Chainlink announces the launch of its mainnet on Ethereum

[Mercury]

Chainlink, a decentralized oracle service, announced the launch of its mainnet on the Ethereum network. The company is working towards achieving real-time information validation in smart contracts, saying it will have “immense” potential for adoption in various industries.

Chainlink goes live on Ethereum

Chainlink, an interoperability-focused company that aims to solve the connectivity problem in smart contracts, has quietly been developing its latest project. According to the company’s official blog post, the Chainlink network is now live on Ethereum.

The move will enable the creation of a decentralized oracle network run by multiple independent node operators—something the company has been working on for more than a year. Chainlink said that the mainnet launch followed the successful completion of three independent security audits, as well as the completion of various internal scalability and stress tests.

While the launch was hinted at earlier this year, a clear increase in demand for reliable decentralized oracle mechanisms was what led to the Ethereum mainnet launch.

Chainlink’s oracle solves the problem of trusted third parties

Put simply, oracles are the connection between blockchains and the real world and are used to feed real-world and real-time data into smart contracts. The concept itself is nothing new, but Chainlink’s implementation is—the company’s mechanism supports Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger, and every other major blockchain.

Sergey Nazarov, the ChainLink community leader and SmartContract.com chief executive officer, explained Chainlink’s approach to solving the problem of a “single trusted third party” in blockchains. He said that the company used decentralized computation to secure smart contracts. He explained:

“The Chainlink network allows multiple independent nodes to perform decentralized computations about the accuracy of an external input before it is written into a smart contract.”

According to the company’s announcement, some of the first oracle networks on Ethereum will be focused on retrieving market prices and feeding them into smart contracts, e.g. the ETH-USD conversion rate.

The company also noted that they will have an onboarding process to list endorsed Chainlink nodes in the official documentation of the project. Other third parties will also be able to run Chainlink nodes themselves, as the project’s code is open source.

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