After collaborating with Everipedia and Chainlink to publish 2020 U.S. election results on the Ethereum blockchain and auctioning a commemorative NFT, the Associated Press (AP) is focused on fueling more advanced use cases for hybrid smart contracts powered by Chainlink’s industry-leading oracle network.
Today, AP announced that it will deliver its trusted economic, sports and election race call datasets on-chain via Chainlink’s secure middleware, in what AP’s director of blockchain and data licensing, Dwayne Desaulniers, described as a “very significant event” for the 175-year-old news agency.
“The Associated Press is 175 years old for two reasons – we produce fact-based news everyone can trust and we know how to adapt to new technologies,” Desaulniers told Chainlink Today.
He described AP’s role as an important news source as well as a technology company that’s evolved to send news through every global communications platform invented over the past two centuries – from telegraph to radio, television, electronic photo delivery, satellite, internet, mobile and now blockchain.
“This platform [blockchain] has enormous information and data needs, and with auto-executing [smart] contracts, this data and information had better be right, so it’s a great fit for AP,” Desaulniers said.
All AP U.S. elections data, economic data, sports game outcomes and business financials will be cryptographically signed and made available to numerous smart contract applications running across various blockchains. Smart contracts can now use AP’s data to trigger on-chain functions like executing a trade or dynamically altering an NFT based on real-world events like a company’s quarterly financials or a professional athlete’s career highlights.
Desaulniers told Chainlink Today that among many new use cases for AP’s timestamped news archive, he’s particularly eager to help develop the use of AP data by dynamic or generative NFT art that responds to real-world facts and events.
Beyond DeFi and sports applications, he said AP is also looking forward to serving social applications and metaverses with facts and definitive truths from the tangible world.
“I think our geopolitical news and data will be consumed by supply chains and government smart contracts. The incredibly valuable, independent output of AP’s data journalism team will feed a wide range of data to inform applications, particularly in the massive domain of understanding and managing climate change,” he said.
He also expects a variety of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) will call on AP’s nodes for a wide range of inputs to feed their governance algorithms.
Lastly, Desaulniers said he hopes AP’s on-chain data delivery advances to the point where smart contracts will not only pull static data from an AP node, but request new research or fact-checking.
“That’s a cool, dynamic, smart contract use case that makes total sense for AP to serve,” he said. “I believe we’ll be both a source of known data and an on-demand service smart contracts call on when they need original, trusted information.”
Elizabeth Licorish is a writer and author whose work has appeared in HuffPost, PhillyVoice and Bustle. In 2008, she wrote and co-authored Innovation for Underdogs. In 2010, she wrote and edited Charles Manson Now. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Rutgers University and has ghostwritten hundreds of executive thought leadership pieces for some of the world’s leading experts across diverse industries. She has been writing and editing for influential blockchain projects since 2017, when she fell in love with decentralized finance’s potential to empower individuals in an economically just world. As the editor-in-chief of Chainlink Today, she’s passionate about telling the human stories behind some of the most promising technology in the fastest-growing blockchain ecosystem.