Coin of the week |  What is Chainlink (LINK)

What is Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink is an Oracle network run on Ethereum with the main objective of improving the efficiency of smart contract technology by connecting off-chain data with on-chain data in real time.

Founder

Co-founder of Chainlink are Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis. Sergey was co-founder of CryptoMail, a mail service provider on blockchain. Steve was software engineer at Pivotal Labs and co-founder of Secure Asset Exchange, which provides systems that assist users to trade decentralized assets easier.

Why Chainlink

Chainlink is one of the first networks to integrate off-chain data into blockchain. Users can download Chainlink API to connect to the Oracle network. With the network, users can connect and communicate between on-chain data and off-chain data, efficiently and highly secure. 

Chainlink provide oracles to gather data from various sources and also aggregates the collected data to the smart contract to trigger its execution, reducing the risk of a centralized point of failure.

LINK Utility

Link is the native coin of Chainlink, run on ERC-677, with the main utility of paying the transaction fee and run node, including integrating off-chain data to blockchain. LINK holders have the right to vote for high quality product and service Node, which gives that Node higher score. This scoring is intended to help keep the developer continuing to develop their Node so the score will not drop.

The maximum supply of LINK is at 1 billion tokens, currently around 570 million tokens circulating in the market. Current market cap of LINK is at USD 9 billion.

Estimate Date: Coinmarketcap of February 2024 

Roadmap and future of Chainlink

Chainlink Oracle is highly secure to the point that a number of large organizations integrate the system. The organizations are not limited to financial and digital asset industry, but insurance as well such as agriculture insurance, weather industry such as AccuWeather, and logistic industry such as FedEx.

To be able to provide the correct and accurate price in real time on DeFi Application, Oracle network of Chainlink play very important role as well. 

Recently Chainlink had joined forces with well known layer 2 token, Arbitrum, which is considered to be a big step forward in development of cross-chain tokenization DApp.