Hedera Hashgraph and Chainlink are collaborating to provide a decentralized oracle network for Hedera’s enterprise-grade distributed public ledger. In this way, writing Hedera-based smart contracts can access real-world data, events and payment information. Chainlink and Hedera are hoping to set the standard for trust and will endeavour to enable the next generation of smart contracts to become the primary method for establishing digital agreements.
Chainlink was developed by a company called SmartContract, founded in September 2014. It is a platform which attempts to bridge the gap between smart contracts on the blockchain and real-world applications, which often tend to be off the blockchain. It is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. The cryptocurrency uses “oracles”, which find and verify real-world data and bring it on-chain to be integrated into smart contracts.
Chainlink is consistently selected as one of the top blockchain technologies by leading independent research firms such as Gartner. The core team behind the cryptocurrency involves two people, CEO Sergey Nazarov and CTO Steve Ellis. Steve Ellis, the CTO, was a co-founder of SmartContract and has worked with Sergey on Secure Asset Exchange. He also worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Chainlink’s advisory team is also strong and includes Ari Juels, professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech and co-director at IC3, Andrew Miller, who is also an advisor to ZCash and Tezos and Brian Lio, CEO of Smith+Crown, among others.
Hedera Hashgraph is a DLT project and an innovative variation of a standard blockchain on the basis of the technology called directed acyclic graph (DAG). Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger for building decentralized applications. Developers can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralized applications on top of Hedera. It aims to directly resolve four fundamental issues with mainstream market adoption of public ledger technology — performance, security, stability, and governance.
“We’re fast approaching Open Access, the time at which developers can freely develop distributed applications on Hedera’s beta mainnet. The Chainlink integration, alongside our full support for Solidity, makes it even more compelling for applications to migrate from other Solidity based smart-contract platforms to Hedera for improved performance, security, stability and much more,” said Jordan Fried, SVP of Global Business Development for Hedera. “Smart contracts have already started to change the world, and how organizations and individuals do business, and we see Chainlink’s oracle network as a key piece of infrastructure to improve smart contract capabilities even further.”
Daniel Kochis, Global Head of Business Development for Chainlink, added “Chainlink is excited to integrate with the Hedera network to provide their developer community and smart contracts with provably accurate off-chain data.”