Chainlink notes in a blog post that “secure, up-to-date” price data is the “centerpiece” of many financial applications. This data is regularly used to initiate transactions and “derive” various other instruments and products, particularly in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, Chainlink explained.
The decentralized Oracle network provider noted that Synthetic tokens that are based on commodity price data are of “major” interest within the DeFi ecosystem. They may be used for creating “decentralized” options, futures, and several other more complex derivatives.
Chainlink data feeds are used to obtain secure cryptocurrency price data, the platform’s developers noted, while adding that these Feeds may be used to obtain “high-quality” commodity price data in your smart contracts so you’re able to launch these advanced financial products.
Chainlink points out that the commodity exchange market is an international market for the trading of raw products like gold and oil. Because of their high volume and “popularity” of this market, many DeFi apps now use Chainlink Commodity Data Feeds “to ensure that commodity price data is delivered to their derivatives contracts in a secure and decentralized manner, without any single point of failure.”
Synthetix Exchange, an established DeFi derivatives exchange, uses various commodity price feeds offered by Chainlink oracles “to ensure tamper-proof and accurate valuations in accordance with the real-world market price of their underlying assets, even during times of high volatility.”
Chainlink further explains that its Data Feeds use many different high-quality data sources and “aggregate them through a decentralized network of Chainlink oracles that feed price data into reference contracts, where the results are again aggregated in an Aggregator Smart Contract as the latest, trusted answer.”
Chainlink also notes that by using many data sources and “multiple levels of aggregation” within a decentralized network of nodes, Chainlink oracles “ensure price data is of the highest quality and reflects broad market coverage, protecting the data feed from sudden volume shifts and price oracle attacks.”
(Note: to learn more about the technical details of how these products actually work, check here.)
Chainlink Data Feeds aim to offer a “hyper-reliable” mechanism for obtaining high-quality commodity price data into Solidity smart contracts so that application developers can implement new DeFi derivatives around “real-world” asset data.
Chainlink’s Oracle framework offers the flexibility needed to seamlessly acquire secure data around stocks, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, indexes, and several other asset types, “giving smart contract developers a robust data infrastructure to power the next wave of DeFi innovation.”
In another update, the Chainlink team revealed that the next Chainlink Virtual Hackathon is getting ready to launch on Monday March 15, 2021. You may sign up for a chance to compete for $125,000+ in prizes.
As mentioned in a blog post by Chainlink:
“The ETHGlobal 2021 MarketMake Hackathon was an impressive outing for smart contract developers to embrace the innovative fervor in DeFi and build advanced new decentralized applications (dApps) with Chainlink Oracles.”
Chainlink added that they “continue to see explosive growth in the smart contract ecosystem, as developers both build traditional financial instruments on decentralized infrastructure and unlock completely new DeFi primitives and markets.” Chainlink’s “widely adopted oracle network is helping dApp developers securely access a full range of off-chain data resources, ensuring that as smart contracts continue to lock in more value, they can depend on hyper-reliable external inputs and computations.”
In another recent announcement from Chainlink, the developers confirmed that Jinzhu, the lead maintainer of GORM—an open-source ORM library for the Golang programming language—has received a Chainlink Community Grant.
As mentioned in the announcement:
“This grant will financially support the continued maintenance and development of GORM, one of the most widely used libraries for Golang—a broadly adopted open-source programming language for backend development and the primary language of the Chainlink Core client.”
(Note: to learn more, check here.)