Founded in 2017, Chainlink aims to make digital smart contracts more useful in the real world.
Mission
Blockchains are highly secure and reliable networks for value exchange, but fundamentally lack the ability to access off-chain systems in a tamper-proof way.
Chainlink gives smart contracts – computer programs which are not only transparent, but capable of responding to real-world developments according to pre-set conditions – more relevance by connecting blockchains to real-world data feeds.
Use-cases
Driven by an open-source community of data providers, node operators, smart contract developers, researchers and security auditors, and partnering with trusted organisations, Chainlink is a major player in the data processing field.
An Ethereum-based ERC-20 token and secured by the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, it opens up blockchain technology to a new world of possibilities, such as connecting applications to authenticated web APIs, Internet of Things sensors and bank payments. Data providers can sell access to data directly to Chainlink.
Examples of smart contract use-cases it enables include decentralised price feeds – it currently secures billions in value for leading DeFi applications such as Synthetix, Aave and yEarn – and transparent random number generators for NFTs and on-chain gaming applications.
Founders
Sergey Nazarov, co-founder and CEO of Chainlink Labs, co-founded ExistLocal, a peer-to-peer marketplace for authentic experiences, in 2009, before going on to co-found CryptaMail – a decentralized blockchain-based email service – five years later.
That same year, he launched SmartContract, a forerunner to Chainlink, with Steve Ellis.
Ellis worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs before co-founding the Secure Asset Exchange, a company facilitating easy web access to a decentralized asset exchange, in 2014.
Economics
There will be a total supply of a billion LINK tokens issued. At ICO the founders promised to send 35% of the total supply towards node operators to incentivise the ecosystem, with another 35% distributed in public sales and the remaining 30% going to support the continued development of the network.