Baselining With Chainlink And Oracles In The Enterprise
Recently, I had the chance to co-host with John Wolpert a new weekly show we’re starting called, The Baseline Show. We’ll be talking more about Mainnet, the Baseline Protocol, blockchain in the enterprise, AND interviewing celebrity guests to share insights on their business automation efforts.
In this debut episode 🥳, we brought on Adelyn Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) & Head of Marketing at ChainLink to share with us everything new happening with the company and their role in the Enterprise technical stack.
What Is Chainlink?
Chainlink is a blockchain abstraction layer. We create universally connected Smart Contracts. So let’s unpack what each of those things means. When I say a blockchain of the abstraction layer you can think of as a level between the blockchain and the outside world. Within that space, are based solutions that people are familiar with us for is what is called decentralized Oracle’s. This is a way to connect the data on a blockchain with the real-world systems.
If you think about the blockchain as a database, it is isolated and has no way to connect with weather price data, IoT (Internet of Things) sensor information, none of that data can be fed into the blockchain, nor can the blockchain information be fed out. And so at the core, we create that connectivity layer and that system to allow information to flow in and out of the blockchain securely and reliably. And then when we talk about the abstraction layer, though, we do things even beyond that. We are working with, for example, Offchain Labs, to do off-chain computation. We are that layer that allows the blockchain and smart contracts on it to function at the highest capacity that they can.
What is an Oracle and can you share some examples of their importance?
Let’s say you have a smart contract for a supply chain shipping container. Let’s say I’m trying to buy t-shirts from the UK. The contract stipulates that if I received this shipment of t-shirts in the port of New Jersey, then I will pay my vendor. In so in the traditional world, you don’t have smart contracts, we had a trust that when I received them that I would pay you the vendor. But now with smart contracts, all I have to do is figure out if that IoT location or tracking of that shipment arrived in the port in New Jersey, and that the bill of customs, which is another data point, was approved, and then I would remit payment. So with that, there is external data of location GPS, the port customs information, and that information can then be fed into a smart contract that will then trigger the payment directly to the vendor. So in that system with smart contracts, each party longer has to trust each other. It’s a trustless system. What’s also wonderful about this is that you have to have an Oracle system to bring that IoT location data, to bring that bill of customs information.
Another example is if you had, let’s say frozen goods, it [an Oracle] brings the temperature information — i.e. did that temperature in that shipping container, go above or below a certain point? That information isn’t on the blockchain itself and so you need to have a third-party system like ours [Chainlink] to bring that data securely into the smart contract to trigger. And so that’s what we do. We provide the like railing, the connectivity, whatever you want to call it, that bridges the real world, and the on-chain world.
“We believe that 90% of the smart contract applications cannot occur without a secure decentralized Oracle”
For the full episode be sure to see the video above or you can find it here on the Baseline YouTube channel.
Turn in weekly, Wednesday, 12:00 PM ET, live on YouTube. Each week as we speak with guests about Mainnet, The Baseline Protocol, blockchain in the enterprise, AND their insights on business automation.
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