Disclaimer: I don’t stand to gain any benefit from my review of ChainLink. This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my opinion. As always, DYOR before investing.
For the past few days, the market mood has been upbeat. Everyone is speaking about the new bull market which is around the corner and we are seeing a lot of coins posting handsome gains.
Travel a couple of months back, this was not the mood. The market mood was neutral to negative, bears were wreaking havoc and a lot of folks lost hope to see an altcoin rally. Irrespective of all these negativity there were a couple of projects like BNB, HT, LTC, Link that performed well and gave its investors handsome gains.
From my perspective, BNB(Binance Coin) and Link were the best among the lot. Both projects are among the top 20 rated and have created an All-time high price in 2019 without the support of any Altcoin rally.
In the case of BNB, the growth was due to the launch of Binance Dex, IEO’s, as well as the evolution of BNB as an ecosystem whereas LINK growth, was fueled mainly due to various solid partnerships.
Chainlink (LINK) — A short intro
Chainlink is lead by Sergey Nazarov (CEO of SmartContract.com, Chainlink’s parent company). Launched as an ICO on September 19, 2017, Chainlink raised $32 Million. Chainlink presents itself as a decentralized oracle solution that acts as a middleware agent between traditional data sources, blockchain projects & the smart contracts. Chainlink’s secure infrastructure allows smart contracts to link to API’s, to communicate with and obtain data from external sources.
In Simple terms, Chainlink helps to connect on-chain smart contracts with off-chain, real-world data.
Chainlink (LINK) — The partnerships.
Let’s take a look at some of those partnerships that fueled the insane growth of Chainlink (LINK)
One of the biggest surges in LINK price happened when it was officially announced that Google had chosen to Chainlink, as an official Cloud Partner. With this partnership, users can use Chainlink to connect to BigQuery, one of Google’s most popular cloud services.
Talking about the partnership, Nazarov remarked
“In this case we are working with Google as someone who we’ve successfully made an on-chain data provider that can now securely interact with smart contracts that want to consume their high-quality data and/or various off-chain services. We’re trying to create the next generation of smart contracts that are able to go beyond tokenization, and will find their usefulness based on interactions with market events (DeFi), IoT events (Decentralized Insurance) and various other use cases.”
Oracle
Chainlink is a partner of Oracle’s startup program. This partnership will help Chainlink to generate additional revenue streams by selling its data. One more advantage of being the member of the Oracle for Startups program is to receive oracle cloud credits, pricing discounts and access to the Oracle marketing services.
About the relationship, Sergey Nazarov said,
“We’re excited about enabling the next generation of externally connected smart contracts together with Oracle for Startups, successfully generating an order of magnitude improvement in the usefulness and quality of the smart contracts available today.”
Regarding the partnership, Fernando Ribeiro, a senior manager with Oracle claimed
“We are going to co-develop Chainlinks with 50 qualified startups to prepare them to sell their data to Oracle’s 430,000 customers in 175 countries on the Oracle Blockchain Platform. The startups are going to be announced in Oracle Code One in September.”
Town Crier (Acquisition)
Town Crier is a project that was incubated at Cornell University which is considered to be the world’s leading trusted hardware-based oracle system. With this Acquisition, Chainlink plans to l integrate the Town Crier technology into their decentralized oracle network which will help Chainlink tp be a clear technical leader for securely providing smart contracts
Top Project's Integration
Chainlink is used by numerous top crypto projects including, Aelf, Polkadot (Web3), Ocean Protocol, Streamr, Accord, and many others. As the first decentralized oracle, Chainlink is prefered by all from old projects like ZeppelinOS to the new ones like Celer. As of current date Chainlink ecosystem now boasts 70+ integrations.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important integrations
Aelf
On Sep 10, 2019, Enterprise blockchain giant Aelf announced the integration with Chainlink.
Regarding the integration, Zhuling Chen described as
“aelf is excited to continue to provide a well rounded and real-world solution to enterprises. This integration is the next step in ensuring the highest quality, security and reliability is given to all our clients who utilize the aelf enterprise platform.”
Daniel Kochis who is Chainlink’s Global Head of Business Development remarked
“Collaborating with aelf, Chainlink is thrilled to provide their community’s smart contracts and enterprise use cases with provably accurate data from off-chain endpoints.”
Binance
On Oct 25, Cryptocurrency exchange leader Binance announced their partnership with chainlink which will help Binance to share its crypto data to other blockchain platforms.
Regarding the partnership, Binance CEO CZ (Changpeng Zhao) remarked
“At Binance, we are committed to growing the blockchain ecosystem. We support the development of Decentralized Finance as an important part of the ecosystem. Binance works with many blockchain projects, including Chainlink, to bring freedom of money everywhere, and through the help of Binance data and Chainlink’s network, we can help accelerate the growth of DeFi,”
Conclusion
So far Chain link is ruling the market without a competitor. With positive news coming from the Chinese market we will be seeing more price growth if Chainlink keeps on piling up new integrations and partnerships.