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Alpha Male
   
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RE: Chainlink (LINK) - Oracle/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world
Quote:Blockchain startup ChainLink has pulled in $32 million through its presale and initial coin offering, which closed yesterday. The company provides middleware to enable “smart contracts” running on a blockchain to access external data.
Smart contracts, or self-executing contracts, are one of the exciting promises of blockchain tech. They allow businesses and individuals to set service-level agreements with each other.
For example, imagine if airlines started offering smart contracts that would automatically refund 20 percent of your ticket fare if your flight misses its departure time by more than an hour. Or imagine if medical shipments to pharmacies were automatically halted and returned to the manufacturer if the shipping temperature exceeded a contracted limit.
As Coin Sciences’ Gideon Greenspan explains, these kinds of pie-in-the-sky use cases for blockchain have been unrealistic to date, since blockchains haven’t been able to reliably access a wide range of external data. But ChainLink plans to change that. It offers contract makers a whole network of “oracles,” or trusted external data sources, to choose from. With ChainLink, you can have a contract query one or several different oracles to check, say, flight departure times.
“When you type ‘interest rates’ into the ChainLink search bar, you’ll get a list of some 50 data feeds to choose from,” explained CEO Sergey Nazarov. “You copy and paste [from that data feed page on ChainLink] what your contract needs to do and copy that into your contract.” The developers who connect APIs to ChainLink are compensated with ChainLink’s LINK token each time someone uses their feed by the contracts that are requesting data from those feeds.
The company has had about 3,700 emails from developers interested in running a ChainLink, Nazarov said.
ChainLink is being built by the team at 3.5 year-old company SmartContract, based in San Francisco, which does custom enterprise smart contract rollouts. So far SmartContract’s biggest client has been inter-bank transaction network SWIFT, which has 11,000 banks in its network.
But one-off rollouts take time, require a hand-tailored API, and are, in effect, hard-wired to the chosen oracle; they don’t give you the flexibility of deciding how many data sources to query.
ChainLink will bring smart contract capabillites to anyone with high security and a lot more choice.
Without ChainLink’s network, Nazarov said, a company wanting to deploy a smart contract able to interact with an external data feed needs to develop an API for that data feed and then go to one of the few middleware providers working in this space who then wrap the necessary rules and calls into the smart contract. The application developer doesn’t get much flexibility in deciding how many of the blockchain’s nodes should query the data feed or how many data sources to query. Security is also a big concern. “If we’re transacting billions of dollars on these systems, we need them to be secure end-to-end,” said Nazarov. Having a decentralized system make a call to a single data source in order to execute a multimillion dollar contract could leave the system open to manipulation.
The coming generation of open-source oracles will come with more options and more security. Developers will be able to have their smart contracts query multiple disparate data feeds from many different nodes, cross-check them for consistency, possibly averaging the various inputs to reduce the chance of error.
ChainLink’s capabilties aren’t ready for rollout yet — the company is still working on its network — but the fresh fundraise should help move that work along.
Even after the company’s oracle network is rolled out, it could take five or so years to reach maturity, Nazarov explained. The biggest data providers realize this new model could be good business for them, but they’re not willing to take the jump until they see a decent volume of smart contracts in play. So we’ll likely see smaller and mid-sized data providers move in first, with the rest following later. And the pace at which key data feeds become available will, to a certain extent, dictate how quickly the whole ecosystem is able to develop.
https://www.cahfindit.com/news/1528219181
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| 09-21-2017 07:29 AM |
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thebassist
Chubby Chaser
 
Posts: 584
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RE: Chainlink (LINK) - Oracle/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world
The classic Binance dump is very unlikely for LINK for two reasons- first of all Chinese (AKA the most notorious dumpers) are now banned from the platform. I believe it was primarily Chinese investors unloading their DNT bags that caused it to crash so hard after the Binance listing. Second of all, and most importantly, this only ever occurs if the token in question has already been listed on other medium-large exchanges before they hit Binance.
If Binance is indeed the first proper exchange for LINK to be listed on it is highly unlikely it will crash. Anyone who's not a complete and utter retard in the crypto world is aware of the value and high potential of LINK, but plenty of people who are aware of this aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use EtherDelta to pick up cheap LINK- as a result there's a pretty big untapped pool of demand for LINK that will be released as soon as it's released on a bigger, proper exchange. Due to these factors if Binance is indeed the first exchange to list LINK, I expect the price to blow up, and not tank too hard afterwards.
So bottom line- if you haven't already, it would certainly be worth it to head over to EtherDelta and pick up cheap LINK while you still can. The delayed exchange listings have been a blessing in disguise for me, allowing me to pick up much more underpriced link than I would have been able to otherwise, I honestly think that anything under 2x for this token is a steal given its potential.
RVF Fearless Coindogger Crew
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| 09-28-2017 03:26 AM |
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The following 2 users Like thebassist's post:2 users Like thebassist's post
Bill Brasky, booshala
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NewMeta
Wingman
Posts: 635
Joined: Aug 2015
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RE: Chainlink (LINK) - Oracle/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world
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| 09-28-2017 03:46 AM |
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Bill Brasky
Wingman
  
Posts: 765
Joined: Jul 2014
Reputation: 18
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RE: Chainlink (LINK) - Oracle/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world
(09-28-2017 03:26 AM)thebassist Wrote: The classic Binance dump is very unlikely for LINK for two reasons- first of all Chinese (AKA the most notorious dumpers) are now banned from the platform. I believe it was primarily Chinese investors unloading their DNT bags that caused it to crash so hard after the Binance listing. Second of all, and most importantly, this only ever occurs if the token in question has already been listed on other medium-large exchanges before they hit Binance.
If Binance is indeed the first proper exchange for LINK to be listed on it is highly unlikely it will crash. Anyone who's not a complete and utter retard in the crypto world is aware of the value and high potential of LINK, but plenty of people who are aware of this aren't willing to put in the effort to learn how to use EtherDelta to pick up cheap LINK- as a result there's a pretty big untapped pool of demand for LINK that will be released as soon as it's released on a bigger, proper exchange. Due to these factors if Binance is indeed the first exchange to list LINK, I expect the price to blow up, and not tank too hard afterwards.
So bottom line- if you haven't already, it would certainly be worth it to head over to EtherDelta and pick up cheap LINK while you still can. The delayed exchange listings have been a blessing in disguise for me, allowing me to pick up much more underpriced link than I would have been able to otherwise, I honestly think that anything under 2x for this token is a steal given its potential.
Good analysis. I am starting to see binance as a significant alternative to both Polo and Bittrex and can eventually take their market share as they don't have a lot of bullshit KYC you need to go through and customer service is excellent.
DNT and then Kyber made me very skeptical with binance but I'm glad to have been proven wrong this time.
I don't get all the ED hate. Yeah, it gets clogged up and congested but read the instructions on their reddit and use metamask and it's easy to use.
In a nutshell from their reddit:
Deposit = wallet (metamask) > Etherdelta
Withdrawal = Etherdelta > Wallet (metamask)
Transfer = Wallet > another ETH wallet
Link was also listed on an unknown exchange called mercatox. These exchanges can have significant price spreads where you can sell high or sometimes buy lower than normal.
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| 09-28-2017 11:54 AM |
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[email protected]
Alpha Male
   
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RE: Chainlink (LINK) - Oracle/middleware that connects smart contracts to external world
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| 09-29-2017 09:06 AM |
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