Whether the Chainlink project has a boon of a year in 2020 like it did in 2019 depends on if the decentralized oracle provider’s builders can keep the pace up.
With 10 percent of the new year already completed, the good news for proponents is that Chainlink has been maintaining its stride so far.
The latest brow-raising development around the oracle middleware effort was unveiled on February 6th, when Chainlink and Ethereum-based insurance project Etherisc revealed they had completed a proof-of-concept decentralized flight insurance product.
It’s an interesting new wrinkle to say the least, particularly since insurance solutions are one of the oldest envisioned use cases for Ethereum and since Etherisc is one of the most experienced decentralized insurance initiatives in the ecosystem.
Together with @etherisc, we're proud to announce we have a working decentralized flight insurance POC live on Ethereum testnet. The design incorporates reliable flight status data (delayed or on-time) delivered by Chainlink's decentralized oracle network. https://t.co/saU3smevkn
— Chainlink (@chainlink) February 6, 2020
Insurance Powered by Chainlink
The traditional flight insurance sector is paper-intensive and lacking in transparency, not to mention that insurance company’s are third-party arbiters that, like all centralized things, are inefficient.
Yet what if these companies and their clients alike could benefit from a new way forward? That’s where the Chainlink and Etherisc collaboration comes in.
With a prototype already live on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet, Etherisc has demonstrated how its possible to leverage Chainlink oracles to ping flight data in order to actualize trust-minimized insurance products that aren’t subject to the whims of human or bureaucratic error. In their announcement of the meld, the Etherisc team explained:
“In our POC, multiple Chainlink oracles retrieve data about whether or not the flight was delayed using an external adapter [via an API]. The individual node responses can then be aggregated together into a single data point. This allows for the decentralization of data delivery, which protects against oracle downtime and a single oracle being a point of failure.”
The system is not designed to ax flight insurance companies from the travel industry altogether, then, but rather to offer these firms and fliers a more efficient solution. There is, in fact, a new way, and in time it may become the best way.
“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 added.
Moreover, flight insurance is undoubtedly just a taste of what’s to come — both the Chainlink and Etherisc teams have asked other insurance projects to reach out if interested in collaborating on related solutions.
Keeping Up the Pace
Chainlink hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down so far in 2020.
Just last week, the oracle middleware project rolled out its first wave of new price reference feeds — 25, to be exact — for the Ethereum decentralized finance arena. That means that DeFi builders can now readily rely on Chainlink oracle networks to provide their decentralized apps with useful off-chain price data.
“Chainlink’s Price Reference Data 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 said at the time.
Just prior to that, the Mainnet Working Group of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) tapped Chainlink’s oracle experts to join the body’s new EMINENT task force, which stands for “Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises.”
Accordingly, Chainlink will help the new task force research and create new standards for corporate record-keeping practices on Ethereum in the months ahead.
Of course, there’s still plenty of work left to be completed, but Chainlink is heading deeper into the new year on more productive footing than many projects in the cryptoeconomy. Chainlink’s early advancements are a testament to its builders and to the growing demand for oracle solutions.
