Chainlink has a hot hand so far in 2020. The latest in a flurry of recent developments for the decentralized oracle project came on February 12th when Swipe, a digital currency app, revealed it had integrated Chainlink’s tech into its payments network.
In an associated explainer post, Swipe’s marketing head Nicole Del Rosario said Swipe, which facilitates easy crypto-to-fiat conversions and vice versa, would specifically be leveraging Chainlink’s recently unveiled decentralized price feed oracles; moreover, the Chainlink team would also be creating a customized SPX-USD price feed for tracking Swipe’s SXP app token.
Welcome @swipewallet to the Chainlink ecosystem! Swipe's crypto payment platform is using Chainlink's oracles for secure price conversions on point of sale transactions. They will leverage the ETH/USD Price Reference Contract & a custom-built SXP/USD feed. https://t.co/6R1wP6CQAf
— Chainlink (@chainlink) February 12, 2020
“Chainlink’s oracle solution will allow Swipe to create a stable, yet decentralized bridge between reliable off-chain prices and Swipe’s on-chain transactions,” Del Rosario added.
The decentralizing meld is all about making the payments app’s prices accurate and secure, as Swipe’s chief executive officer Joselito Lizarondo commented:
“I believe this relationship is vital for Swipe users who need access to Chainlink’s trusted oracle services. By collaborating with Chainlink, Swipe will effectively address the security problems for off-chain connections that currently exist for users of the Swipe Network Wallet-Contacts.”
Ever on the Move
Over the last year, the Chainlink project has proven adept at staying in the headlines with spates of back to back developments. The past month has proven no exception.
Last week, word broke that Chainlink and the Ethereum ecosystem’s most respected insurance project, Etherisc, had collaborated on a proof-of-concept prototype for a decentralized flight insurance product. Made possible by Chainlink’s oracles, the resulting infrastructure could lead to a big use case for Ethereum.
“Insurance companies stand to save money on the backend by cutting their overheard for processing claims, as well as improved brand recognition thanks to moving policy arbitration to a neutral third party protocol,” Etherisc said of the prototype.
Furthermore, one week prior to the Etherisc news Chainlink rolled out its Price Reference Data oracle networks, i.e. price feeds for trading pairs like ETH/USD and BTC/USD that decentralized finance projects can now permissionlessly leverage at will.
“[Our] oracle networks vastly expand the amount of secure and reliable data accessible to Ethereum Dapps, greatly accelerating the rate at which new DeFi products can be successfully launched,” Chainlink’s leadership said at the time.
Meta Oracles on the Horizon
As Chainlink’s and DeFi’ respective capabilities continue to grow, their associated possibilities are also blooming.
One newer wrinkle around the Chainlink the project that’s recently been gaining interest due to the unprecedented capabilities it can actualize is so-called meta oracle functionality.
Simply put, these meta oracles extend “Chainlink’s capabilities to aggregating and reacting to any/all on-chain data,” as the project’s team noted in a blog earlier this year:
“This meta oracle functionality allows users to combine any on-chain values with Chainlink’s own high quality off-chain data sources, while setting key conditions about how a smart contract should receive, react to and rely on this larger combined data set. Our goal with Chainlink’s meta oracle capabilities is to give smart contract developers more choice when deciding which data resources will be used to build and improve their DeFi smart contracts.”
Users can thus apply these meta oracle capabilities to avoid falling on the wrong side of price inefficiencies, for example. If a meta oracle finds a large gap between on-chain and off-chain prices, users could then save money on a trade by waiting for the markets to stabilize.
Return to All-Time High?
Bullish buy pressure has seemingly returned to the cryptoeconomy once more, a reality that’s pushed the price of the LINK token to over $4 at press time, a mark just shy of the project’s $4.36 all-time high that was reached last summer.
If a crypto bull market really is just beginning, buy pressure could push the LINK price to new highs sooner rather than later. Only time will tell for now.
