optimism has remained steady on the heels of Chainlink launching its mainnet on Ethereum in late May.