Follow decentralized oracle project Chainlink even casually? Then you know its builders and community move fast and stay busy, so keeping up with all the happenings around the Chainlink ecosystem is no small feat.
No worries, though: in today’s post we’ll catch you right up by breaking down Chainlink’s biggest highlights from the past two weeks. First up, let’s talk the project’s bread and butter, i.e. price feeds.
New Price Feeds
Chainlink’s oracles help smarten up on-chain smart contracts by serving as reliable bridges by which they can access off-chain data. The most dominant of Chainlink’s “bridges” today are its price feeds, which serve decentralized finance (DeFi) apps with accurate, real-time price info.
Accordingly, Chainlink’s growing ranks of price feeds have already proven extremely useful around DeFi, and the project’s adding more feeds all the while. Recent significant additions include:
Aave’s LEND, yEarn’s YFI, and Ethereum’s rising tokenized bitcoin projects are some of the most popular tokens in Ethereum’s DeFi sector, so these new Chainlink price feeds will surely see no shortage of use in the months ahead and beyond.
New L1 & L2 Integrations
Ultimately, Chainlink is blockchain agnostic. It’s rise has largely been built atop Ethereum, but it’s capable of providing decentralized oracle networks for layer-one smart contract platforms in general. Chainlink’s recent advances in L1 integrations include work with projects like Blockstack and Reef.
Indeed, on Wednesday, September 30th, decentralized apps network project Blockstack announced it was working with the Chainlink team to “integrate Chainlink as the preferred oracle solution” for Blockstack’s Clarity smart contract language.
“Given our familiarity with and knowledge of Chainlink’s impressive team and technology, we are confident that this partnership and resulting Chainlink oracles will advance our shared ecosystem,” Blockstack co-founder Muneeb Ali said on the news.
Moreover, Reef, a cross-chain smart asset management platform built on Polkadot, also just revealed it was integrating Chainlink’s price feeds to access DeFi pricings “denominated in both ETH and DOT.”
The decentralized oracle project has also been involved with notable layer-two scaling forays lately. For example, synthetic assets protocol Synthetix, which relies on Chainlink’s oracles, is now live on the L2 Optimistic Ethereum Testnet. Additionally, L2 scaling platform Matic Network is presently working on integrating Chainlink’s tech into its mainnet.
More Gaming Integrations
Beyond Chainlink’s flagship oracle tech, the Chainlink VRF solution — which helps products generate verifiably random results on-chain — has become a hit in the blossoming blockchain gaming arena.
Just this week, Aave’s up-and-coming Aavegotchi NFT game project announced its mechanics would “make full use of Chainlink VRF,” adding:
“Each Aavegotchi summoned needs to be randomly generated with a massive variety of intrinsic qualities, including visual traits, wearables, and collaterals. These unique Aavegotchi are then able to again engage Chainlink VRF for many of our mini-games and AavegotchiDAO experiences.”
Another NFT gaming project that’s going all-in on Chainlink is Planetarium, which revealed on Tuesday, September 29th, that it was integrating Chainlink’s tech to “power cross-game Metaverse communication, in-game commodity pricing, and secure trading of in-game items.”
Chainlink Makes Grant Moves
Gitcoin Grants is a respected ecosystem project that provides matching funds (therefore boosting grassroots donations) to open-source projects building around Ethereum. And now Chainlink’s pitching in to help the funding.
That’s per an announcement last week that the project would be providing an influx of funding to help support the ongoing Gitcoin Grants 7 campaign.
Earlier this month, Chainlink also revealed it was giving a grant to blockchain infrastructure project SimplyVC. The purpose of the funding is to help the firm “build its PANIC monitoring and alerting system for the Chainlink Network so it can be leveraged by Chainlink Nodes.”
