Today marked the start of the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona, Spain. To kick off the five-day event, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov virtually joined Emin Gün Sirer, the founder of Ava Labs (a team supporting the development of Avalanche), to talk about how Chainlink oracles and Avalanche’s high-performance, high-capacity blockchain enable the future of web3.
Since launching in 2020, Avalanche has become one of the fastest organically growing blockchain ecosystems, with its novel consensus mechanism and near-instant transaction finality. Last July, Chainlink Price Feeds went live on Avalanche mainnet, unlocking key functionalities for next-gen DeFi applications on the low-latency chain.
“I think we’re finally at the cusp, where the mainstream is beginning to understand the importance of web3,” Sirer said.
Nazarov agreed and offered his thoughts on how web3 will come to surpass its predecessor.
“I think that really web3 is the reliable version of web2, and the preconditions for that being attractive are that web3 systems meet the speed, scalability, and privacy properties of web2 systems,” he explained.
Once web3 systems are “at parity” with the web2 user experience, Nazarov said the tipping point will stem from the “additional properties of web3 systems that web2 systems will never have,” chiefly: user control, transparency to manage counterparty risk, global access, and superior efficiency that achieves DeFi yields of up to 8% on the US dollar.
“If DeFi becomes one of the few places where you can protect your fiat holdings against inflation by having an 8% rate of return, that is just very, very hard to compete with,” Nazarov said.
Once web3 has the infrastructure to match the speed and scalability of web2, he believes web3 will be the obvious choice.
“Why would you ever choose a less controllable, less reliable, less transparent version of an application?” he asked. “You wouldn’t. It just doesn’t make sense why you would.”
“To compete with web2, you have to have the lowest latency chain, and that is what I think Avalanche brought as a unique ability to the space,” Sirer added. “And our ability to actually execute transactions at sub-second latencies means that people can suddenly interact with web3 at granularities that rival regular web2 interactions.”
Sirer, who said, “Chainlink has set the standard for oracles and data across blockchains and decentralized applications,” when announcing Avalanche’s Chainlink integration, underscored Chainlink oracles as critical infrastructure for achieving a web3 world.
“What I think is going on behind the scenes is we’re redefining the business model behind web services where they’re no longer controlled by a single entity that sells you ads, that builds a dossier on you, that ends up selling your private information to third parties. The business models can be far richer, far more interesting. And when you have such a world that’s fully decentralized – there is no single entity that is in control – it’s a collaboratively built environment, and the role of oracles – the connection from these services to the external world – becomes ever more important.”