- Smart contracts have unique value to various industries but still not 1005 capable
- Chainlink to solve the impending issues associated with smart contracts
- Chainlink intends to achieve an end to end reliability of the smart contracts
On May 30, Chainlink announced the details for their launch on the Ethereum mainnet. Chainlink takes the merits of smart contracts and plans to expand on its capabilities by addressing current smart contract limitations in both short-term and long-term.
Limitations of smart contracts
A smart contract is a tamper-proof digital contract/agreement that is run in a decentralized node network. Smart contracts guarantee payment to the rightful party, unlike typical contracts that give no guarantees other than the force of law. The use-case of smart contracts goes beyond the transfer of ownership of a property to other businesses such as insurance, finance, and other aspects in the fintech world.
Chainlink believes that Smart contracts for specific contractual events such as the market or insurance events and goods delivery should indicate the time those events occurred. Also, smart contracts should maintain their high level of reliability while reacting to proof of an agreement performance. Last, smart contracts cannot access the data feeds of the event in which case they need to be provided with the performance data of a contract from the real/”off-chain” world.
Decentralized oracles
After Chainlink figured out that smart contracts can’t request any data inputs from any source outside the blockchain they are on, they promptly went for designating a “single trusted third party” in the form of a single “oracle.” However, they later realized that this setup creates a conflict of interest, which breaks the basic values that smart contracts aim to provide–security and reliability. Thus, Chainlink considered making a system that values “end-to-end reliability.”
When the network becomes live on Ethereum, Chainlink plans to provide a decentralized oracle network that will be run by multiple independent node operators, and initiate decentralized computation that combines those individual results into a single, smart contract input/trigger.
The value of Chainlink is its potential to offer provably credible individual oracles which can be merged effectively and securely into various oracle networks of different sizes. The primary goal of smart contract development that Chainlink intends to establish is one where smart contracts are created at the same rate as web applications.
